5 Tips To Speed Up Your WordPress Website
One of the most common strategies to generate income online is to generate content on a WordPress blog as it has many advantages such as generating long-term traffic for free. You can monetize it in so many ways such as with marketing affiliate or AdSense, build your own brand, etc.
In fact, it is one of the recommended strategies in the course that I liked the most about online marketing with one of the most successful in this field: John Thornhill, you can check it out here: automated-sales-and-success.com
So, yes it is a good strategy. However, these days if your website is not fast enough google and other internet search engines are not going to send you the maximum traffic because your website is slow.
With that in mind, what are the factors that you can improve to make your WordPress site faster?
1. Check your WordPress Website metrics
The first thing you have to do is diagnose how the performance of your page is.
Although there are limited functions in SEO Plugins such as Rank Math SEO a great tool for this is from Google itself
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
Take a screenshot of the scores that these pages give you since this will be your reference point to measure the results derived from the improvements you make.
2. Increase your WordPress Website hosting Speed
If your score in the previous tests came out very poor, especially in red or yellow, the most likely thing is that the biggest problem you have is your hosting service. You can check if this is your problem if in the google page speed insights report you first see a red triangle with the suggestion to “Reduce the initial response time of the server”.
Unfortunately, when we first create our website we do not take much into account the importance of having good hosting or we get swept up with what the guru’s are promoting which is generally simply something that they want to sell, and many times the most recommended hosting services are the slowest!
I also highly recommend that your hosting service has a good 24-hour live customer service. There is nothing so frustrating as you having an issue and you have to wait until someone finally reads/responds to an email request.
Also, other things such as PHP versions and upload bandwidth so you can make your own backup copies of your WordPress site.
If you want to know more about this, check outthis great article:
https://www.johnthornhill.com/blog/i-have-to-change-my-hosting-dont-make-my-5-mistakes-checklist/
3. Optimize your WordPress Website theme
Many pages are also usually slow because the theme they use is too heavy or they have built everything using page builders.
There are so many themes available. Many are, or have free versions available. Some are even bundled with “page Builders” built in such as OptimizePress, Elementor and Thrive Architect.
Anyway, if the page builder is slowing your webpages, I recommend you check that your theme is optimized to be quick to load and is mobile friendly since currently, that is making a lot of difference to google. FYI, OptimizePress and Thrive architect have options to manage many of these settings.
One of the WordPress themes that I liked for its speed was Neve: https://themeisle.com/themes/neve/
Or these happy themes that also have multiple versions for news pages, videos, blogs, health, etc: https://www.happythemes.com
Always remember, you can do your own research, but avoid trying to build your entire website with “Page Builders” as they will put a lot of CSS and javascript on your website which will make it extremely slow no matter what other things you optimize it.
4. Optimize your WordPress Website images
Image optimization can be very important for your website if you have many images in your post, in addition to converting everything to formats such as WebP can be very useful to make your WordPress site faster, since from the perspective of google this will be a point in your favour, since they are considered “next-gen” formats. That is, as the most modern for a website to work properly and faster.
In fact, in the initial analysis of google page speed insides, you can know if this is a point of improvement for you if you see a red triangle below with the legend “Publish images with next-generation formats”.
There are many plugins (most are paid) available to do this but one of the best FREE plugins is WebP Express which you can find in the plugins section.
Dont worry that whatever service you choose, there’s bound to be detailed tutorials for all the configurations, However, remember to check that it can use the next-gen formats.
5. Reduce the CSS and Java code on your WordPress Website
This is relevant because there are many plugins that we install on our website that put codes of this style on all your pages even if they are not going to be used on each of them, and this may be slowing down the visitor experience on your site. WordPress.
You can remedy this with a service such as “perfmatters” that allows you to install a “scriptmanager” on your site and thus analyze which codes may be affecting your pages and deactivate those that you do not need to be active.
PS. You can also use “perfmatters” to Add Missing Image Dimensions if that is a problem that page speed insights say your site has.
Conclusion
That’s all for today, I hope that these simple but powerful tips have given you the starting information you need to optimize your website and make it faster than ever, so that you can be more successful in your google rankings and that your visitors are very happy with their experience on your site.