speed up a wordpress site

How to Use Plugins to Speed up Your WordPress Site

Featured Posts Website Tips and Tricks

Imagine a world where your WordPress site operates faster than the speed of light. Okay, maybe not that fast, but a simple plugin could be all you need to speed up a WordPress site.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out how to do this.

Keeping track of online statistics and web servers to see how your site’s doing is important, but so is page speed. A 1 second delay in page loading time means not only an 11% decrease in page views but a 7% decrease in conversions.

With the right plugin, your WordPress site can run at a speed that pleases both you and your site’s visitors. Even better, if you speed up a WordPress site, your website will rank higher on Google!

The following tips will have your WordPress site running faster than you’ve ever thought possible.

You’ve Got Caching Up to Do

If you want people to stay on your site, you’ve got to “cache up.” Using a cache plugin can speed up a WordPress site by a noticeable amount.

In fact, caching can help your WordPress site work 2 to 5 times faster than it would without caching.

Each time someone visits your site, WordPress has to find the site’s information, load it up, and display it to your visitor. It’s a time-consuming process and if you want to speed up the WordPress site, it’s not necessary, either.

With a caching plugin, it copies your page after the first load and voila! From then on, every visitor sees the same cached version instead of a separate page.

WP Super Cache produces static HTML files that your web server then serves instead of repeating your WordPress’s loading process again. Overall, it’s a more efficient use of your site’s power.

Minify Your HTML, Javascript, And CSS Files

Bad (or just excessive) HTML or Java could be clogging up your loading time. A minifying plugin will resolve this problem.

The minification process eliminates redundant or unnecessary data from your website’s code. This includes getting rid of any line breaks or spaces in your site’s code.

Doing this “lightens to the load” and the end result is a faster WordPress site.

Plugins like WP Super Minify both compress and combine your HTML, CSS files, and Javascript in this manner. Users can expect to speed up a WordPress site by an increase of 2% to 4%.

WP Super Minify is also simple to use and easy to download.

Speed Up WordPress Site: Fix Up Your Images

Researchers have found that people are 80% more likely to read your content if you accompany it with colored visuals. Your graphics accomplish just that.

Still, your images affect how much time it takes to load your site.

As attractive as your graphics might be, they’re still eating up a lot of loading time. Fortunately, a simple plugin can fix these images to speed up a WordPress site.

JPEG photos tend to take less time than PNG photos. They’re also crammed with extra baggage like metadata and big file sizes.

WP Smush ditches the hidden metadata in (JPEG) images and reduces the file size of your images. It also removes unused colors from your images.

Fortunately, this plugin does this without sacrificing image quality. This means your JPEG images will retain their quality while your PNG images will still look good.

If you’ve got other image files (gif, anyone?), then you’re in luck because WP Smush supports all image files. Plus, you can compress up to 50 photos at once.

Use a CDN Plugin

CDN stands for “Content Delivery Network.” Using one can make your page load faster for visitors all across the globe.

A CDN is made up of servers from all around the world. Each of these servers stores “static” files (images, CSS, Javascript, etc.) that make up your site.

With a CDN, every time a user accesses your website, the server closest to them hooks them up with your static file. This can speed up a WordPress site by a significant amount.

A plugin like W3 Total Cache increases server performance and provides transparent CDN integration. It not only improves your search engine ranking and conversion rates, but it can also improve your site’s performance by at least 10 times.

Even better, it can save you up to 80% of your bandwidth.

Get Lazy

As far as the internet is concerned, people are naturally lazy. Attention spans have decreased by over 50% in the last decade.

Half the people on the internet expect a page’s loading time to be 2 seconds. By the 3-second mark, they abandon the site.

Who said your site has to load all at once? Save your site the labor of loading a full site and watch your site’s loading time dwindle to a fraction of what it once was.

The BJ Lazy Load plugin makes it so your site doesn’t load until it’s in the browser window. This includes images, thumbnails, and videos.

That way, your visitors can consume your page bite by bite instead of loading it in 1 shot.

Downsize Your Database

After becoming a regular on WordPress, your database will gather a lot of information that it doesn’t need. To enhance your site’s performance, you can get rid of all that cluttered data and optimize your database for the best.

The WP-Sweep plugin helps you clear up your WordPress database by deleting stuff like revisions, unused tags, trashed posts, duplicate posts, comments, spam, and more data that you don’t use.

This plugin also analyzes your database, examines what you use and don’t use, and gives you an estimate of how much you can tidy up your database.

You have the option of going through the report and “sweeping” specific items. You can also go to the page’s bottom and simply click “sweep” to clear all the unnecessary stuff from your WordPress database all at once.

Test your site before and after you’ve added the right plugin on a site like Google Page Speed. Let the difference in speeds speak for itself.

What Are You Waiting For?

Your WordPress site is begging for an upgrade. Having a faster site will benefit both you and your users in both the short-term and the long-term as well.

It’s important to track your WordPress site’s speed in order for your website to be a success. With the help of a simple plugin, increasing your site’s speed is perfectly doable.

Master the art and science of manipulating images for SEO purposes. You won’t be sorry.

Now is the time to get your WordPress site moving faster than ever!