WordPress powers more than 40% of the world’s websites, and for good reason. WordPress is famously easy to use, and its countless themes and plugins make it endlessly customizable. But if WordPress websites aren’t optimized, they can also be painfully slow. If you’ve been having problems with your loading speed after switching to WordPress, here are six tips you can use to speed up your WordPress website!
6 Tips to speed up your WordPress website
1. Go static with FLATsite
FLATsite has been the best-kept secret among website owners for quite some time now. And we’re not just saying that because it’s our product! FLATsite has been provento make your WordPress website faster, safer, and cheaper to host. Why? Because it turns your dynamic WordPress website into a super light static website that takes up very little server space. When your website is static, visitors can be served directly from the cache on the server, which makes your website dizzyingly fast.
2. Choose the right theme
Themes make your WordPress website unique to you and your brand. WordPress themes are the reason three hundred people can use WordPress and end up with completely different websites. But every aspect of your theme demands server resources to load, which means it affects your website speed. So, if your website has been loading slowly lately, take a look at your theme. Does it include lots of extra features that you never actually use? If so, choosing a different theme is a quick way to speed up your WordPress website.
3. Also, check your plugins
Lurking behind every slow-loading WordPress website is a low-quality plugin that costs more server resources than it’s worth. The traditional advice is to keep your plugins to a minimum, but the truth is that it’s not that simple.
If you have five poor-quality plugins and your competitor has twenty plugins in tiptop condition, your website will load more slowly than theirs. So, while limiting the number of plugins will help you speed up your WordPress website, the quality of your plugins is much more important. Before you install any plugin, look for reviews and complaints to make sure you won’t be installing a dud.
4. Use better images
In the tech world, we usually call this “optimizing” your images. Here’s what that means and why it’s important: Optimizing your images means making your image files as small as you can possibly get them without sacrificing quality.
Image quality is an important part of making sure visitors stay on your website, but website speed is also crucial to retaining visitors. So, what you want is to have images that are high-quality enough to keep your visitors, but also not stored in such massive files that visitors are turned off by your slow-loading website.
Ideally, you want to use JPEG format for images with lots of different colors and features, and if you’re using simpler images, you can use PNG.
5. Choose the right web host
Your web host is the company that stores your website on their servers. The right web host can speed up your WordPress website, and the wrong web host will have your site loading slowly no matter what you do to speed it up. So, choosing the right web host is essential.
The great thing about using FLATsite is that we don’t tie you to any particular web host, so you can choose any hosting company or hosting package you like. Shared hosting is the cheapest kind of web hosting you can get, but if you want to use FLATsite to build a PBN, you might want to choose a more robust hosting option like VPS hosting or dedicated hosting. And check the reviews of the web hosting company to make sure they have a good reputation when it comes to response times and average website speed.
6. Optimize CSS delivery
CSS keeps the style requirements for your webpage. Your website will access this either from an external file that loads before your page renders or from within the HTML document itself. Generally, you want to avoid having your website access the CSS from within the document, because this causes severe bloating in your code. External CSS stylesheets are best, but if you really want to take your CSS delivery to the most efficient level, you can also combine all your stylesheets into one stylesheet. Each additional stylesheet increases your HTTP requests, which increases your loading time.
Wrapping up
If you google ‘How to speed up your WordPress website,’ you’ll find thousands of suggestions that require moderate-to-high technical skills. The great thing about the tips in this guide is that they’re all simple to do, so you won’t get overwhelmed. Using even one tip in this guide will help you speed up your WordPress website, but if you employ FLAT static sites and follow the tips, your website will load faster than you ever thought possible!
