Page load speed is apparently a crucial part of any website that helps in enhancing user experience. However, many site owners usually pay less consideration to website speed, and rather tend to care more about giving a refreshing look to the site and incorporating new functionalities into the site. No doubt, accommodating aesthetic design and updated functionalities is vital for a site’s success, but faster page loading time is equally important for gaining good search engine ranking and more traffic.
According to KISSmetrics analysis, a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load has higher chances of getting abandoned by users.
Are you running a WordPress powered site with slow page loading time? Certainly you’ll lose a lot of potential customers interested in taking up your services. Fortunately, there are ways that can help you in optimizing your WP website speed.
1. Removing Unusable Plugins
Plugins can help extend the functional ability of your WordPress site and make it do anything you can possibly think of. And since most of them are free, many (though not all) site owners bamboozled by the allure of extended functionalities that the plugins offer usually go on a plugin binge, and install lots of plugin into the site. However, adding more plugins and stuffing your site with too many features increases page load time. Therefore, it’s important to determine what all plugins are useful for the site and which ones need to be removed. So, go through your plugin list and cut-down the unwanted fancy ones wherever possible.
2. Get Rid of External Scripts
Another common reason that makes WP site to load slowly is because of the use of external scripts present in the site. For instance, adding social media buttons like Facebook, external Javascript files, embedding third-party videos etc. can slow down your page load time. When loading scripts from other websites, perhaps restrain site owners from making changes to the scripts. Thus, make sure to remove some of the external scripts that are not much use to you, in order to get a significant boost in your page loading speed.
3. Clear Away Excess Baggage
A lot of site owners often over-board their site with large amount of stuff that keeps on accumulating over the years. This eventually makes the database huge and with too many data in your site makes the website run slowly. We often keep on uploading images, make any trending theme as the default theme (that might contain unnecessary code) and so on. Well, you can’t just leave all the data intact and expect your site to perform better over the years. It’s mandatory to expel out stuff that is no longer useful and only puts a lot of load on the site. For doing so, you can customize your site’s theme or build one from scratch and add only the essential elements as per the modern day needs. PSD to WordPress conversion is one of the most viable way that allows users to come up with a fresh-looking site with required new-found functionalities.
4. Pick the Right Advertisements
Pay attention to the sort of advertisements you’re adding to your site. That’s because, adding ads from external advertising network often leads to slowing down the page load time when calling the external servers. Undoubtedly, advertisements are important means for a site that is tied to a shoestring budget. But make sure to be evaluate the load a particular advertisement adds to your WP site. For this purpose, test the speed of your site before and after embedding the ads.
5. Choose the Right Hosting Plan
I’ve kept the best for the last! The most important factor that plays a huge impact on your WordPress page loading speed is the hosting plan you have chosen. It’s been observed that people always blame the hosting companies for the slow response time of their server. But no matter which hosting company you’re using what affects the response time of your server is the hosting plan that you’ve chosen. Many (although not all) site owners chooses a low-priced hosting plan in a bid to save money. Choosing the wrong hosting plan will most likely takes time to process HTTP requests or SQL commands. Therefore, make sure to pick a plan that can handle increase in your site traffic with efficacy.
Conclusion
Many website owners wrongly assume that adding tons of plugins, sheer amount of features to their WP site can help them gain success in today’s wobbly and competitive online arena. Moreover, choosing to add advertisements and purchasing a cheap hosting plan to save money may not be a productive option after all. Rather all these factors leads to slow page load time. Aforementioned are 5 useful tips that will help you optimize your WP website loading time.
