Is your website loading slowly? Is it performing poorly? Poor performance will definitely hurt your website traffic as well as your business. According to statistics, 97% of people leave a website that does not load for three seconds. These statistics show how important a website's performance is.
Considering this importance, in today's topic we will see 7 techniques that we can use to improve the performance of our WordPress website. So let's begin.
Performance Is Important For SEO As Well
There are different Ranking Factors of SEO issues by Google. Performance is one of the 200 important ranking factors. If your website is not performing well, that means you're missing out on something very important for SEO.
As a result, your site's ranking will be adversely affected and it will go down in Google's search results. Which means your business goes down.
SEO is one of the most important things to succeed in this internet age. If you are not appearing anywhere in the search results or do not have a prominent ranking, you will never be seen by Internet users. And they will never become your customers. The success of a business on the Internet is dependent on visibility.
Now we will discuss 7 best ways that we can improve the performance of our website.
7 Best Tips To Improve WordPress Website Performance
We will talk about following 7 methods of performance improvement:
- Remove extra themes and plugins
- Delete additional pages and gallery items
- Delete additional tags and categories
- Use of any caching plugin
- Use image compression plugin
- Use better images format
- Defer loading of all the unnecessary JavaScript
Let's see them in detail now:
Remove Extra Plugins And Themes
When we install WordPress, some themes are automatically added to it by WordPress. Every year WordPress releases a theme named after the year of its release like 2016, 2017, 2018 etc.
Hardly anyone uses these themes. So it is important that whenever you do a new WordPress installation, you only keep the theme that you are going to use for your website. Delete all remaining extra themes.
WordPress also provides some plugins automatically like themes. For example, when we install a new WordPress, we get two plugins from WordPress, one is Akismet Anti-Spam and the other is Hello Dolly. Both of these plugins are rarely used anymore. Akismet Anti Spam is used to prevent spamming on our website (although there are many better plugins for that too), but if we ask someone about Hello Dolly who uses it, 10 or 15 out of 100 people who use it will be able to tell 😀
In short, additional plugins, just like themes, should also be removed. It won't make a huge difference to your website's performance, but it will definitely make some difference. Apart from these two plugins, if you have some plugins on your website that are not used too often, they should be removed as well.
For example, plugins that are required for the installation of a theme, such as for importing the theme's demo content, have no use after the demo is imported. So it is better to remove them. The same can be done with other unnecessary plugins.
Remove Extra Pages And Gallery Items
On installing some Free and all Paid themes in WordPress we also get demo data of the theme. Now while installing, most themes give us the option to import whatever we want instead of importing all the data. Normally we import all items on import option.
In such a case, all the images in the theme's demo pages and media gallery are also imported. Now on the website we will put our own images and pages. So it is better to remove all the unnecessary pages and gallery images from the imported demo so that the website does not slow down unnecessarily and remains light weight.
Remove All Extra Tags And Pages
Demo data doesn't just come with pages or images. It Also includes some demo posts, their categories and tags. All these tags and categories may not create any problem in viewing but when we do website SEO, we have to deal with the problems they create.
For example, having any dummy data on a website is not good at all for its SEO. Along with this, if we scan our website with the help of an SEO tool, then it tells us about the various problems related to these sample categories and tags, which you can see and fix. While fixing these issues at that time, you will feel angry thinking that I have never used these things and here they're appearing as issues!
So it is better to delete all demo categories and tags along with posts and pages to avoid any problem in future.
Use A Good Caching Plugin
One of the most important things to improve the performance of a WordPress website is to use a good caching plugin. Speed issues have always been with WordPress. WordPress has launched many free and paid plugins to solve these problems. W3 Total Cache is a free WordPress Caching Plugin through which we can improve the performance of our website.
Also, WP Rocket is a paid WordPress plugin that is considered the best for performance. With more features than any other caching plugin, this plugin is installed on most WordPress websites.
Caching plugins use different methods to improve the performance of your website. They compresses your website's CSS and JavaScript files to reduce their size so that the site loads faster and performs better.
Use Compressed Images
To improve the performance of a WordPress website, it is important that the images you use should be small in size. Everyone wants to use the best resolution images on their website. This will use larger images which will increase the loading time. The larger the size of the images, the more time they will take to load and because of this the speed of the site will also be affected.
WordPress offers a solution for this as well. There are many plugins (both free and paid) that compress and reduce the size of images on your site. A popular plugin for compressing images is Tinypng Plugin . With its help, you can compress images and improve performance of your website.
Use Better Format For Images
The images we use on websites include formats such as JPG, JPEG, PNG, SVG and Webp.
Now which of these formats is the best? The most light weight format is considered Webp. Fortunately, since version 5.8 of WordPress you can also use the Webp format.
So you should use the lightest format i.e. Webp so that your website doesn't get overloaded and loads faster.
Defer Loading Of All Unnecessary JavaScript
Usually, all the plugins we use on our website, we have no idea how they are slowing down the performance of our site.
When we install a plugin, every time the page is loaded, the JavaScript of that plugin is also loaded. 90% of loaded JavaScript is being loaded unnecessarily and affects the performance of our website.
For example, when we use the Contact Form 7 Plugin on our website, its JavaScript is loaded even on pages where we don't have added a form. As a result the performance of the website is down.
The solution is to make sure that Contact Form 7's JavaScript is only loaded on the pages that we have placed the form on and not on all pages. For this we will add the following code to our theme's functions file to prevent unnecessary JavaScript from being loaded.
<?php
/**
* Contact Form 7
*
* Prevent the javascript and styles from loading on every page
* Load them only on the Contact page
*/
/ Removes the Contact Form 7 scripts and styles from all pages /
remove_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'wpcf7_enqueue_scripts' ); // Prevents the scripts from loading on all pages
remove_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'wpcf7_enqueue_styles' ); // Prevents the styles from loading on all pages
/ Adds the Contact Form 7 scripts and styles to the appropriate pages /
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'new_cf7_loader' ); // Loads the scripts and styles on the appropriate page(s)
/ Load the Contact Form 7 scripts and styles on the appropriate pages /
function new_cf7_loader() {
if ( is_page( array( 'contact', 'another page' ) ) ) { // Add all pages here that contain the contact form
wp_enqueue_style( 'contact-form-7', wpcf7_plugin_url( 'styles.css' ), array(), WPCF7_VERSION, 'all' );
wp_enqueue_script( 'cf7.jquery.form.js', wpcf7_plugin_url( 'jquery.form.js' ), array(), WPCF7_VERSION, true );
wp_enqueue_script( 'cf7.scripts.js', wpcf7_plugin_url( 'scripts.js' ), array(), WPCF7_VERSION, true );
}
}
?>This was our article today where we looked at 7 ways we can follow to improve the performance of our WordPress website. One or two of these methods may not have a huge impact on performance, but are still necessary, such as eliminating additional themes. If you keep these methods in mind, you will definitely be able to boost your business by improving your website speed.
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