Page speed is defined as the length of time it takes to display all the content on a specific page or the length of time it takes for a browser to receive a web server’s first byte. At the same time Bounce Rate is defined as the percentage of visitors that leave a webpage without taking an action, such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase.The longer a webpage takes to load, the more its bounce rate will skyrocket .1 in every 4 visitors would abaondon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load. 46% of visitors never visit poorly performing websites.Moreover 64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will shop somewhere else next time. One second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%.
Inshort website speed is very critical and it affects your Google site ranking position as well.
To measure your website speed you can mainly use Google Page Insights , GTMetrix & Google Chrome Browser’s Light House extension which will give you a perfect insights for the improvement areas .
Aside from the fact that you should always keep your plugins and themes up to date, deleting unused ones is the most important step to a speed up the site. Not only unused plugins and themes can create security vulnerabilities they can also make your website slow
To delete the used plugin , First you have to deactivate it , then click on the delete link .To remove a theme simply go to Appearance > Themes to delete the ones no longer in use.
To cleanup the space in your WordPress ‘Uploads’ folder / Media Library you can consider removing unused media . You can consider plugins like Media Cleaner to dispose of unused media .If you would like to do it manually you can simply go to Add Media -> Media Library -> Unattached and then delete those files no longer in use.
If left unattended, your WordPress database will start to accumulate junks of data over time. This unnecessary bloat can slow down your site by adding extra server trips and data base query execution time. Most of the time post revisions can take up a huge chunk of unneeded space. If you have a post which is 100KB of data and there are five revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 500KB. Cleaning up your database can be done manually through phpMyAdmin but it can easily damage the database . If you aren’t a technical person, installing a plugin to accomplish this task is the safer way to go. WP-Sweep and Advanced Database Cleaner are both safe bets to broom through your database and get rid of things like old revisions, spam comments, MySQL queries, and more.
If you’ve been using page test tools to test the website performance, you can see this recommendation most of time which can be difficult to understand for a non-technical person .
Technically, “rendering” by a browser means to parse HTML code and display it on the screen. But most of the time we can eliminate the Css / Js files which is not crucial to load until it finish the page rendering process.The most common render-blocking resources are JavaScript and CSS files that are located in the head of your web page.If you have enough coding knowledge you can do it by calling the CSS / JS using methods like Async /Defer method for every critical files using functions file in WordPress when we call the enque function and clean up rest of the code manually else there are a few plugins out there which can help you in deferring this JavaScript, including WP Critical CSS.
The term “minify” is programming lingo that describes the processes of removing unnecessary characters in the source code. These characters include whitespaces, line breaks, comments, and block delimiters which are useful for us humans but unnecessary for machines. We minify the files of a website containing CSS, HTML, and Javascript code so your web browser can read them faster.After you complete the minify process if you combile the css and js through a single individual files then it will drastically reduce the server trip and enhance your page loading time . There are a number of plugins built to minify code. Autoptimize is one of the top rated free plugins for this task..
Images are crucial to keep a site visitor engaged. But most of the time we will be having enough room to reduce the file size using different compression methods without loosing it’s quality. Having small file size for the images will make a huge impact on the overall page size and it will definitely increase the overall performance by reducing the rendering delay .Also use Lazy loading technique to load your images .
It is a fact that not all WordPress themes are created equal . Some are written better than others. An eye catching UI design is so meaningless if it is taking forever to load. Instead of choosing a feature-rich / multi purpose theme (which involve a lot of code that is not needed for your actual website to function properly), take a minimal approach by using a theme that contains the bare bones of what is necessary to function well. You can contact us if you are interested to have a tailor made / minimal theme according to your design specification
WordPress caching plugins like W3 Total Cache , WordPress Fastest Cache etc have been there for a long time, making the complex tasks of adding caching rules to your website elements easier. Combining such plug-ins with advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish could help you better the loading speed of your website and ultimately speed up WordPress considerably.Also don’t forget to enable browser cache during this process (Browser cache or temporary Internet files are a way that browsers download website images, data, and documents for faster viewing in the future. )
WordPress caching plugins like W3 Total Cache , WordPress Fastest Cache etc have been there for a long time, making the complex tasks of adding caching rules to your website elements easier. Combining such plug-ins with advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish could help you better the loading speed of your website and ultimately speed up WordPress considerably.Also don’t forget to enable browser cache during this process (Browser cache or temporary Internet files are a way that browsers download website images, data, and documents for faster viewing in the future. )
Pingbacks and trackbacks are two core WordPress components that keep you alert whenever your blog or page receives a link. You can easily replace this functionally by using tools such as Google Webmaster Tools and other services to check the links of your website.
Keeping pingbacks and trackbacks on can also add an undesirable amount of strain on your server resources. This is because whenever anyone tries to link up to your site, it generates requests from WordPress backend and forth. This functionality is also widely abused when targeting a website with DDoS attacks.
You can turn it all off in WP-Admin → Settings → Discussion. Just deselect “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks).” This will help you speed up WordPress some more.
Post revisions is a WordPress feature that allows you to undo changes and go back to an earlier version of your posts and pages. For each draft you are working on, WordPress automatically saves a temporary revision . But most of the time it will play a big role to increase your database size and increase the page loading time .
To speed up your site, you can define the limit of number of revisions per post.
To do so, open the wp-config.php file and add this line of code to limit the number of post revisions:
define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3 );
You can see that the number, in this case, denotes threer, which means there will be three revisions created per post. You can change this number or even switch revisions off by setting the value to 0 or false.
Our speed optimization experts have years of knowledge in this field , We are catering so many clients every day to improve their site speed , So you can expect some secret recipes from our experts which we grabbed from our years of experience & learning curve with WordPress coding – development experience which can dramatically improve your website performance . So please feel free to contact today to get a quote to improve your WordPress site speed .