Why speed is important?
One second increase in page load than usual time will decrease the number of users to visit the site. To let users stay at your website, it should load within 2 seconds as per Google Recommendation.
Speed is considered as an essential factor in SEO of any website. Speed helps the website to rank higher in page search results. “More speed=Higher ranking” and “Higher ranking=More business sales”.
Now you have known why speed is important. So let’s focus on boosting up the site.
Choose better web hosting
Site’s performance depends upon your hosting of the website.You might wanna opt shared hosting for your site at the first glance as it provides unlimited bandwidth,domains,emails,etc.But as the name says “shared” the server,bandwidth,etc are shared among the other websites with same plan.What if your neighbouring site is getting more traffic? At that time server responds more to the neighbouring site than yours which in turn affect your site performance.
To overcome this you can choose Dedicated Hosting Service or Managed WordPress Hosting Service.
Use CDN
Site speed varies as per user’s location.(for e.g. A website server is located in London, so a London user will get faster loading of the site than the other users in different location.)
CDN(Content Delivery Network) helps you to reduce page load.It stores copy of your website at different location to serve webpage faster to nearby visitors.
Some of the CDN’s are MaxCDN and Cloudflare.
Optimize Images
Users prefer to read content that has images in it.But images contain more size as compared to text.Higher size images when loading reduces speed of a webpage, so it needs to get compressed.
WordPress has several plugins that compresses bulk images such as:
Manage plugins
Get rid of plugins that are not in use as it puts load on server resources and increases size of backup file of your site.
Some of the problems can be solved by writing code in backend, so remove plugins that are related to it.
Enable Caching
Caching improves your site performance by keeping a copy into user’s browser and reducing download times of your files.
W3 Total Cache helps to increase the site performance.
Optimize Database
There can be lots of redundant data, unused tables, unnecessary post revisions, etc. in your site which increases the size of database.This affects on the fetching of data from the database.
WP- Optimize helps the site database to be fast and efficient.
Update your WordPress site
WordPress keeps on updating.The current version of wordpress is 4.7.2.
Update your wordpress,themes and plugins regularly as it not only provides new features but it gives more security and fixes the bugs.This in turn prevents your site to be less hacked.(Note: If you want to customize code from the backend then create a child theme of the main theme and then copy the files into the child theme you want to customize.)