The days of waiting minutes for webpages to load are long gone. So the question is How to Speed Up Your Website With the Right Web Hosting? There’s little justification for poor website performance now that many of us have access to high-speed internet connections – not just in our homes, but anywhere we go.
The loading times on your WordPress website should be monitored. In addition to enhancing user experience, faster loading times can discourage users from visiting your rivals’ websites.
Fortunately, there are many ways to increase site speed, and we’ll look at 8 of the greatest strategies in this post. Even using a couple of these strategies should help your site load faster, so let’s get started!
Why You Should Improve Your Website Performance
Many website owners err by believing that their pages load quickly enough without carefully examining their actual performance. The majority of websites these days actually load fairly rapidly if the user has a strong internet connection.
But, there may be considerable differences between how “fast” is defined by you and your visitors.
Studies show that most people are remarkably impatient when it comes to lengthy loading times. A little under 47% of respondents believe that all websites should load quickly. For the majority of websites, three seconds is the perfect page load time. With every extra second, it takes a page to load, conversion rates may drop by up to 7%.
If you are unsure about the speed of your WordPress site, now is the time to find out. Several factors might have an impact on site performance, and there are various tools available to undertake simple speed tests. PageSpeed Insights is one of our favourites because it provides access to a wide range of performance indicators.
All you have to do is enter the URL you want to test and hit enter.
Remember that even if your results are under three seconds, there is still space for improvement in web performance. As your site develops in popularity, optimizing your loading speeds becomes even more important, and shaving off a few milliseconds today might make a major impact afterwards.
How to Speed Up Your Website With the Right Web Hosting
It is critical to recognize that there is no silver bullet for increasing loading speeds. Depending on how your website is configured, some methods may give you a better bang for your buck.
But, if you want to ensure that your site loads as quickly as possible, you should use as many optimization tactics as feasible. Here are 15 of the finest ways for increasing the speed of your website.
1. Choose the Right Hosting Provider
Every hosting company offers a different baseline performance right out of the box. The performance of a web host’s shared plans cannot typically be compared to that of more sophisticated services like dedicated servers.
Ideally, you should select a web host that provides consistently high performance. Any web hosting provider will claim to be the quickest, therefore it is your responsibility to compare features and rates, as well as read as many reviews as possible, before making a decision.
You may always switch to web hosting companies later, but it might be time-consuming. Your WordPress website should be lightning-fast from the start if you choose the proper service and hosting plan.
2. Enable Keep-Alive On Your Web Server
Your browser normally creates a connection to the server when you visit a website and uses that connection to transfer the files it needs. But, if your server is not configured properly, users might need to create new connections for each file transfer.
Naturally, that is not a practical approach to load modern websites that include dozens, if not hundreds, of files. To avoid this problem, set your webserver to use a “keep-alive” HTTP header or persistent connection.
Most Apache and NGINX configurations should use persistent connections by default. Nonetheless, if you’re unsure about how your server is set up, it never hurts to double-check.
3. Leverage Browser Caching
One of the most crucial steps in enhancing your website’s loading times is caching. By turning on browser caching, you tell visitors’ browsers to temporarily cache some (or all) of the static files from your website on their devices.
Because those visitors won’t have to refresh your site completely every time they return, subsequent visits should be substantially faster. There are numerous methods to use browser caching in WordPress, and if you haven’t done it before, now is the time.
4. Avoid Landing Page Redirects Whenever Possible
Making a mobile-friendly version of your WordPress website has been highly recommended to you in the past, both for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and to maintain user satisfaction. In order to use that strategy, you had to create landing page redirects that led mobile users to the “correct” version of your website and cache them to speed up the process even more.
Now that mobile devices have surpassed desktop browsers in terms of overall traffic, designing numerous versions of your website makes little sense. You’d rather have a single, mobile-friendly design that scales across all potential resolutions.
5. Use a Well-Optimized WordPress Theme
WordPress themes can have a huge impact on your site that goes beyond merely changing its appearance. Many themes now have dozens of unique features, custom page builders, and much more. All of that increased capability, though, can come at a cost: poor performance.
Even if you do everything else correctly, not all WordPress themes are adequately optimized, which might result in slow loading times. Because it is not possible to test hundreds of themes on your own servers, we recommend that you undertake extensive research before selecting a template.
There are hundreds of articles on the web about the quickest WordPress themes, and independent reviews are equally crucial. Just like with your web host, conducting your research before making a decision here might save you a lot of trouble later on.
6. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Your website is housed on a single server with a specified location in most types of hosting (excluding cloud hosting). Every visitor must connect to that server in order for your website to load, which might cause bottlenecks.
CDNs are global clusters of servers that store copies of websites. That is, your site can be hosted in the United States but use a CDN with servers in Latin America, Europe, and the rest of the world. The CDN will deliver your site from its Latin American servers if a user from Brazil requests to see it.
This configuration offers you two benefits:
- That alleviates the strain on your servers.
- International visitors will benefit from faster loading times.
There are numerous excellent CDN solutions for WordPress. As you may assume, the majority of such services are not free. Yet, if you run a big website, investing in a CDN can have a major impact on its loading speeds.
7. Remove Unused WordPress Plugins
It’s fun to experiment with new plugins, but don’t keep the ones you’re not using. Plugins, by definition, add extra code and functionality to your website, which might slow it down. If you don’t use those functions, you’re only slowing down the user experience.
Most plugins, in our experience, should not have a significant influence on loading speeds. But, disabling plugins that you aren’t utilizing takes only a few seconds.
We recommend that you check your plugins page every couple of months, determine which ones you no longer use, and disable them. If you don’t miss them after a while, simply uninstall them.
8. Optimize Your Website’s Images
We’re prepared to guess that you can’t recall the last time you viewed a website without photos, and this isn’t by chance. Pictures improve everything, and they are an essential component of modern online design.
High-quality image files, on the other hand, tend to be quite heavy. Longer loading times are a result of large file sizes. There are two main ways to deal with this issue:
- Image compression before uploading to your website
- Image resizing to fit contemporary screen resolutions
There are numerous programs available for compressing photographs with minimum or no loss of quality. If you’re using WordPress, you can use plugins to automate the entire process and resize images while you’re doing it.
That latter point is critical because there’s no purpose to provide images with high quality if your users are predominantly using laptops or mobile devices to access your site. By combining compression and scaling, you may substantially reduce image file sizes while also speeding up your website.
Conclusion
It can be not very comforting to optimize your website to increase its performance. As you can see, there are numerous ways to reduce loading times. You do not, however, have to implement every single optimization at once.
Also, many of the procedures covered in this article, such as selecting the correct WordPress theme, are only necessary once. As your site expands, you’ll have more time to fine-tune its performance even more, offering a better user experience and ensuring that your site always loads smoothly.
If you want to ensure that your website loads as quickly as possible, consider a web host that provides excellent performance right out of the gate.