5 Ways of Increasing the Speed of Your WordPress Website

Learning how to speed up WordPress is an essential skill for any website owner. Since page load speed affects everything from traffic to bounce rate to conversions, user satisfaction, and end-revenue. Although using a PSD to HTML service to build your website will ensure it is fast, you can still take a few steps yourself. In this article, we’ll teach you multiple ways to increase WordPress page speeds.

1. Investing in Hosting Quality

One of the most essential steps for increasing site performance is choosing a good host to house your site. Sure, there are a lot of cheap hosts out there, but hosting is one of those areas where you get what you pay for.

As a first step, avoid shared hosting if you can. This reduces the risk of bad neighbors on your server, which slows your site down. Also, unless you have a massive website and workforce/budget to run your own server, a dedicated server may be more than you need and isn’t worth the investment.

2. Always Keep Core Technologies Site Up to Date

The second element essential to speed up your WordPress website is to keep the core technologies you use up to date. New releases of HTML, PHP, and other web technologies appear for a reason. It contains improvements and new features and often improves speed. For this reason, it is important to stay up to date.

A high-quality host will take care of this on its own. However, this does not mean you shouldn’t double-check. When logging into the hosting website, be sure to search for a PHP configuration or similar menu item. Here, you can often control which version of PHP you are using.

3. Use the Latest Versions of WordPress and Its Components

That also applies to the core technologies used in the website also applies to WordPress. Each version of CMS comes with new features, bug fixes, and more. They make your website run more efficiently and prevent it from slowing down too much.

Keeping your website updated is not only speed but also a security issue. With the latest version of WordPress and templates and plug-ins, you also make sure to fix all known vulnerabilities.

4. Image Optimization

Often photos are the bulk of the size of the page. This is normal because images are composed of way more data than HTML or CSS, which are merely text. For this reason, in order to speed up WordPress, it is necessary to learn how to make it as small as possible without losing quality by compressing them.

One of the best ways to go about it is to compress your images before uploading them. For example, in Photoshop, you can use the Save for web option for that. there is also TinyPNG, an online service that does the same. If you want to automate the process, the third option is to use an image enhancement plugin in WordPress.

5. Avoid Hosting Videos on Your Site

Videos are also a problem. While WordPress is completely able to host and play videos, doing so is not a good idea. First, it costs you bandwidth, which is especially important if you have a limited hosting account. Secondly, it will make the WordPress page significantly larger and thus difficult to back up. Most importantly – there is a lot of very fast video hosting websites that can do much better than your own private server ever. If you want to avoid slowing down your website, you should avoid hosting videos on your website. Instead use video embeds from YouTube, Vimeo or another service which won’t drain your hosting bandwidth or consume resources from your instance.