If you are about to start a business or you already run one, you probably know how it’s important to discover all possibilities of online business. While everything is online, people are using all resources from the internet to inform themselves or buy online rather than go anywhere. These trends are rising every day, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Having a fast WordPress website in the high-tech era is absolutely the ultimate goal and crucial part of your business success online space. Whether you are a blogger, you are running a business or you are an e-commerce store owner, fast loading WordPress website delivers better user experience, seamless browsing across the website, and reduced consumption of resources.
While WordPress is the best CMS in the world – customizable, user-friendly, and affordable, it tends to suffer from speed issues if it’s not properly optimized.
In this article, we’ll give you a useful guide on how to simplify and effectively optimize the WordPress business website for better performance and functionality.
What are the causes of slowing WordPress websites?
No user wants to wait for a website to load and waste their time looking at a blank page. If users do come across a page that takes minutes to load, they’ll go looking for another that gives them the info they want in a few seconds. Once they leave, users usually don’t come back due to bad experiences. What can be the cause? Well, it depends on various factors. First of all, if your website is too big for your hosting solution, maybe it’s the main cause of slowing down. Before you start solving other problems, you should check your hosting provider and see if it took all measures for your WordPress website’s performance improvement. Speed and performance problems sometimes are caused by issues you didn’t even think of, so you need to start to deal with it systematically. Of course, in most cases, problems with speed and poor performance your WordPress website comes from bad optimization, but the good news is that you can easily solve it.
Here are some tips to speed up your business website because, as we said – the faster website is, the better business will be.
- Host on a reputable and reliable WordPress hosting provider
When it comes to web hosting infrastructure, you need to know what your website needs – from basic shared resources to dedicated virtual servers, there’s a service for all kinds of websites and all budgets – but some solutions perform better than others. For WordPress websites, the best choice is a service specifically tailored for it. If you’re about to change your hosting provider or to establish a new WordPress website you need to check Hostinger – according to reviews, it has excellent optimized solutions for WordPress websites and it’s also very affordable. Providers specialized for hosting WordPress websites actively contribute to its codebase, so you can be sure everything will be customized for your website’s needs – from speed performances to security updates.
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
The closer content is to your visitors, the quicker it is to access and download. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) reduces the distance and time required to complete a request.
CDNs are especially useful if you want to conquer international markets because it will help you ensure your site consistently performs well, no matter where your visitor is physically based. The truth is that WordPress is user friendly, but for cases like this, if you don’t have significant technical experience, it’s recommended to find a WordPress specialist who will do it for you.
3. Use a lightweight WordPress theme
Your WordPress theme can also be a factor that affects your website performances and speed. You can find thousands and thousands of themes on the internet designed for all kinds of websites. But, sometimes they’re bloated with some options no one ever uses like plugins, fonts, or they just have bad code. Before you choose a WordPress theme, think about what you need for your website – sometimes the less is more. Try with lightweight themes that are both fast and very aesthetic. You can find them in many forms, and all you have to do is to choose some suitable for your business – both functional and aesthetically proper.
4. Delete unused plugins
Installing every plugin you can find is not the smartest idea. Too many plugins (which you are usually not using) can significantly slow down your website. Delete all the plugins and even the extra installed themes from your WordPress, simply – all you don’t use. Only when you delete them from your dashboard do you really reduce the size of the WordPress content folder.
5. Reduce the size of the images
Last 10-15 years graphic content has become more important than ever! If you want to attract visitors you should have stunning images and designed posts. The problem is that high-resolution images are usually large file sizes, which can also slow down loading page speed. To avoid burdening your website resize images to reduce its size. The high resolution will stay, but the file size will be drastically smaller. You can do it on your own by using some really useful WordPress plugins, or you can use photoshop or programs specialized for design.
6. Monitor your website performances
To know when something goes wrong on your website, you need to understand all its parts. First of all, you need to test and benchmark WordPress site load and script execution times to see where you have a problem. If something goes wrong – you’ll see the change in parameters so you’ll be able to act quickly.
Final words
Taking care of speed and performances of the WordPress website is not simple. The steps above can help you to solve the essential aspects of performance issues and make the user experience of your website more comfortable. As we said earlier, although WordPress is designed to be friendly for users of all levels of technical experience, sometimes it is better to leave the job to the professionals, especially if you don’t have enough technical experience for maintaining a big website.
How To Optimize WordPress Business Website For Better Performance And Functionality? originally posted on Source Digit – Linux, Ubuntu Tutorials & News, Technology, Gadgets & Gizmos.