There are a wide range of factors that will influence the search engine ranking of your WordPress website. Along with the obvious things like adding better content and building backlinks to your site, one of the best things you can do to improve your search position is to improve your site’s speed.
Fortunately, there are plenty of different ways to improve the speed of your WordPress website design, especially if you know a little bit about coding and web development. Here are five of our favorites:
- Use fewer plugins
Don’t get me wrong, WordPress plugins are handy, and you should be using them! However, you need to make sure that you’re only using plugins that actually benefit you actually do the web design. Unfortunately, plugins will slow your site load speed down, mainly if you use a lot of complicated ones.
- Optimize your images and videos.
Loading images and videos can take a long time, especially if your site is heavy on visual content. It’s important to make sure that you optimise your visual content before you upload it to your website, otherwise, your site load speed will be compromised.
- Minify your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code.
Here’s where a bit of coding knowledge will come in handy. The size of your CSS and JavaScript files (and the number of calls required to load them when someone clicks on your website) is a big problem for many people. Adjusting and fixing your CSS and JavaScript code from your WordPress dashboard will significantly speed up your website.
- Use a caching plugin.
Although you indeed want to minimize your plugin use where possible, a decent caching plugin will help improve the caching of your website on people’s browsers. This means that they won’t have to load things like images and complex code the next time they visit your site, improving your load speeds, increasing visitor retention, and improving your organic search engine ranking.
- Find a better hosting provider.
The hosting provider that you use will heavily impact your page speed. Some web developers would argue that your choice of hosting provider is the most critical factor in optimizing your WordPress website.
It’s usually a good idea to avoid the cheapest hosting providers where possible. Even though they might claim to provide premium service and optimal load times, the simple truth is that they usually can’t keep up during peak traffic times. They often suffer a lot of downtime as well. Instead, research and try to choose a hosting provider with a good reputation and who will allocate a specified number of resources to your website.
Final Word
There are many ways to speed up your WordPress website. A few of the most common are outlined above, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. Do your own research and speak to an experienced web developer if you need more advice.