How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website Los Angeles | ClapCreative

Site loading speed now plays a huge role in online success. Major search engines take site loading speed into their algorithms in order to determine rankings. That’s not it! High speed websites are also reported to have a higher conversion rate as well. This is especially true in case of e-commerce websites. Users too appreciate pages that load faster and enjoy surfing on them longer.

If you have a website powered by WordPress, here’s something that will help you speed up your WP website in no time.

  1. Reduce HTTP requests

In simple words, the number of files necessary to display your website should be reduced. When a visitor lands on your website, many files including CSS, images and JavaScript library references have to be loaded on to the visitor’s browser. More the number of files, more time it will take to load them.

Certain WordPress plugins load extraneous CSS in your website code. This can further increase the size of your page without you actually knowing it. Eliminate unnecessary things especially code. Have a manual check if possible on the plugin codes.

  1. Optimize Images

Images can take forever to load especially when the user connection is slow. So, reduce the size of images before uploading them onto the website. Many image formats contain metadata that can significantly increase the size of images. Designers many times fail to compress the images before they are uploaded on to the website. On certain image intensive pages, example portfolio, this can result in excessively slow page speed times. Another designer side mistake is to upload extremely large size images for banners or logos. Pictures extracted from digital cameras are uploaded directly. This can seriously dent your webpage’s speed credentials. There are numerous free applications including image optimizer and Picnic that help you compress the image before uploading.

Wordpress reduces the size of the image by default and resizes them accordingly but sometimes that might not give you the best results, so it is always better to upload high resolution optimized images.

  1. Minify CSS, HTML and Javascript

Make sure that all the white space is removed from the code before serving to visitors. Spacing and tabs are entered into the code to ensure that it is read easily by humans. Browsers and servers don’t have to consider readability of the code. They just have to execute it. As long as it is error-free, they don’t care how it looks like.

For faster page load times, you should simply remove this white space before code is implemented. W3 Total Cache and WP-Minify are the best wordpress plugins to make it happen.

  1. Content Delivery Network

Want to reduce the load times on your server? A content delivery network is the perfect alternative. A content delivery network replicates the static assets of your pages and delivers them to the visitors from their nearest POP.

  1. Gzip components

Many files can be reduced in size by compressing them at server level well before they are uploaded on to the browsers.

  1. Put Style sheets at Top

The <head> of your document should contain all the style sheet references. Unstyled content is not to be displayed to the visitors at any cost. Files that determine the appearance of our website should be loaded first.

  1. Plugins

There are many wordpress plugins that will help you increase the speed of your WP site. The popular ones include P3 Profiler, WP Smush.it, W3 Total Cache, Digg and more. Besides the paid ones, there is an arsenal of plugins that promise high performance without costing an arm and a leg.

For any wordpress website development and customization in Los Angeles, please contact us today.

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