People won’t waste their time waiting for your site to load on a worldwide web with limitless options. Instead, they’ll just hop to a faster site. Therefore, you should avoid losing visitors by building an optimized WordPress site that looks sleek and functions fast – here’s how.
Understand your needs
Before building a site, think about what you want your site to accomplish.
If you’re creating a dynamic WordPress site, you may need to splurge more on extra server resources to keep things speedy. For example, social media sites and 24-hour news pages can quickly become overloaded with server requests and traffic.
However, personal sites, blogs, and business directories are primarily static sites. This means that pages generally stay the same, with infrequent updates. As a result, you’ll need to put in minimal effort to keep these WordPress sites running fast.
Choose the right server host
Since you’ll be trusting a server provider with your site’s data and accessibility, you need to make sure they’re legitimate. Therefore, before choosing a host, make sure to do your research to find the best WordPress hosting providers.
To know if a provider is trustworthy, search for unbiased reviews and social media discussions about the host. You can also check WordPress.org, which vets site providers for safety and reliability and offers some hosting recommendations.
Choose the right plan
You’ve narrowed down a list of reliable WordPress hosts, but now you need to pick your hosting plan. Here are the types of hosting you can choose from:
Shared server
The biggest WordPress hosts offer seemingly great deals, such as unmetered website space for $12 a month. However, providers offer these cheap deals with the caveat that you’ll be sharing a server with hundreds of other people. This means that your site will slow down if another site on the server is experiencing high traffic. Therefore to ensure a consistently fast website, it’s better to pay more for your own server or server space.
It’s sort of like living in a dormitory. Everyone has their own room, but the resources, like the bathroom and kitchen, are shared. So if a lot of people are using the bathroom, your needs will have to wait.
Virtual Private server
On a virtual private server, your site’s data will be the only priority. This means that your site will load faster since the server doesn’t have to process other users’ requests. Therefore, a VPS is ideal for businesses, as most consumers will leave a site that doesn’t load within three seconds.
Managing a VPS and server tool on your own is cheaper than using a managed VPS hosting plan. However, with unmanaged VPS hosting, the speed of your site will depend entirely on you and your technical knowledge. Therefore, if you don’t have the required expertise, your site will likely be slow.
So, if you want a speedy site, you should instead opt for a managed VPS plan. With a managed VPS, your provider will take care of everything to do with your server, including its speed. This, therefore, makes a managed VPS the best choice for you to obtain the fastest WordPress site without coding knowledge.
Pick a server in the right region
Site load times decrease the closer a visitor is to the site’s server. Thus, you should select a data center that’s as close as possible to the majority of your visitors.
Use a minimalist, well-coded theme
Style and functionality are essential for a theme, but you also need to ensure your theme is efficient. No one’s going to stick around for 10 seconds waiting on your flashy theme to load! Therefore, keep videos and high-resolution images to a minimum, and avoid animated icons.
Use good plugins
WordPress consists of open-source code, which means that independent developers can make add-ons to the base code – called plugins. However, some plugins take up a lot of space, so you need to pick your plugins carefully. Only use plugins that are essential to the operation of your site. Additionally, consider using a page builder plugin instead of a theme page builder to reduce excess code. If you have a site where you compare products, you should consider using WordPress table plugins to help you with that.
Use caching
Caches are files stored on a server that help the server deliver information faster. Instead of processing requests, the server can instead access files immediately from the cache. Therefore, caching vastly improves a site’s load times.
To use caching, you can either install a WordPress caching plugin or check if your hosting provider offers caches with their plan.
Optimize content
The more content a server must retrieve, the slower the site will load.
Most webpage data is composed of images and videos. Thus, you can slash load times by cutting out unnecessary content and compressing files.
You can use WordPress plugins to compress both image and video files, but try to include these files sparingly!
Summary
To achieve a speedy WordPress site, you should ensure that you pick the appropriate server host and hosting plan. Also, you should choose a server in the region closest to your typical audience and make good use of caching. Additionally, an efficient theme, useful plugins, and image and video compression can lessen load times.
