Improving Website Performance in WordPress

If you are maintaining a WordPress site, you may encounter problems with site loading time. Slow-loading sites will receive adverse impacts from both users and search engines. To resolve this issue, you need to take proper actions to improve website performance in WordPress. There exist a lot of ways that will give you the chance to solve this issue but many feel confused while doing it properly.

For a smarter sustainable decision, all you need to do is to find out the actual reason behind your site’s poor performance. 

From this article, we are ready to clear all your confusion and try to give all your answers thoroughly regarding your WP site’s performance-related optimization.

Now, let’s dig deep with the following steps for Improving Website Performance in WordPress

Don’t panic! We have assisted numerous non-tech professionals in optimizing their WordPress site’s performance for the past few years. Although an optimum configuration is the key to success in this field, you need not overthink this matter as we are here to help you with the following few tips and tricks-

Identifying the ‘Hosting Server’ Issue 

Hosting servers play a crucial role in the performance of any WP site. It can hit your site negatively if your server’s response time is longer than expected. 

The solution to this issue involves using a properly located hosting server, which will not only reduce your site's loading time but also enhance its overall performance.

You will also manage to overcome other problems like vulnerable performance, unexpected security breaches, and slower software updates.  

Cache Page Configuration 

Suppose, you've posted attractive and interesting content for your audience but they have trouble with slow loading times when visiting your page, it could be because your site's cache settings aren't set up correctly.

So, how this could hurt your site’s overall performance? Well, if you fail to fix this issue in the first place, you will eventually lose traffic.

Our suggestion for you is to use Caching Plugin for your WordPress site. This will benefit you by making your site run smoothly and faster. Also, merging your caching plugin with a web application firewall will enhance the highest performance in a faster manner.    

Page Size and Load Time 

Larger pages with extra large images can affect the performance of your WordPress site, so it is wiser to pay attention to the size of individual pages and their loading times.

If you want to solve this issue, then our recommendation will be to remove unnecessary and gigantic images for proper boosting. With this removal, your site’s page load time will also get to an optimal limit.

Proper Use of Extensions/External Scripts 

If you are using too many external scripts on your page headers then you need to stop it immediately as it will slow down your page loading time automatically. 

To solve this issue, we recommend you not to use too many third-party ads or extensions to make your site properly perform in the search engines.   

Fixing Underperformed Plugins 

Underperformed or slow plugins harm websites in different ways. A poorly coded WordPress plugin may create unique types of problems that might be responsible for future bad performance for any good content site.

Such complications should be taken care of with proper use of appropriate plugins. These suitable plugins can automatically resolve this underperformance and speed up the loading time of your site.  

One thing you also need to remember is to run a speed test just before and after adding any faster plugins to your site to check its overall compatibility and efficiency.    

Image Optimization 

Images give life to any content. Without images, your content will remain vague in front of your readers. As a result, most of the bloggers and developers prefer to include images on their WordPress sites. 

However, any website will face unexpectedly slower loading time if the image files are not optimized properly.

If you want to make yourself feel less stressed about image optimization, then you can choose one from two types of images: JPEG and PNG.     

Updating WordPress Site 

Regular checking on updates for your websites, plugins, and themes will give you the advantage of fixing several issues frequently and confidently. 

Without proper updates, you may likely face difficulties regarding security, bugs, threats, unreliable connections, and so on.

Background Process Optimization 

Every WordPress site has an active background processing system for regular updating and other performance-related issues. 

If you want to improve your site’s performance then it is necessary to check the backup plugins and excessive crawlings by search engines too. By doing this, your site’s speed will not get slowed down drastically.

Proper Use of CDN 

CDN or Content Delivery Network is a network that can help your server sync with the hosting server and load from the nearest locations of your visitors. 

More precisely, it will reduce the immense loading time of your website even if the hosting server’s location is far away from the page visitor. 

As a result, proper use of CDN will bridge the gap between your site visitor's expectation and the site’s loading time and thus create an improved performance.

Use of Light Themes 

When you use WordPress, you'll discover many exotic and impressive-looking themes in the store. However, you might not realize that these gorgeous themes often have poor coding and larger images.

If you install those mesmerizing themes and plugins, you will face long-term consequences, as they will significantly reduce your site's speed.

Some Advanced Tips for Fine-Tuning Your WordPress Site 

With the above-mentioned tips, you will be able to generate as much speed as you want in a broader sense for your WP site. However, if you want to take care of every fraction of a second then you should optimize your site with a few more technical activities.

These tips and tricks require an advanced level of knowledge about site file modification and PHP basics. Furthermore, you should keep in mind that you must avoid any post malfunctions by backing up your site in the first place.

Now, let’s look at a few of our advanced tips:

Long Post Modification 

Any blog can attract its targeted readers by retaining its longer status. This is important to get a higher ranking as well. However, much longer blog posts may turn into your worst nightmare occasionally as it might heavily hurt your site’s overall loading time. 

You can bypass this issue with the development of multiple pages to place the longer post content in it.

By doing so, you can have the freedom to add a Page Break block which can initiate a new page on your blog post, and then, the overall WordPress functionality can be improved.

Limiting Database Calls 

Unfortunately, many WordPress themes are not properly coded or equipped with lots of unnecessary request functions. These poorly coded themes create a lot of back-end problems by initiating spare calls to the database. 

As a result, databases need to answer those calls and hamper the page loading speed.

To reduce these database calls, you can use child themes and see the sudden improvements in your site’s performance. 

Lowering External HTTP Requests 

Improving your WordPress site’s performance can be affected by the presence of outside files that are present on different themes and plugins. Many external resources like YouTube, Facebook, Google, or analytics services provide videos, images, scripts, or stylesheets that are some common outside files.

Sometimes you need to allow these external files to work on your site as they are well-optimized in nature and can easily lessen the stress of hosting them on your site.

However, your plugins may initiate a lot of these requests from time to time which can seriously lower the speed of your site.

To avoid such a problem, you need to deactivate most of these scripts and styles created from external HTTP requests or integrate those into one single file. Only then, you can see the real difference.   

Reducing Post Revision 

WordPress database might get burdened with a lot of post revisions. These post revisions occasionally affect various database queries run by your site’s installed plugins.

With this type of interruption, your website may face an unnatural lower speed while loading ultimately angering your visitors heavily.

To solve this issue, our recommendation for you is to include a simplified coding line in your wp-config.php file:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 );

Now, your WordPress site will then include only the last 4 revisions of each page and deactivate older codes automatically to save you from low speed. 

WordPress Database Optimization 

If you have been using a WordPress site for a while, then your site’s database might have already stored a lot of unnecessary files from plugins.

These files are just a burden for your database and need to be rid of as soon as possible.

To solve such an issue, you can add two popular plugins the WP-Optimize or the WP-Sweep Plugin.

These tools will eradicate the unwanted and unused files stored inside your database and eventually optimize the database structure with a few clicks.  

How Glossy IT could help you deal with the Improvement of Your WordPress Site Performance? 

The growth of an online presence is a must for any business to flourish. As a result, your website also needs definite growth. Glossy IT's team of experienced professionals is expert enough to give your site a growing and sustainable solution. Among these members, we have a few expert developers who have been working successfully with the development of WordPress services for the past few years for clients globally. You can simply give us a shout to fix any issues regarding the improvement of your WordPress site’s performance and optimization by clicking here.

End Notes 

Congratulations for reaching the end of this discussion and we hope you have learned a lot to improve your WordPress site’s performance. You are now experienced enough to detect most of the negative issues created by your site. However, if you still feel perplexed then you should take expert opinions to improve and get growing.