How to make your website load faster
In this post, you’re going to learn how to make your website load faster.
Every time you catch a cold, your overall health becomes more vulnerable to viruses and bacteria, and your movements become slower and slower.
Your face becomes pale and your friends try to avoid visiting you.
You are probably asking what this has to do with website speed if someone lands on your blog.
Reed the above symptoms again and apply them on your website. This is what will happen if it gets sick. Who said websites don’t catch colds?
If your website’s health is down, it becomes more vulnerable to attacks, its speed will become slower, its loading time becomes horrible, and your visitors will avoid visiting it and bounce back whenever they face such issues
This introduction is all about telling you that page speed is one of the most important factors that keep your website alive and prevent its ranking from dropping.
This is because page speed is related to UX (user experience), which is undoubtedly a ranking factor for search engines, especially Google search engines.
So, it is crucial to find these issues and fix them as soon as possible
How to do this? Let’s dive in to discover what makes your website load faster.
Check -up your site speed first
The first step is to know if your website speed needs improvement, and believe me, it does.
To do this, simply use tools to do this task automatically.
My top recommendations include Google page speed insights and the IsitWP website speed test tool. Both are free and reliable.
Look at the page speed of my website after applying the techniques below.
Compress your images to make your website load faster
Everybody knows that images take up more space than text. This is why images are the first place to dig in and check if they are the main source of speed loss on your website
The second fact is that the more images you use, the more resources you need and the less speed you get.
This is not to say that we should not focus on using images in our posts because images and other visuals play an important role in user’s experience in clarifying your ideas and displaying more information for users like infographics and other illustration materials
All we need to do is to optimize these images and make them smaller without affecting their quality
Doing this is easy.
There are many ways to do this, either manually or automatically.
To do it manually, you can use free online tools to compress your images and make them upload faster.
You can manually compress the size of your images while preserving their quality by using TinyPNG.
This tool allows you to reduce image size by up to 80% more or less without noticing a tiny blur.
To do this automatically, all we need to do is install the wp-optimize plug-in on your WordPress site to compress the old images and set it up to automatically compress the new ones.
Change image formats
Another modification to make is to change the format of your images to Webp format. This format is, by default, 27% smaller in size than PNG.
It surely makes sense.
There are many online free tools to do this mission, but most of them are limited to a number of images or a limited amount of conversion time.
Don’t worry, you will find many tools to use for free, and one of the easiest is convertio.
Just upload your files, choose the format (webp), convert them, and download them onto your computer.
You can also use WP-Optimize to automatically convert them.
Choose a reliable hosting
There are many types of web hosting.
They differ in specifications and, as a result, in page speed.
Let’s have a look.
All small businesses buy shared hosting plans for their cheap prices. And as the name suggests, a shared plan is a plan where you and others share the same server and resources.
The servers also have a great impact on your website’s performance. That’s why choosing a reliable company will heavily affect your website’s speed.
Here’s all you need to know about web hosting.
Many comments on my blog ask about my pages’ speed, and one of the answers is that, when compared to other companies, Hostinger provides excellent performance for its customers.
Use lazy loading
By “lazy loading,” we mean delaying the load of the image until it is needed to be displayed.
For instance, if your visitor is reading a post and scrolling down, the images that are to come to his sight do not load until he is very close to them.
This act of delay saves system resources and improves performance.
Install the “JetPack” plugin, go to settings, and enable lazy loading.
Cache your blog
Anytime a visitor clicks on a link on your website, your site sends a request to the hosting server to send the wanted data. This data needs to travel from the server’s location to yours, then to the visitors’.
Caching is a way of saving versions of your data in a physically closer place to the visitor, enabling him to reach them without waiting for them to travel back from your server.
This reduces the time needed and thus makes your website load faster.
Wp-Optimize allows you to manually purge the cache. You can also set it up to do the job automatically.
Minify JS and CSS files
When doing a speed check-up on our websites, minifying JavaScript and CSS files is always recommended.
These are the unwanted codes that need to be deleted in order to reduce the size of the files without affecting their execution in the browser.
Don’t worry, these codes refer to white spaces between the codes that, when compressed, have a significant impact on your site’s speed.
It is somehow frustrating to read those issues in red, but most of them are easily solved.
To make your website load faster, you need to minify these codes by installing the “WP Super Minifying” plugin.
You just need to activate it, then go to settings and minify your CSS and JavaScript files.
Use a Content Delivery Network- CDN
Suppose that you live in Australia, your traffic comes mostly from the Middle East, and your hosting server is located in California, the US. Do you imagine the distance your data travels between these directions back and forth?
Doesn’t that affect the delivery time? and users’ experience? Yes, for sure.
Here comes the need for CDNs.
In a nutshell, CDNs are servers placed all over the world to help reduce data delivery time due to the huge distance between hosting servers, website owners, and their viewers.
They store files (cache) to deliver them to the nearest location when demanded.
These CDNs are not hosting firms, nor are they alternatives; rather, they are “rented” to assist these organizations in providing the greatest quality in terms of time savings as well as lowering the cost of data transport around the world.
Using CDNs is another step to making your website load faster.
Many hosting companies do not support CDN, but if you want to create a blog, consider choosing a hosting company that does.
Hostinger supports the Cloudflare CDN in all its packages. You can have a free domain, free SSL, free business email, and Cloudflare for less than three dollars.
Clean your website, speed it up
A lot of information is kept in your database, including revisions, spam, deleted comments, and inactive plugins.
By removing this superfluous information, you can drastically reduce the size of your database, speed up page loading, and improve its functionality.
All you need to do is to install a plugin that makes this simple to accomplish. The most well-known and efficient plugin for cleaning up a WordPress database is, by far, WP-Sweep.
It is very simple to use. Once activated, select Tools > Sweep to start the plugin’s database analysis.
Clean up your media library
One of the biggest mistakes website owners make is not checking their media library periodically.
It is very easy to make your library full of duplicate, unused, and unwanted images.
If you open a new browser now and check your library, you’ll be amazed at the total number of images it contains.
Deleting these unwanted images is like surgery that may rescue your website because of their impact on your site’s speed.
Removing such garbage can be done in two ways.
Either manually by going to Media > Library, then choosing the images you want to delete and clicking to permanently delete them.
Another way is to use a plugin.
Do you remember when I recommended WP-Optimize?
Besides the many features it offers, this plugin allows you to delete images both manually and automatically.
You can configure the plugin to automatically remove ‘orphaned’ photos or images set to specific sizes. You can also create an optimization schedule that suits your website.
How to make your website load faster? Final thought
Page speed is a ranking factor, Google doesn’t joke about this.
in order to make your website load faster, there are many tasks to do.
Knowing what slows down your site is the beginning, and the cure comes later.
Images occupy the lion’s share in terms of space when compared to text (we are not talking about videos since we can embed them and make them use outer resources).
That’s why we need to focus on optimizing them by compressing them, changing their formats, and using lazy loads.
Choosing a fast and reliable host is also the main factor when dealing with speed issues.
Additionally, you should cache your blog, minify your CSS and JavaScript scripts, use a CDN, and delete any unneeded files.
To keep duplicate and unnecessary photos from piling up and wreaking havoc on your website, always keep your media library clean.
What of the above practices were you aware of? And which one are you going to start with in order to make your website load faster?
Let me know in the comments below.
Until next time.
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