If you want to make your website to light and to load faster, there are several things you must do. As you know, faster loading sites rank higher on Google than the slow ones. It’s your responsibility to put measures to increase the speed of loading for your website.’
It’s also common knowledge that people don’t like opening websites which load slowly. If a website is slow, there are chances that it will have high bounce rate. The readers will also not return to the blog again.
A light website will experience upsurge in traffic which will translate to more income. To ensure that it’s light, here are the things to do.
- Delete/Remove plugins
Many plugins will slow down any website.By deleting plugins which are not so important, you’ll make your website load faster and even become light. Taking this step will also reduce hosting costs.
- Compress/Optimize image size
You should always make sure than your images are light. You can use Smush plugin to compress the images or Snipping Tool which is in every computer to crop the images. Light images obviously reduce the time in which someone spends to open a post.
- Choose the right hosting company
Some hosting companies lump hundreds of websites together, thus slowing loading speed of the sites. Some hosting companies have slow or poor servers which are not appealing to clients. Do your own research and identify the best hosting company.
My websites are hosted by Kinsta and I can confidently say I am happy. It’s exciting to see that when I joined Kinsta,my sites’ loading speed grew by 200%.If you have been facing challenges with your current hosting company, it’s time to change to Kinsta.Follow this link to check their plan prices
Currently, Kinsta is ranked as the best WordPress Managed Hosting company in the world. The company has less than 4% of clients moving from it, meaning that it’s the best of the best.
Another company I will gladly recommend is Bluehost.Bluehost is less expensive than Kinsta and it currently host over 2 million websites. When a site is hosted by Bluehost, the loading speed is blazing fast.Follow this link to see Bluehost plans
- Reduce the number of Adverts on your blog
Adverts, especially AdSense greatly affect loading speed. A site with more than 3 banners will load extremely slow. If possible have a maximum of 4 banners on your site.
There are sites with over 5 banners which take even 20 minutes to load.
If you open any website without AdSense banners, you’ll realize that it’s extremely fast. People like to read such websites because there are no adverts to disturb them.
- Minify CSS and JS Files
Minify means combining CSS and JS files to reduce the number of calls and the size of CSS and JSS file to reduce website loading speed.
Check out the size of CSS and JS Files using Google Page Speed Insight tool. Developers can minify files by combining files manually. However, there are some pretty good WordPress plugins that can help to minify. Check out Autoptimize – its pretty good at optimizing HTML, CSS, and JS for your WordPress website.
- Employ Advanced Caching
Caching in WordPress improve website speed, WordPress has many caching plugins, W3 Total Cache is one of the finest caching plugin in WordPress, Varnish, WP Super Cache, and WP Rocket are some of the popular new.
If you are on Kinsta,the company offers Caching Plugin which you should activate.
- Deploy a CDN
CDN refer to Content Delivery Network, CDN is very important in modern computing. Edge computing has grown to popularity with the need to serve content near consumer in a timeless manner. CDN allows content websites to store and load content from edge nodes near to the client and therefore reducing the time taken to load a page.
There are many CDN services such as Cloudflare, MaXCDN and recently and hottest player Cloudoon.
- Enable GZIP compression
GZIP compression is one of the most important file compression technology that reduces web files and cutting down bandwidth.
GZIP compress files and serve to the browser, browser unzip the files to load the website, thereby cutting bandwidth and website page load.
GZIP compression can be enabled in three popular ways
Enable GZIP from Cpanel
Use plugins such as Page Speed Ninja and others
- Delete/disable comments
The more the comments on your site, the slow the website. There are two things to do, either delete old comments or disable the comment section.
A site without comments will always load faster than one with comments.
- Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks are WordPress core functionalities that keep track links on pages and posts.
However, pingbacks and trackbacks are server intensive, the two are also popular vulnerabilities to DDoS attacks.
Utilize Google Webmaster Tools to track of new links to your pages and posts.
How to disable WordPress pingbacks and tracebacks
You can turn it all off in WP-Admin → Settings → Discussion. Just deselect “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks).” This will help you speed up WordPress some more.
- Buy a light theme
There are themes which are heavy and others light. Buy a theme which is less than 1 MB. A light theme will translate to faster loading of your site.
