Introduction
Your website is slow. You know it, and your visitors know it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business or large corporation. Whether you’re a blogger, a small business owner, or an enterprise-scale organization—your website needs to load quickly on mobile devices and desktops alike. The faster your site loads, the better user experience you’ll provide your visitors and the more likely they are to come back for more.
In this article we’ll cover some strategies for speeding up your site’s performance so that it loads quickly regardless of device or connection speed.
Use a lightweight theme or framework.
- Use a lightweight theme or framework.
If you’re running an older version of WordPress, it’s possible that your site is being slowed down by heavy themes and frameworks. Heavy themes and frameworks can bog down sites because they include scripts (also known as PHP) that are constantly running in the background and using resources on your server. They also have large database tables that contain information about each component of the theme or framework, which means more time is needed for your database to process requests for data from these tables when loading pages on your site.
To avoid this problem, look for a lightweight theme or framework when shopping around in the WordPress repository, such as:
Optimize images.
Don’t forget that images are also part of your website’s content. To make sure you’re optimizing them properly, here are some guidelines to follow:
- Use the right image format. JPEGs are smaller than PNGs, which in turn are smaller than GIFs. But don’t just use the smallest format available; keep in mind that JPEG compression makes it harder for people to see what’s on an image, while PNG files can have lossy (meaning they lose quality) or lossless compression.
- Choose a file size appropriate for your site and audience. This will depend on whether or not you’re selling products/services online, but generally speaking larger sites need larger images—if they don’t load quickly enough on mobile devices then users will abandon them immediately!
- Optimize images with appropriate compression and resolution levels based on their purpose and context within your layout design scheme
Optimize and minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
Optimize and minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
In order to optimize your web pages for speed, it is recommended that you minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML using a tool such as Google’s Web Page Test or YSlow. Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary data from files such as comments and whitespace so that they are smaller in size. When you combine multiple files into one bundle with tools like Gulp or Webpack (JavaScript), you should also minify them to decrease file sizes further.
Remove unnecessary plugins.
The next thing you can do is to remove unnecessary plugins. If you’re running a WordPress site and are trying to reduce the load time of your website, then it’s a good idea to use only necessary plugins. If you aren’t sure if you need the plugin or not, ask your developer first before installing it. The reason for this is because most of these plugins come with additional code which makes them heavy on load time and bandwidth usage as well as increase security risks such as cross-site scripting attacks or brute force attacks because they have access to sensitive information such as user session tokens
Minimize redirects.
Redirects are a bad thing. You can use them, but don’t overuse them or use too many redirects on your website. Redirects can slow down your website and confuse search engines, visitors and even Google’s crawler which gets confused by them.
Redirects can also be used to hide spammy links, so that when someone clicks on one of those links they are taken somewhere else instead of being sent to a page full of ads for Viagra or Cialis (and other prescription medication).
Remove render-blocking JavaScript
Remove render-blocking JavaScript from the above the fold content
One of the most common causes of websites being slow is render-blocking JavaScript, which stops your page from rendering until it has downloaded and executed. The simplest way to fix this problem is to move all nonessential JavaScript files into a separate file that you load asynchronously via . In addition to moving nonessential JavaScript into a separate file, you should also make sure that you’re not loading scripts in an inefficient order (including them in or <!– script tags).
Using asynchronous CSS & image loading techniques
Another common cause of slowness is images taking too long to load because they’re being loaded synchronously along with everything else; this can be solved by using asynchronous CSS and image loading techniques, such as using CSS sprites where possible and setting image sizes correctly so they don’t need huge amounts of data transferred at once when loaded for the first time (e.g., set images’ initial widths equal to their natural widths).
Your website should load in less than three seconds
If you’re noticing that your website is loading slowly, there are several things you can do to improve the speed of your site. These include:
- Use a lightweight theme or framework.
- Optimize images.
- Optimize and minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
- Remove unnecessary plugins (like comment forms).
If these tips don’t help improve the performance of your website, consider other factors such as server location and hosting provider. If you need assistance in finding a new hosting provider or making any other changes to improve the performance of your WordPress site I recommend reaching out to WP Engine or Elightx who offer 24/7 support via live chat or phone call so they won’t miss anything important!
Conclusion
The bottom line is this: If your website is slow, you can fix it. It may take some time and effort, but the rewards are worth it. Your viewers will thank you for the faster loading times and will be more likely to return again and again.
