Tips to Optimize the Speed of Your WordPress Blog
The speed of a website, especially its loading time, is an important factor that determines user experience. People tend to ignore or leave websites that take too long to load and display. So, if you too wish to ensure that your website works optimally and does not take long to load, choose a WordPress hosting service that offers adequate support and resources.
Choosing the Right WordPress Hosting Plan is the Key
A slow website tends to dissuade visitors, thereby negatively affecting its bounce rate, which refers to the number of visitors leaving the site early. Slow uploading of a site can also have a negative impact on its search rankings. Website owners can reduce the bounce rates and avoid poor search rankings by identifying the reasons for its slow speed and taking steps to optimize the working of their website.
Some common reasons resulting in the poor speed of a website are:
- A poorly built website: If a website has not been designed properly, it may not perform optimally. This can easily be rectified by choosing a quality WordPress hosting plan which ensures that the resources allocated for your website are adequate.
- The server on which your website is hosted is slow: Frequent downtimes on a server can affect the speed of a website. Again, this can be rectified by choosing a hosting plan which guarantees a certain amount of resources to host your website. You can also opt for managed hosting plans where the management of the running of your website lies with the hosting provider.
- High traffic: Higher than expected traffic can put greater pressure on the available resources and thus slow down the working of a website or its certain features. Again, the problem can be resolved by either opting for hosting plans that come with a scalability option or shifting to a plan with higher bandwidth and storage.
- Your website shares a server with another website: In cases when one server is shared by several websites, extra load on one website can affect the performance of others too. Again, the solution lies in choosing a hosting plan that ensures adequate resources and support for your website at all times.
- DoS attack: Malicious users can also hijack your website’s backend performance through a Denial of Service of DoS attack. Again, this can be dealt with by buying a hosting package which includes adequate security measures to prevent your website from any kind of malicious attacks or malware.
Other Ways to Optimize the Performance of Your WordPress site
While choosing domain hosting services that come with adequate support and features to manage the working of your website is essential, you also need to take certain additional steps. These include:
- Updating the Software and Plugins: Ensure that you are always using the latest version of the WordPress software and the chosen plugins and themes are also updated from time to time. New updates ensure greater security and speed of your website.
- Use a Cache-in Plugin: This ensures that your website’s files do not need to be downloaded from the server every time a person visits your website. The use of Caching plugins leads to a significant reduction in the resources required to run your website thereby boosting its speed. To avoid the display of outdated pages, keep on updating g your caching settings too.
In addition to these steps, your WordPress hosting provider can suggest ways and plugins to reduce the space required to store and run your website.
