WordPress websites are on the rise since the number of people opting for a dynamic website over a static on the rise. WordPress happens to be a very popular content management system (CMS) for a small corporate website and other small to medium websites.

The nice thing about WordPress is that it is capable of man different things hence there are many different functional options at hand.  For any website to be successful it is necessary that it be easily accessible.

This is the mobile age and hence the visitors are not very forgiving if the website takes a long time to load. Thus the so called loading speed of the website is very important. That said, it often happens that your WordPress website is talking a long time to load due to one reason or the other. You will be happy to learn that there are ways to fix that.

The fact of the matter:

As per a recent study conducted it was found that approximately 47% of the visitors expect that a page loads in under 2 seconds. That same study found that about 57% of the visitors will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Amazon also found that an increase in 100 milli second of page loading speed was the equivalent of a 1% increase in revenue. Google too has made it quite clear that it’s search algorithm takes the loading time of websites into consideration. There are several quick solutions to this issue as mentioned below however this article will explain the same in more detail.

• Find the plug-in that is slowing down the website

• Compressing web pages, images, JavaScript and CSS files.

• A clean database is an efficient database.

Getting it right:

 

• It is important to drill down to the heart of the problem and not going about making guesses. For example it f the problem is a slow performing hosting company then change the hosting company. At times it can be a bad theme or plug-ins. In such cases there is no point spending time making quick fixes. The problems at hand need to be dealt with.

• As far as the hosting of your website is concerned, it is one of the most important factors of your website. There are many cheap hosting options and even free hosting servers around. But you need to check how they are performing first. The first thing to do is to assess what kind of a server you require. For example a small website with a handful of pages and little functionality does not require a very high performance server. But if it is an ecommerce website with a lot of products and high traffic you better pick a fairly good server if you want to make some customers.

The theme can slow you down:

 

• WordPress is one open source software for which there are a very high amount  of free themes and then there are the ones that come at a cost. Either way not all theme are the same. It is possible that some are lightening fast while other take a very long time to load. One quick way to check the performance of your theme is to use one of the several tool available to check the performance of the theme prior to opting for it. A good theme can easily mean an increase of loading speed of the website.

The slow plug-ins:

 

• It may sound strange but WordPress has a plug-in by the name P3 to a check the performance of the other plug-ins installed on the system. This P3 plug-in is capable of measuring the impact of the Plug-ins on your load time. It is often found that social sharing plug-ins are the culprit. However, once you do know which plug-ins are casing the slow down, you can either find an alternative or do away with it all together.

Using compression techniques:

 

• The basic principles of a compressed file are the same everywhere. For example a .zip file much easier to transfer , load and even send to someone. The same applies for a website. It is possible to compress your website by installing Gzip, this will speed up the loading time. The way this works is that when to user visits your website the browser automatically unzip the files and show their contents. This does work out as a good solution for a fair number of websites. It is possible to make the necessary settings from the .htaccess file.

• Besides compressing there is another similar technique which is called minifying. In some cases it may be worth a shot to put all stylesheets and JavaScript files into one file. WordPress even has a plug-in for that and it is capable of combining all of your style sheets and JavaScirpt files in one.

Making the most of the Browser caching:

 

• Browser caching is common knowledge. Hence there are a handful of plug-ins available in WordPress that can implement the caching correctly. Mind you, if you get the settings wrong for the plug-in you could end up doing more harm than good.  A example of a good caching plug-in is WP Super Cache.

Setting the other elements correctly:

 

• When it comes to images it is a good idea to mention the size of the image straight out. This helps prevent the browser from having to figure it out thus saving precious seconds. Another good practice to follow with CSS and JavaScript is that make sure the CSS is at the top and loads first while the JavaScript code can be in the bottom (footer) since it is usually not required early. There are exception to this  and hence  sometimes the JavaScirpt code is required at the very beginning. It is also a good idea to enable ‘Keep Alive’ on the server so that the client’s machine is allowed to download multiple files without having to repeatedly request permission. The way this is done is by adding the following code to the .htaccess file.

• Header set Connection keep-alive

Conclusion:

The speed issue of a website is often overlooked by many development firms especially in WordPress. WordPress is a very easy tool to understand and implement. But at the same time if it is not setup correctly, or if you end up making the wrong choices for the plug-ins and other features our website will crawl at snail pace. The fact of the matter is that there are many slow WordPress websites around on the internet. The reason for this is either a careless developer who has simply ignored the how his work is going to affect the speed. But at times it is also the fault of the website owners themselves who go about building websites with their limited knowledge and end up making a botch of things.

Alakmalak is also a wordpress development company and it  has a great deal of experience in this field. Having witnessed the evolution of WordPress into a very good open source software they are aware of the capabilities of the tool and its limits as well. It is for this very reason they have successfully completed more than 2000 websites for clients from all around the world and continue to do so. You can be sure that if you pick them for the development of your website you won’t have many things to worry about.

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