When time is money, a slow-loading website won’t do much good. Even if you allow your users to wait a few seconds longer, you will soon realize your conversion rates are dropping, page rankings plummeting, and all the adverse effects surfacing right away.
Efficiency is known to be the foundation of survival. You may run a small blog with shared hosting and without much maintenance, but a high-traffic WordPress website requires website content optimization for a better user experience. Giving the quickest fix like caching to more extensive options is a guide to help you improve your site’s performance. An excellent user experience enhances your conversions and website traffic. These are the pillars to keep any online business going. Understanding these things isn’t as complex and technical as it might sound at the very beginning. Let us go through these fixes.
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Quality hosting and lightweight theme:
Hosting is of different types. Shared hosting is one of the most commonly used hosting types. In shared hosting, many websites are on the same server. Because of this, you have little control over your server. Virtual hosting and dedicated servers give you control over your server, unlike shared hosting. A heavy traffic website might need more than one server to load all the requests made to the page. A wise decision saves you from much trouble later.
Picking an appropriate responsive theme is like setting your first foot right. Themes play a role in the seamless working and compatibility of a website on various platforms like tablets, mobile phones, and laptops. Make a list of desired features and then search the theme according to need. Use WordPress Feature Filter to search through relevant themes and customize them. Using a theme heavily loaded with images and graphics can bring down your loading speed. Do not forget to test the theme before using it.
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Minify and Cache:
Remove the unnecessary code. Modify all the JavaScripts greater than 4096 bytes. Install lightweight plugins. The code of some page carried forward to another should be checked for and deleted.
Use caching plugins or add a code snippet. Cache all the static data and pages you do not regularly update, like the contact information page. It would help if you also cached the frequently visited pages on the local computer of your visitors. Use either server-side caching or browser-caching accordingly. Object caching, browser caching, Gzip compression, Content Delivery Network Optimization are a few of the many available options. Look for a premium CDN for a website with heavy traffic and page requests.
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Enable Gzip compression:
Gzip compression is the best way to compress a file by almost 70 percent and even up to 95 percent in some files. Helping in faster network transfers, the compression happens on the server. For a web page struggling with only a few seconds, Gzip compression can create a difference and save visitors from abandoning your site. To do the same, enable text compression or add code to .htaccess fileOptimize CSS and HTML codes. W3 tool gives the same benefits as adding code. Connect to the web host for further assistance.
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Use only the necessary plugins:
From allowing features to your site, plugins can also affect your website speed. Few plugins make database calls, and others work on front-end loading assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript files. If the plugins installed are more than required, they load query requests and increase the load time of your page. Deleting the plugins which aren’t updated over time is the second step. Find a replacement for these plugins as they might overload the server, and neither do the function they were installed for.
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Optimizing images:
Images make up almost 60 percent of the web page’s total size. Neglecting this would mean ignoring to optimize a significant chunk of your website. Start by uploading an already resized image. Try to upload the smaller image under 30kb and the larger between 60-100kb. Use tools like Photoshop to reduce dimension. You can also use compression tools to shrink the image. Apply lossless reduction to the images where intricate details matter. Apply lossy reduction to images that are only reference-based. Prevent the formation of duplicates on your WordPress site. WordPress automatically generates copies when it gives you the option to resize your uploaded image. Ensure this does not happen by sizing and editing images before uploading.
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Connect to a reliable CDN:
CDN is the abbreviated form of the Content Delivery Network. It is a group of connected servers that keep the cached copy of your site database and file. CDN serves the cached content from the closest server to the visitor. It reduces a great deal of load from your server.
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Upload heavy media to external platforms:
If your site has heavy data, host these files on external platforms and embed them on your site. An example would be uploading the media files to external media platforms like YouTube and linking them to your website. Note here that offloading is different from CDN. CDN only makes the cached pages to the visitor’s server.
A fast website boosts the search engine rankings, improvises user experience resulting in increased conversion, decreased bounce rate, and hence, a growing business. Happy visitors are the best propagators in your industry. Optimizing your site is like the maintenance of your home. It would be best if you kept cleaning to clear the mess and maintain the beauty alive.
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