5 tips for a faster WordPress website

Guest blog by Remco Nieuwenhuizen from WP Supporters

WordPress speed is one hot item. It can make or break your website.

Google values faster websites more than slow websites. And with a view to the future, website speed is becoming increasingly important. A slow website often has an increased bounce rate. This will result in fewer visitors to your website and loss of income.

You will regularly ask yourself what is the reason for the slow speed of your website. But there are many things that can affect the speed of your website. In this post, therefore, 5 tips to speed up your WordPress website.

But before we will start this one, we will start at the beginning. How do you measure your website speed?

If you are new to the world of speed optimization then you probably don't know how to do this yet.

You measure your website speed by undergoing speed tests. This can be done free of charge with the following tools:

• Google page speed insights - the speed tools of Google but often difficult if you do not have much experience yet
• GTmetrix - A user-friendly tool that gives you many tips to improve your speed
• Pingdom - Similar to GTmetrix

You can see the best way to interpret the speed tests in the following video:

1: Hosting

First of all, we discuss hosting. You have probably studied this topic several times. Because it is an important part of your website speed.

Your hosting determines how quickly your website responds to a request. In addition, the location of the hosting and the package of the hosting company also influence your speed.

For example, a dedicated server will be much faster than shared hosting. But this also has to do with budget.

If you want to optimize your website for speed, we recommend comparing a number of providers and also conducting a test. This way you can be sure that it is certainly not the hosting.

2. Choose a lightweight theme

A common mistake made by website developers is choosing themes with a hundred thousand options. While they often only use 5.

A fast WordPress theme is for example Generatepress or Astra. Both are very light and contain only the necessary functions.

If you use page builders such as Elementor or Beaver Builder, these themes work well with them too.

3. Plugins

Another way to slow down your website quickly is to use many plugins that add little or nothing to your website.

We always recommend to be very critical when it comes to plugins and really only install the ones you can't live without.
Also test the speed before installing a plugin, and after. This way you know how it affects your website speed.

It can also happen that plugins conflict with each other where the speed suffers.

To find out, you will have to test, test, test.

4. Pictures

You want to make your website as lightweight as possible. And with images you can make a website a lot heavier very quickly.

That is why it is important to optimize them before uploading them to your website.

An easy way to do this is as follows:

1.  Determine the size you need on your website. A normal screen is 1920 x 1080 pixels, so if you want a full-screen photo, this is the format, if you want a smaller photo, adjust the dimensions. Then in Photoshop we adjust the quality of the image by eye.
2. In many photo editing programs you can determine the quality of the photo while saving. If it is set to 100%, the image will be large, but often when you sit down 70 and 80 percent, you will hardly see this difference with the eye. While the size of the image is drastically reduced.
3. Compress the image with, for example, the free tool from tinypng. Download the plugin or visit their website and load their tool to do the job. You will not notice anything in terms of quality, but the image will be reduced again.

Now your image is ready to use on the website. Normally 1 image should not be larger than 500kb. (exceptions)

5. Use caching plug-in

A final tip to speed up your website is to use a caching plugin.

WProcket is for example a good and user-friendly plugin that gives you many options to speed up your website.

Besides the cache you can also compress and reduce your html, css and javascript. In many cases you also get a faster loading time.

Conclusion

If your website speed is important, you have to make good choices from the start.

With the above tips you have a good basis to load a website within 2 seconds.

And 2 seconds is a good measure to use. If you come above you have a greater chance that Google will let others go first.

Guest blog by Remco Nieuwenhuizen from WP Supporters