Until now, you must have feel changes in your website speed, But if you really want to keep your website as fast as possible, you’ll need to use the best practices listed below.These tips aren’t too technical, so you don’t need to be worried how to implement them. But using them will prevent common problems that will slow down your website.
Keep Your WordPress Site Updated
As a well maintained open source project, WordPress is updated frequently. Each update will not only offer new features but also fix security issues and bugs. Your WordPress theme and plugins may have regular updates, too.
Use Excerpts on Homepage and Archives
By default, WordPress displays the full content of each article on your homepage and archives. This means your homepage, categories, tags, and other archive pages will all load slower.
In order to speed up your loading times for archive pages, you can set your site to display excerpts instead of the full content.
Split Comments and posts into Pages
Getting lots of comments on your blog posts might be a great indicator of an engaged audience. But the downside is, loading all those comments can impact your site’s speed.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Using a CDN, or Content Delivery Network can help to speed up loading times for all of your visitors. A CDN is a network made up of servers all around the world. Each server will store “static” files used to make up your website. Static files are unchanging files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript,
When you use a CDN, every time a user visits your website they are served those static files from whichever server is closest to them. Your own web hosting server will also be faster since the CDN is doing a lot of the work.
Don’t Upload Videos Directly to WordPress
Hosting videos will cost you bandwidth. You could be charged overage fees by your web hosting company, or they may even shut down your site altogether, even if your plan includes “unlimited” bandwidth. Instead, you should use a video hosting service like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc., and let them take care of the hard work. They have the bandwidth for it!
Use a Theme Optimized For Speed
It’s usually better to go with a simpler theme and use quality plugins to get the features you need than to choose a theme that’s bloated with complex layouts, flashy animations, and other unnecessary features.
Premium WordPress theme shops like StudioPress, Themify, and Array Themesoffer themes that are well coded and optimized for speed. You can also check out our article on selecting the perfect WordPress theme for advice on what to look for.
Reduce External HTTP Requests
Many WordPress plugins and themes load all kinds of files from other websites. These files can include scripts, stylesheets, and images from external resources like Google, Facebook, analytics services, and so on.
Some plugins like MinQueue, Merge + Minify + Refresh and Dependency + Minification automate the process somewhat, but I’ve had mixed results. Give it a go, if they work you might see a significant reduction in requests made.
Reduce Database Calls
Note: This step is a little more technical and will require basic knowledge of PHP and WordPress template files. Unfortunately, there are a lot of poorly coded WordPress themes out there. They ignore WordPress standard practices and end up making direct database calls, or too many unnecessary requests to the database. This can really slow down your server by giving it too much work to do.
In this example, every time you see <?php, that’s the start of a new database call:
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<html xmlns=“http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” dir=“<?php language_attributes(); ?>”> <head profile=“http://gmpg.org/xfn/11”> <meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=”<?php bloginfo(‘html_type’); ?> charset=<?php bloginfo(‘charset’); ?>” /> |
You can’t blame theme developers for that. They simply have no other way to find out what language your site is in. But if you are customizing your site using a child theme, then you can replace these database calls with your specific information in order to reduce all those database calls.
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<html xmlns=“http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” dir=“ltr”> <head profile=“http://gmpg.org/xfn/11”> <meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=UTF-8” /> |
Conclusion: Speed is Not Everything
I’d like to stress that while speed is extremely important, it is not everything. Taken to the extreme, you could disable images altogether and use almost no styling and JavaScript. This could lower your page load time to 345ms but would it really serve any purpose other than a pointless speed race? Always keep in mind what the goal of your website is.
If it is to make you money you should put everything in the service of that goal. A goal is usually achieved through the clever balancing of multiple tools, website speed is just one of those tools.
If you have any questions, comments, ideas or tested methods please let us know in the comments below, we’d love to hear from you!
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