Tips To Improve Speed Of Wordpress Website

By Author: Anant Jain
Total Articles: 5
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Website speed is an important factor for SEO and site traffic. It also said that faster sites do end up ranking higher. Hence people have started focusing more on the page speed. Here is the list of some tools to examine website speed.

https://www.pingdom.com/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
https://gtmetrix.com/

All of the tools mentioned above, provide us with an insight of each issue and solutions to each issue on the tested website. you can go through the suggestions provided by the tools mentioned above to increase your site speed.

Here some general techniques to increase a WordPress website speed.

Serve optimized images
Images make people attracted toward your content. However, if images aren’t optimized, they could be damaging rather than supporting. Non-optimized images are one of the most common speed issues that the websites face.

There are some good plugins available in the market which can help you in optimizing the images. here is the list of such plugins:

Smush Image Compression and Optimization
EWWW Image Optimizer
Compress ...
... JPEG & PNG images
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Read More: Are WordPress Plugins safe to use?

Enable Browser Caching
Browser caching temporarily stores visited web page resources on local disk. So, if someone visits the webpage again, the browser requests only updated data from the server & load other data from the cached content. Hence, Enabling Browser Caching became important to load your web pages faster.

Browser caching can be enabled by manually setting the expiration time for various resources into the
htaccess
file on Apache or by setting cache-control header & expires headers to your server block on Nginx or by using a plugin. Below is the list of some available plugins in the market to enable browser caching:

WP Fastest Cache
W3 Total Cache
Leverage Browser Caching
WP Performance Score Booster
Read More: 11 Effective ways to Scale up Your WordPress Website for High Traffic

Enable gzip compression
GZIP compression means zipping(compressing) pages on a server before the page is sent to the visitor. Enabling compression can significantly reduce the loading time of your page. For enabling GZIP compression you can use listed below plugins :

Check and Enable GZIP compression
WP Performance Score Booster
W3 Total Cache
Warning: Many shared hosting servers do not support gzip compression. Below is the list of modules to enable compression on your server.
Apache : mod_deflate
Nginx : ngx_http_gzip_module
Html, CSS and Javascript Minification
Minification implies eliminating extra spaces, lines and unnecessary characters from the website source code. Minified files are faster to load and enhance your site’s speed.

For Html, CSS and Javascript minification you can rely on plugins like Autoptimize, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Minify or Better WordPress Minify.

Defer javascript parsing/Asynchronously load javascript

To serve a webpage to the visitor, the web browser parses all the tags added on the web page. This parsing adds page loading time. By reducing the amount of javascript required to display the web page or deferring javascript parsing until required, you can reduce the loading time of a web page.

To defer javascript parsing, you can use given below plugins or you can use WordPress filter hook given below to add defer/async to script tags.

Async JavaScript
Autoptimize
WordPress filter hook:
function add_asyncdefer_attribute($tag, $handle) {
// if the unique handle/name of the registered script has 'async' in it
if (strpos($handle, 'async') !== false) {
// return the tag with the async attribute
return str_replace( '

I am Anant Jain, I Co-Founded Creole Studios in 2014, a software studio that specializes in Web Development, Mobile App Development, and Cloud App Development. As of 2021, Creole Studios is one of the trusted agencies in the IT services and outsourcing business. With offices in two geographies, we are proud to have served clients in over 16 countries with projects ranging from Website development, Mobile App Development to complex SAAS-based system development. For more details please visit: https://creolestudios.com/