Ways to Optimise a WordPress Site
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Page speed is the time required to load a web page, however it is often confused with site speed. Page speed plays an important part in enabling search engine optimisation in most efficient ways. With a greater page speed, you allow search engines to crawl into most of your website’s webpages which makes it easier for it to rank your website. In other words, it can also be said that page speed is the quantification of how fast items of a webpage load. Tools such as GTMetrix, Pingdom and Google Page Insights can help you easily analyse your page speed in real time.
There are multiple ways to enable greater page speed, here’s how you can optimise yours.
Do Java script, CSS and HTML Compression
To optimise page speed in the best ways, you must make sure that your Java, CSS and HTML files are not more than 150 bytes, that’s the best practice. To enable compression, you may use multiple software applications readily available in the market.
Gzip and Brotli are among the prominent tools used today, to compress WordPress sites. Enabling Gzip and Brotli compression can help you reduce the size of your webpage, which can evidently reduce the duration of time it takes to download the resource, reduce data usage for the client, and optimise the time to first render of your pages. However, webmasters often ask which one is better for compression. Compression tests have revealed that Brotli compressed; Java script files 14% smaller, HTML files 21% smaller and CSS files 17% smaller than Gzip.
Minify Java script, CSS and HTML
It is essential for you to remove all unnecessary code to boost your page speed. By removing code, it is referred to optimise it by removing comas and other irrelevant characters. Do not forget to format unused codes if any!
Manually removing unwanted Java script, CSS and HTML code characters can be tough. To make the task easy you can use some efficient plug-ins such as WP Rocket which is fit for minifying Java script, CSS and HTML codes. Rest include:
Closure Compiler and JSCompress can be productively used to minify Java script.
CSS minifier and csscompressor.net can be used to proficiently used to minify CSS codes.
minifycode.com and html-minifier.com can be used to successfully minify HTML codes.
Diminish Redirects
Visitors of a webpage must wait for longer in cases of redirects. This is because it takes excessive time for a HTTP request-response cycle to complete. Redirects such as 301, 302 and 404 can severely hurt your SEO practices. A 301 redirect suggests that your site has been moved to a new address whereas 302, informs the search engine that your site has temporarily been moved. 404 similarly, can cause a lot of traffic disruption as it gives out a message that your site has been removed or page not found. Hence, it is vital for you to ease out request response cycles by removing redirects.
Enhance Server Response Time
Server response time of your website is highly affected by the amount of traffic it receives. To make sure that your server response is speedy you need to have an adequate hosting solution for your website. You have multiple hosting solutions available such as a shared hosting or VPS hosting. Server response time clearly depends on storage bandwidth and routing, to make things run smooth you need to look for relevant loopholes and eliminate them. To assist you with your server hosting, service providers such as A2 Hosting ,SiteGround , Digital Ocean, and BlueHost are among the best available options.
Adjust Browser Caching
Browsers tend to cache a lot of website data such as images and code files to reduce loading time for the users when they choose to revisit a website. You have options to set cache removal deadlines in your website and by optimising them you can certainly improve page speed. Google suggests that it is ideal for a website to have cache removal deadlines up to a year if it does not frequently change. Manually leveraging browser caching can leave you muddled. Plugins such as WP Rocket, Swift Performance, Litespeed Cache and WP Fastest Cache can be readily used to enable browser caching especially for WordPress sites.
Optimise Images
To optimise images, you require CSS sprites. These enable you to make sure all icons and relevant smaller images load at once as a larger image. This dramatically reduces page speed as this consequently results in less HTTP requests.
While optimising images for your webpages, you need to learn what format fits the type. For graphics and icons always choose PNG formats while for images go for JPEGs. Later to optimise these for greater page speed you need to convert them to WebP formats. To do this in real time, plugins such as WebP Express, Smush Pro and Imagify are easily available online.
Go for Content Distribution Networks
Content Distribution Networks are geographically distributed servers embedded as a group to enable fast delivery of website contents. By using it, chunks of your website get stored at multiple places which makes more reliable and faster accessibility possible. Sucuri, KeyCDN and Rackspace are among few quality CDN providers that make your SEO practices easy.
Slow webpages often increase bounce rate as these annoy users at most. Furthermore, a good page speed plays a vital role in making search engine optimisation possible. Optimise page speed to keep up in the race. Need to learn more about optimising your website’s page speed? Contact our team today by commenting below!