How to Increase WordPress Website Loading Speed

Website speed is increasing in importance. With the rise of mobile usage and the ‘click here to read the article’ trend, sites need to respond quickly to visitors’ demands. According to Google, fast-loading sites can boost their rankings and attract more visitors. To achieve the best performance possible, it is important to follow best practices, such as keeping your page speed low, compressing your CSS, and caching your content. In this article, we will discuss how to increase the loading speed of your WordPress site.

Optimize Your Images

One of the biggest performance bottlenecks on a website is images. Large images with lots of colors and sharpness consume a lot of bandwidth and take a lot of time to load. Even worse, they are often the source of slow performance and security issues. To remedy this situation, you should try to replace all the images on your website with smaller and faster versions. You can also use a service like Cloudinary which will allow you to effortlessly upload images from your computer to your website without worrying about the size or quality. If you are generating the images yourself, you can always use software like Photoshop to resize them before you upload them to your website.

Reduce Your CSS

Another important factor that affects your site’s speed is the amount of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) applied to your webpages. When someone visits your site, their first impression is usually based on the appearance of the webpage. For this reason, it is important to keep the styling of your webpages to a minimum. You can use tools like Gist to make changes to your CSS quickly and effortlessly. Alternatively, you can write your own CSS or use a service like Wistia which will do the task for you. If possible, you should avoid using CSS all together and use a tool like Bootstrap instead.

Caching Your Content

Another crucial step to making your site load faster is to cache your content. When a visitor goes to your site and wants to read an article, they usually go to the browser’s cache and read the previously downloaded content instead of requesting it from the server again. To benefit from this, you should store the content of your webpages in the browser’s cache so that when a person visits your site again, they will get the content immediately without having to wait for it to load. You can use tools like Cloudflare Page Speed or WordPress’s own page speed plugin to easily accomplish this.

Minimize Your JavaScript

Even more crucially, you should minimize the use of JavaScript (JavaScript is an important part of a webpage’s functionality and allows you to create interactive elements). The best practice here is to avoid using JavaScript as much as possible. If you absolutely have to use it, try to make it as lightweight as possible and minify (compress) it. Another thing that you can do to improve your site’s speed is to remove unused JavaScript functions. You can also use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to find areas where your site could be improved.

Use Proxies

Finally, you should always use a proxy to improve your site’s speed and bypass the region’s quota restrictions. If you are living in China, you will want to use a Chinese VPN to get around the Great Firewall and be able to browse the web as usual. However, proxies can also be used to access otherwise blocked content on social media platforms like Twitter. In these cases, you will want to use a VPN configured to work with the proxy so that all of your internet traffic is encrypted and private.

To summarize, if you want to improve the speed of your site, you should focus on replacing images with smaller files, reducing the use of CSS, caching your content, minimizing your JavaScript, and using a VPN to access blocked content on social media.