If you want to increase WordPress website speed, then follow these efficient guidelines. A quick loading website increases your traffic, is useful in WordPress SEO, and the user doesn’t like to wait until your page gets load, instead, they may visit some other website.

So, I will share some very effective tips to increase WordPress website speed and performance.
Here you can get to know how website speed slows down, how can you increase its speed, and why speed is crucial.

What is the reason for slow site speed?

the main reason for a slow website is:

Bad plugin
When you use an unwanted plugin that is not compatible with our WordPress, that could slow down your website or crash it entirely.

Plugins are basically third-party software, so make sure to use high-rated and most downloaded plugins.

Size of the Page
Pages that haven’t been image optimized can cause slow speed.

Web Hosting
Web Hosting is the main reason to slow down the speed because the entire website depends on the hosting.

Without hosting your website won’t load on a Google page. Make sure you choose good quality, high performance, and premium hosting server that is properly configured.

External Scripts
This could be font loaders, ads, and so on. That can affect the speed of your website.

WordPress Configuration
Your server can be overloaded and it could slow down the speed of the WordPress website, which has not served cached pages.

Choosing heavyweight themes
There are many themes available in WordPress, when you install heavyweight themes then it takes time to load your website.

Why speed is crucial for your site?

According to a study, an average student’s focus level has dropped down from 12 seconds to 7 seconds. These days people want a quick answers to what they are looking for.

If your website doesn’t open within a second or two, visitors will go to some other sites that load faster. You also lose your visitors because they did not visit your site or posts due to slow speed and your traffic may not increase as well.

Google has also started to examine websites that are slow and push them down on Google’s page. That will give lesser views.

So to conclude, if you want your website to have more views in order to rank on Google, then there’s no other option rather than a quick-loading website.

How can you check your website speed?

The website owners who run their website very often don’t get to know that their Website Speed is slow. This is because the browser stores its website in the hoard and automatically fetches it as soon as they type their URL. This makes their website load quickly.

But to a normal user like you and me, who is not the owner of the website. when we type their website name for the first time, we may not get the same speed. And for the user who lives in different countries, they may have a lot of issues to load the website.

So to check the Website Speed there are many tools available Online. You can go for Page Speed Insights to check your Website Speed. Here they give you all the insights into your website, in this tool you can measure the speed in terms of percentage.

If the percentage shows 90-100%, your website is fully optimized and it loads less than a second.

50-89% indicates that the speed is moderate and you need to optimize your website. And if it’s 0-49%, the speed is too poor, This looks so awful.

The next tool you can use to check the speed is GTMatrix. This tool gives you performance scores and page details.

From the above image, you can check all the details of the website. If the Page Speed Score, YSlow Score is moderate or poor then it’s a clear sign that your website is slow.

How to Increase the Speed of Your Website?

There are many ways available to increase the speed of your website like Installing Caching Plugin, Optimizing Images, Deleting unwanted Plugins, Installing Lightweight Themes.

Making changes to your website could be a nightmare if you are a beginner. There’s no need to freak out, I will tell you how can you do changes to your website to achieve speed.

Install a Caching Plugin

By installing a caching plugin your website will boost automatically and website speed increases 3 times faster than before. You don’t have to understand how it works, but for your knowledge, I’ll explain how the cache plugin works.

The plugin keeps a copy of the page after it first gets to load, then with every subsequent user, they are served with the cached version.

I would recommend you’ll to use WPSuper Cache or NitroPack Plugin.

The process to install and set up is simple. Here’s a video link on how to set up WPSuper Cache, and NitroPack Plugin.

Image Optimization

Your website/Blog looks boring and plain without any images, images explain a lot of things that words couldn’t explain. Uploading images on your site is important for the user’s reference as well.

Users like to read your content more often if there are images placed in your blog. But having lots of images that are not optimized is another reason to slow down your website speed.

However, there is a plugin that will solve this issue by compressing the size of the image without affecting the quality of the image.

Use the short pixel plugin to compress and optimize your image.

ShortPixel plugin is the best so far, I personally use the short pixel plugin. The installation and setup are again very easy. You can go to YouTube and search for the video. But to save your time I’ll give you the link to set up a short pixel plugin.

You can go for a free or paid version, it is quite affordable if you go for a paid one. But it’s up to you.

Other Best Practices to Improve Website Speed

1. Upload Audio/Video Files in Embedded Format

Uploading Audio/Video directly into WordPress should be avoided since it will cost you bandwidth. The company could charge you for using bandwidth, even though you had opted for an unlimited bandwidth plan.

Also, directly uploading such files will increase backup size as well. So avoid direct uploads and go for YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, DailyMotion hosting services.

These will automatically embed your Audio/Video URLs. All you need to do is copy the video’s URL from YouTube and paste it into your blog. That’s all.

2. Use a Premium DNS

We all know the full form of DNS is Domain Name System but do you know what it has to do with Website Speed?

It’s because while using a free DNS the speed, performance, reliability is less. After all, it’s free!!. The reason behind using a Premium DNS is only because of Speed and Reliability and it Increases Website Speed.

By connecting domain name with the web servers, DNS helps with direct traffic on the net. When we type any website name in the browser, that name gets translated in to IP address.

3. Try to fix HTTPS/SSL errors without a plugin

You can face some mixed content errors when you’re trying to switch your site to HTTPS/SSL. To fix this issue, the best way is to install a plugin called Really Simple SSL.

But there’s a small problem. This plugin caches all the URLs first, later this plugin will change those URLs to HTTPS before sending them to a browser.

This can cause a small performance issue. But you can solve this by manually fixing all the URLs. Go to settings->General Page and you can see that the WordPress address and site address have HTTPS URLs.

If that’s not the case then you go ahead and type ‘S’ after HTTP. Click on the Save changes button.