Enhancing your website speed is something that you should have done ages ago. It is a pure fact that what glues a user to a certain site apart from the relevance of the information and the outlook is how fast the site is. Everyone loves a site that loads fast.
This is because the faster the site, the more information you will be able to gather and the quicker you solve the problem that bought you to the site in the first place. This is why you need to make sure that your WordPress site is literary on toes in terms of speed.
Some of you are already aware that your WordPress site is lagging, but you have no idea how to increase its speed. Others have no idea; if that is the case, you will have to place it under scrutiny. Once you find out it is lagging, then know it’s time to boost its speed.
There are so many methods that different people use to maximize the speed of their sites without necessarily changing your hosting company. Among these many hacks. There are only four easy ones that will surely get the job done. Here are 4 easy hacks to speed up your WordPress site without changing your host provider.
1# Optimizing images.
Optimizing your images is a very effective method that will speed up your site. This method will work straight away for photographers who like filling their sites with so many images and videos. What you don’t know, or probably did know but ignored is that images add HTTP requests to your site.
This basically means that the more images you place on your site, the more HTTP requests will be sent thus jamming your site and later interfering with its speed.
To solve this problem, you will need to start unclogging your site by removing unnecessary images. There is no need of having a whole lot of images to do something only 25images can do. By reducing the number of images, you will be reducing the number of http requests thus increasing the leading time. It is that simple.
Make sure you cut the numbers starting with slide shows then galleries. You should also crop some of the remaining images. Once you do this, you will see your site’s speed increasing exponentially.
You can also optimize images before uploading them on your WordPress site. Some of the effective tools that are known to be very good in optimizing images include Imagify, WP Smush Pro and Tiny PNG Plugin.
2# Use a caching plugin.
Before you get to know how this method helps to speed up your WordPress site, you will need to know how WordPress works.
Whenever a user requests for a piece of particular information on your WordPress site, there is a process that is involved before the information is availed. WordPress will have to search for the required information, compile it before it is availed to the user.
So if there are five visitors accessing your site, WordPress will have to do that for every individual user lengthening the process. This means that it will slow down the speed at which users are accessing the information.
To minimize this process, a caching plugin is used. Once you install a caching plugin on your site, when the first user requests for the information, WordPress will get the information, compile then avail it. But then instead of the information being put back to where it was taken from earlier, it is placed in the cache you just installed.
This is so that when the second user requests for the information, the already compiled information will be availed thus minimizing the retrieval process. This is exactly what cache plugin does to your site. Caching plugin can literally increase your site speed further in no time. Some of the best caching plugins that you may find useful include WP super cache and WP rocket.
3# Make sure your host can upgrade the server to PHP.
This is not something you can do but what the hosting company should do. This is so far the most important factor when it comes to boosting the speed of your WordPress site. You will find that most hosting companies still run on PHP 5 yet there is PHP 7 which is much better and faster. This is because they are afraid of the possible incompatibility issues. You should thus make sure your hosting company upgrades to the latest PHP.
This step does not just come with the caching capabilities that will improve your WordPress response time to queries initiated by the user. It will have a positive impact to the whole infrastructure. You will be protected from issues such as traffic surges. This will play a great role in ensuring that your WordPress site retains its incredible speed. You will also be protected from a poor quality code that often drags the site.
If you’re not willing to do the proper research to find out wether one host supports PHP7 or not then find a hosting review site like The Hosting Institute and they will help you out in making well researched decision.
4# Minify CSS and Javascript.
This is a good method that will definitely boost the rate at which your site pages load to some length. The term minify is used to describe the procedure through which you can use to minimize your website files. This is usually done by cleaning your source code to make sure that it doesn’t have unnecessary characters, white spaces, and lines.
The only way that this process will increase the rate at which your website pages load is if you minify the code on your end and not that of hosting company. The code on your end includes CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
This method has proved to be useful, and so it is worth trying out. The above four procedures have been proven to be very effective when it comes to increasing the speed of any WordPress site.
Once you notice your site is lagging, you should initiate the above hacks before you start losing your audience. No one likes a site that loads slowly; it is thus very essential to keep your site on toes at any given time.
