6 Methods That Will Improve Loading Speeds on Your WordPress Blog

WordPress is one of the most convenient platforms to start your blog. You can choose between different unique themes, easily update and manage your site, and include all visual aids that you want. That being said, the trouble with this platform is that it can often be very slow. Slow loading speed is the number one thing you should avoid when creating a website. In the day and age of fast technology, users don’t forgive sluggish sites that make them wait forever. To avoid increasing your bounce rate, you should take a look at these 6 methods.

1. Find good caching plugins

When something is cached, it means it is stored in the data of the browsers which have loaded your website before. In other words, after the first time a user enters your website, some things will remain cached for them. This allows for the website to load faster the next time they visit.

Thankfully, WordPress has a lot of plugins that deal with this issue. Any of them can work to improve your loading speed, so don’t be afraid to experiment and test them out. Before you decide on a definite plugin, run tests to see which one fits your blog the best.

2. Analyze the speed objectively

Analyzing website speed is crucial for figuring out what you need to do to improve it. Of course, it’s very easy to say that the website is fast enough when you’re using a high-speed connection and when the images have already loaded in the cache on your device because the website has been visited before.

You’ll need to put yourself in your user’s shoes. Take someone else’s computer or mobile phone to accurately test the loading speed. If it takes more than three seconds to load, it needs improving. 

3. Optimize your images

Images are necessary for every WordPress blog, as they make the site come to life. People are much more interested in reading content that’s accompanied by adequate and interesting images. Since they’re more complex content, images will take longer to load. This means that you’ll need to work on optimizing them to speed up your website.

The safest way to optimize them will be through your analysis report. If it recommends optimizing images, you can go ahead and trust it. The process is pretty much automatic, and you’ll have more loading speed with just one click.

4. Remove unnecessary plugins

Part of what makes WordPress great is that it offers a lot of plugins to its users. This means that you have the freedom to decorate and play with your website in any way you want. A lot of unique functions and looks are available, inviting the user to create something truly wonderful. Still, the average user will not use all these plugins no matter how creative they are.

Simply remove all the plugins that you don’t use so that you’ll gain more speed on your website. Since you don’t use them, they’re only hogging space and slowing down your site. 

5. Avoid storing drafts

Bloggers write a lot of articles and blogs, which is only normal and expected. That being said, you’ll store a lot of drafts as you update your articles and text posts. You may not notice it, but WordPress is notorious for storing old goods just in case you need them again. This is only slowing down your website as it overloads the browser. Every time you enter the site, the current content will have to be loaded with all the previous drafts that you’ve saved. This is simply unnecessary.

To fix the issue, you can contact a professional WordPress development agency , they’ll explain in detail why the issue occurs and help you fix the issue. What most agencies recommend is to install the Revision Control plugin which will manage the revisions and drafts for you. Don’t worry if you don’t know anything about that, as the agency will take care of it in a jiffy.

6. Optimize the homepage

The homepage will naturally be the first page of your website. It’s very important to keep it light and fast because people will form their impressions of your blog according to the first page, regardless of your theme. If it is packed with information and displays a lot of content, you can bet it’s going to take ages to load. Rarely anyone will find it worth it to stick around.

Your homepage can include teasers and shortcuts to popular and recent posts, instead of displaying the entire text, for example. As well as that, you can divide it into categories which will lead the reader to other pages of the website and invite them to explore the website further. Not only will your site be faster this way, but you’ll also be increasing your SEO rank. The more time people spend on your website, the higher quality it is deemed to be.

Conclusion

Even though things may seem complicated now, they’re actually fairly easy once you get the hang of it. Running a website on WordPress is a challenge in itself, so of course, you’ll have trouble making changes. Improving the loading speed is key to having more customers and decreasing your bounce rate, though. WordPress may be an amazing platform, but you’ll need to work quite hard to better the user experience and truly make it great.