Helpful tips to make your WordPress website faster

In today’s smaller, interconnected world the internet is a near instantons means by which people and idea connect. This world is fast paced and there is less and less patience for websites that are clunky and take too long to load.

No matter how interesting or beautiful your website it, it won’t achieve its goals if people are leaving the site because it took too long to load. This is one of the biggest killers of sites’ search engine optimisation (SEO) outcomes as search engines recognize this and rank your website lower for it.

Therefore it’s not only favourable but essential to have a well performing website that makes it fast and easy for users to reach what they’re looking for. Let’s take a look at some of the best tips for making your WordPress website faster.

Get rid of the unnecessary add-ons and plugins

A content management system (CMS) like WordPress is great for all of the additional tools and plugins it offers, but using too many of them will slow your site to a snail’s pace. In some cases the plugins you use can account for up to 80-90% of your site’s load time.

It is not necessarily about the amount of plugins that you use but more about how well they perform individually. A website with 20 good plugins can perform better than a site with 5 clunky ones.

While many plugins will be necessary for the goals you wish to achieve, options that use large amounts of script or make many remote requests will have a negative effect on your site speed. Don’t use a plugin unless you’re sure it’s necessary.

Cut down on the social share buttons

Contrary to popular belief, spamming your website readers with prompts to share something through social media isn’t a big boost to overall traffic. Having a social share button for a dozen different social networks may sound harmless but they actually cause a lot of lag on your website as they often will be using JavaScript.

Avoid using large image or video files

Hosting high pixel density photos or long HD video on your WordPress site is a great way to reduce its speed to a crawl. You should always make sure the you use images and videos in a meaningful way and that they are optimised to be the smallest possible size without jeopardising quality.