We’ve stressed many times, that a fast-loading website is crucial for SEO. In tons of good or not-so-good search engine results, Google always favors fast-loading pages that can provide an excellent user experience to visitors. To achieve high search rankings and drive more organic traffic, it is essential to speed up your website hosting services cost.
In this blog post, we’ll be sharing the top 10 hosting tips to help you boost your managed wordpress hosting Australia website’s performance and seize the ideal position in the search results pages!
Google Favors Fast-Loading Websites
Fast-loading websites are more likely to outperform slow-loading websites on Google for the one most important reason – excellent user experience, and this complies with Google’s values. Google intends to offer the best results to its visitors along with the best user experience.
Therefore, they desire to present users with web pages that will answer their search questions and also offer the best user experience. It is the same reason why user/page experience is now an important ranking factor on Google.
This is totally understandable when you see it against the backdrop. We’ve all experienced this when we click on a link just to hit the “Back” button since the web page took too long to load. And when we leave the page like that, we’re not likely to visit the page again because we know better and faster-loading pages are out there to navigate.
Therefore, your website’s performance not only impacts the user experience but also hugely affects how website visitors assess the quality of your business. Because of this, it is beneficial to speed up your WordPress website by following different practices.
A fast-loading website satisfies website visitors and thus, they’ll engage more and make more purchases on your website. This will ultimately make you happy. Besides that, it’ll also make search engines happy because it’s easier for them to crawl and index your website.
Why is Website Speed Important?
When browsing new sites, nothing makes you click a “back” button like a slow-loading web page. And we’re sure you aren’t the only one here; website performance hugely affects the user experience and profoundly impacts how visitors assess the quality of your business.
There’s very little margin for error with web page loading speed and as stated by Google, your website must load in 3 seconds or less. Any additional time will cause visitors to start losing interest.
Search engines like Google consider web page performance as another crucial ranking factor. The swifter your website, the greater the probability of getting ranked at the top position in the SERP. Now, remember that WordPress in itself isn’t popular for speed right from the start.
It is because of how it functions: when any visitor visits a web page, WordPress actively starts building the web page by extracting the data from the database and theme files, then combining them into an HTML file for the visitor’s browser. This real-time page creation can impact performance.
Furthermore, WordPress themes and plugins all utilize valuable web server resources, even if you’re not actively using them on your website. An overburdened server might run out of resources, slowing down your web pages and disrupting conversions.
In the coming sections, we’ll be discussing the top 10 ways to speed up your WordPress website. Some don’t require technical expertise, whereas others require installing a plugin or modifying some of the code by yourself ( if you know what you’re up to). You could even start to see improvements after applying only a few of these practices.
Therefore, without wasting your time, let’s get started!
Top 10 Tips To Boost Your WordPress Website Speed
1. Select The Right WordPress Hosting Provider
The basis of a fast-loading WordPress website is a quality WordPress hosting provider. It is important that you select a perfect hosting provider as well as a hosting plan that fulfills your performance and bandwidth needs.
The majority of WordPress hosting providers offer several kinds of hosting solutions: shared hosting, dedicated server hosting, VPS (virtual private server) hosting, and managed WordPress hosting.
When choosing a WordPress hosting package, you get product value. In sharp contrast, there’s shared web hosting. That authorizes you to host your website on a similar physical server where multiple other websites are hosted.
Also, shared hosting prices can’t be beaten; therefore, a beginner WordPress user could select this hosting option to get moving online before upgrading. But having said that, your website’s performance will be hampered if another website on your server gets more traffic, as both of you are using the same resources.
Well-established websites with quality content and higher regular traffic must instead opt for dedicated, VPS, or managed WordPress hosting solutions offered by a well-known provider. These hosting plans will assign sufficient server resources to manage high traffic without impacting page load times.
If you’re in the middle of selecting a WordPress hosting company or migrating to a new company, have a look at MilesWeb’s WordPress hosting page.
2. Take Performance Tests
First, find out where your website stands in terms of performance. There’s no particular all-inclusive metric that wraps it up, as the performance differs as per the geographic location of every visitor, the strength of the internet connection, and whether your website is cached by their browser.
Page speed will also differ throughout your website’s pages, based on the type and amount of content on every page. Homepages are mostly the obvious choice for evaluating loading speed, even though you must also test other pages, specifically high-traffic web pages.
To get the most precise results, test your website with the help of free website performance measuring tools such as Website Grader, GTmetrix, WebPage Test, and Uptrends Google PageSpeed Insights.
Just paste in the URL of your web page and check how it performs. These tools also provide recommendations that you can implement and then try again. Make sure to regularly test website performance, particularly after adding new functionalities. It’ll ensure that your website continues to deliver web pages at competing speeds.
3. Regularly Update Everything
If you’re a WordPress website owner, updates are part of your daily routine. WordPress core, themes, and plugins all require to be updated so as to support your website function in the most effective way possible, amidst other tasks.
Always make sure to run the latest software versions to improve performance, keep your website safe, patch bugs, and make sure each feature and tool works as expected.
4. Utilize The Latest Version Of Php
PHP is a server-side scripting language that empowers all WordPress websites, i.e., its files are saved and executed on the web server hosting your website. Similar to WordPress themes and plugins, PHP also releases periodic updates to work effectively, which accordingly helps your web pages load quickly.
Review your WordPress hosting contract to check which version of PHP you’re utilizing.
5. Delete Unwanted Plugins
With regards to WordPress plugins, less is more. Every WordPress plugin is like mini-software on your site, and several of them functioning at a time can adversely affect your website’s loading time.
Even though you aren’t utilizing a specific plugin, the plugin is likely doing unwanted work in the background and utilizing resources. So it could be time to delete it.
Begin by disabling any unnecessary plugins you’re confident you’ll never use again. Test your website after every deactivation, then delete those plugins after confirming that everything is working fine.
Then disable them one at a time to check which ones can make a difference in page loading speeds. Consider using a lightweight alternative to these WordPress plugins.
6. Install Only The High-Quality Plugins
Now that you’ve deleted unnecessary plugins, ensure that the plugins you’ve kept on your website are of high quality. The high-quality plugins are designed in such a way that they use only the required server resources. These are light on code and don’t require too much storage space on the server and are regularly updated to stay abreast with WordPress core updates.
The ideal way to ensure that your plugins provide the expected performance is by reviewing the recommendations list, which often takes into account how well each WordPress plugin is designed and managed.
Before implementing a new plugin, check out its reviews and feedback for any kind of complaints related to poor performance, and re-execute tests once you activate it to make sure that your website’s speed hasn’t been drastically affected.
7. Make Use Of A Lightweight Theme
Similar to plugins, your existing WordPress theme could be putting an unnecessary burden on the server. Themes that are bundled with top-quality images and effects may look great, but they require a fee.
Extravagant effects can require lots of code, and when several themes are coded inadequately, each of them blows up file sizes and slows down page performance. Instead of that, select a simple WordPress theme with just the required features for your web pages.
You can constantly add extra effects later on using custom CSS or plugins if you’d prefer.
8. Optimize Images
Having large images is another key culprit for slow-loading WordPress websites. To further increase your website’s performance, reduce the image file sizes in the best way possible without impacting quality.
The aim is to save space while avoiding making visitors look closely to view your visuals. Use Photoshop or any other tool to compress your image file sizes. You can also give a try to WordPress image optimization plugins such as Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer.
9. Try Lazy Loading Your Website Content
If your WordPress website features lots of images, you can try applying the lazy loading technique. Rather than completely rendering all the images on a web page at a time when the page is loaded for the first time, lazy loading will only load the images that appear in the visitor’s browser window and delay loading the rest of the images until the visitor scrolls down to them.
This technique makes it feel like the page is loading faster because your website content loads slowly rather than needing your browser to do all the loading at once. Apart from images, lazy loading could be applied to other types of media, such as video embeds and other page content, such as text and comments.
10. Try Not To Host Videos On Your Server
Out of the different types of files that you store on the web server, videos are the most resource-intensive. They use space and significantly slow down your web page at the time of loading. Putting just one video on your web server can drastically affect your website’s performance.
However, videos are excellent ways to increase user engagement; therefore, you shouldn’t discard them altogether. Rather than adding videos to the media library, make use of third-party video hosting services, which will manage the storage on your behalf. So all you’re required to do is put the video on your web page with embed code.
It’ll make no difference to your website visitors, but it’ll greatly improve your user experience.
Conclusion
Similar to other important aspects of running a WordPress website, your responsibility is to optimize its speed. Fortunately, there are multiple strategies that you can apply to optimize your website loading times and offer a pleasant and faster user experience to your visitors.
Investing a little bit of time can help you save your visitors lots of time! Do you have an excellent suggestion for speeding up your WordPress website? Do share it in the comment section below!
