8 Basic Tips to Speed ​​up your WordPress Website

A fast WordPress website is a must nowadays. Google attaches great value to it and your visitors to your website, especially the mobile visitors, find a fast website important. A fast website ensures that visitors do not immediately drop out and start looking for the competition. Read the tips in this article to speed up your WordPress website. Why a fast WordPress website is important Search engines like Google will place websites that load faster higher in the search results than websites that load slowly. It is one of the factors that makes your website higher in Google. If it takes longer than 2 seconds for the website to load, approximately 45% of the visitors will click away from the website and search for a competitor. A fast website ensures that visitors stay on your website. Mobile website traffic is increasing and the connections via mobile devices are often a bit slower. A fast website ensures that mobile visitors continue to visit your website. What does the website depend on? Keep in mind that different pages can yield different results. The speed of the page depends on, among other things:

• the page size
• how many requests the page does for external sources such as a Facebook like box
• whether the page is cached or not
• what kind of content is on the page

8 tips to increase the speed of your WordPress website 1. Choose the right webhosting partner One of the most important factors for a fast WordPress website is the hosting. Entrepreneurs often look at the cheapest but not what the hosting provider has to offer. Cheap hosting is often on a shared server where you share the resources of the server with multiple websites. If another customer uses a lot of resources from the server, your website will get less and thus become slower. Problems can also arise with hacked websites that make your website unavailable. 2. Use a lightweight WordPress theme or framework There are many beautifully designed WordPress themes available. The themes are equipped with beautiful sliders, widgets and other dynamic elements. Only all these elements have consequences for the speed of your website. Therefore choose a lightweight theme and be careful with adding all kinds of dynamic elements. The standard WordPress is a great lightweight theme. You can also choose a WordPress framework like Genesis or framework that use Bootstrap. These frameworks take into account the website speed. 3. Pay attention to the size of your images Images ensure that the file size page increases. And the larger the file, the longer it takes before the page is downloaded and shown to the visitor. It is best to reduce the image before you upload it. If you have not done this, there are also plugins that cause the images to be reduced during upload or you can reduce the images afterwards. You can use the free WordPress plugin WP Smush for this. 4. Minimize your JavaScript and CSS files If you use Google PageSpeed ​​Insights, you will probably be advised to reduce your JavaScript and CSS files. You can do this yourself using Google 's guidelines . Or you can use a plugin like Autoptimize. This plugin reduces and compresses JavaScript and CSS files, caches them, moves CSS to the head of your page and scripts to the footer of your page. The best result is to use a cache plugin. See the following point for this. Sometimes you need to add multiple scripts to make your web search faster than ever. This may increase your page loading time. Therefore, it's always recommended to use an external plugin like WPSOLR to make your search even better. 5. Use a cache plugin WordPress normally makes pages dynamic. This means that at the moment that a visitor retrieves a page, the data is retrieved from the database. You can understand that this requires server resources every time and it slows down the display of the page. A cache plugin makes a ready-made version of the page and puts it in a quickly accessible place. It ensures that the page can be uploaded to the visitor faster and faster. A good WordPress cache plugin is W3 Total Cache . 6. Keep your database clean By storing as little data as possible in your database, you ensure that the database remains fast and the website is loaded faster. You can limit the number of page versions, delete SPAM comments, clean up unused users and clean up plugins and themes that you no longer use. 7. Remove unused plugins As already mentioned above, deactivate and remove plugins that you no longer use. This ensures that the backups become smaller and that the server requires less time to make a backup and therefore requires fewer resources.rn8. Use as few external scripts as possiblernCalling an external script often means an extra load for the server. Limit this as much as possible. Only use the essential scripts such as Google Analytics. These were my 8 tips to increase the speed of your WordPress website and internal web-search. Do you have any additions or remarks? Leave it in the comment field below.