A sluggish website affects your overall site performance. The conversion rate, bounce-outs, and SEO – all depend on the speed of your site. So, if your WordPress website is not speed optimized you are putting your SERP ranking at risk. 

For your site to load faster, you must take into consideration numerous factors. Therefore, it is quite challenging to speed up your site, especially if you’re talking about a WordPress site. To help you figure out how to increase WordPress website speed, here are the 7 most important factors to consider for speed optimization!

1 The Quality of Website Host

The most essential component for speeding up your WordPress is selecting a quality and reliable website host. The criteria for choosing the right host is to go for the one that has the server closer to your site visitors. A nearby server can dramatically enhance the load time. 

Shared hosting is also a problem if you want your site to run faster. Since you share the server with many other websites, your site will be slow. Also, during traffic hours, your site might face too much downtime. Therefore, you must avoid a shared host for your site. 

2 Optimization of CSS and JavaScript Files

The long cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript files take longer to be retrieved and processed by the server. There are two ways through which you can optimize them. The first one is to combine similar files together. The second is to minify the files. Through this, you will be able to remove unnecessary elements and blank spaces in the files.

This combining and minifying of CSS and JavaScript files will help you in reducing HTTP requests. Also, it will decrease the time a server takes to process the files.

3 Speed Optimized Themes

Heavy themes and the ones that are not speed optimized can adversely affect your WordPress website speed. Therefore, it is always better to go for faster and lightweight WordPress themes. You might be tempted to use widget-loaded themes however, it is ideal that you select a simple and speed-optimized one.

Speed optimized themes will not only help you in reducing the load time but will help you to make your site more interactive and visually stable. Thus, it can be a great factor for optimizing your WordPress site’s core web vitals.

4 Compression of Media Files

The media files on your website occupy most of the space on the server and limit your site’s bandwidth. Therefore, you must compress all the images, videos, gifs, etc., on your site. If you are an eCommerce site, you should be diligent about it as there are numerous images and videos for every product.

For compressing the media files, you can use a WordPress plugin. The WP Smush is one of the most widely used plugins for compressing media files compression.

5 Reducing Additional HTTP Requests

For speeding up your WordPress site, the biggest challenge is to limit the HTTP requests from the user’s browser to the server. In addition to using faster themes and hosts, for reducing HTTP requests you can also use cache. It will enable you to store the web pages that users instantly require on their devices. 

Other than that, you should remove all the elements that are not necessary for the site. This might include extra widgets, images, external scripts, and inefficient plugins. 

6 Efficient plugins

Inefficient plugins are another source of slowing down your WordPress site. Therefore, make sure that each plugin you use on your website is speed-efficient. Also, you should avoid using plugins that are not necessary for the website.

Besides, there are numerous plugins that you can use to improve the load time of your website. The best speed-boosting plugins for WordPress are WordPress Rocket and WP Offload Media.

7 WordPress Updates and Database Cleanup 

Another way of enhancing WordPress website speed is to keep your website up to date. There are regular latest updates for the plugins, themes, and other widgets. Using the older versions of those plugins and themes will affect the speed of your WordPress site. Therefore, you must keep your website up to date.

Database cleanup is another way of optimizing the speed of your WordPress website. Database cleanup can be performed through a plugin like WP Sweep or Asset CleanUp. Through this, you can remove all the inessential elements from the site.  

Final Thoughts

A slow WordPress site means your conversion rate and SERP ranking is being compromised. To avoid that, you must know all the factors that speed up your WordPress website. The most important factors include having a quality website host, speed-optimized themes, and plugins. 

In addition, you must optimize the CSS and JavaScript files and reduce the number of HTTP requests. Compressing all the media files is also necessary. Lastly, keep your website updated and perform database cleanup regularly.