The page speed of a site has become an important ranking factor. And, Google, the granddaddy of all the search engines of today takes it very seriously when deciding to rank a website. You might have heard about various ways of speeding up your WordPress site by now. Indeed, many of these techniques do give good results. However, you may not be familiar with at least some of the methods mentioned below to improving the speed of your site. And, you could REALLY speed up your site within 10 minutes if you use any of the plugins mentioned below. In this blog article, we are going to discuss 25 ways to speed up your WordPress website in 2021. So, without further ado, let us dive into the topic.
Why Faster Page Speed Is Important For Your Website Ranking?
The answer to the above question is quite straightforward. Faster page speed is important for your website because, Google, the major search engine of the day, started using page speed as an important ranking factor both for desktop and mobile searches several years ago.
Of course, page speed is not THE only ranking factor. There are others too, such as page relevance. So, you know website ranking is a package deal. You have to fix every issue with your website to get higher rankings for your site.
27 Ways To Speed Up Your WordPress Website In 2021?
For the time being, we can recommend you to take the following steps to improve the speed of your website. We plan to expand these sub-topics with great detail at a later stage.
- Use ultra-lightweight and clean themes. We have been using themes from StudioPress for the last several years.
- Use a high-quality WordPress hosting provider which offers great customer support. After failing to get good results from big-name hosting providers, now we have started using Siteground as our web hosting choice.
- Use as few plugins as possible
- Remove all the unused plugins from the site
- Reduce external scripts and HTTP requests
- Use the latest PHP version on your server. Siteground does this all for us without requesting them.
- Go for Cloudflare as your primary DNS provider.
- Optimize the WordPress database
- Reduce calls to the WordPress database
- Keep your WordPress core updated at all times
- Update all the plugins
- Use a limited number of posts on the homepage & use excerpts instead of showing posts content in full
- Install a caching plugin to manage the caching. The plugin should be able to handle both browser caching and server caching to give the most optimum results for the site. There are quite a few great caching plugins available in the market.
- Minify your theme code. In other words, use a high-quality theme only.
- Split comments into pages
- Divide long-form content into various pages
- Host videos onto other platforms
- Combine Javascript and CSS files
- Eliminate render-blocking resources
- Use lazy load feature for both images and videos
- Optimize Google fonts
- Use AMP pages
- Enable preloading
- Use a content delivery network (CDN)
- Optimize your images
- Enable Gzip compression
- Decrease server response time
How To Perform The Processes To Speed Up Your Website?
Not everyone is a developer and expert in web technologies. So, for us, the mortals who do not have much technical knowledge, plugins come to our rescue to help us speed up our WordPress sites. There are plenty of plugins available in the WordPress repository to perform all the above-mentioned tasks. Some of these plugins only perform one specific function optimizing images or do caching while others act as all-in-one plugins like SG Optimizer from Siteground which performs most of the functions cited above.
Every tool or plugin may take a different approach to process all the tasks mentioned above. However, their objective is the same-to speed up your website to get better rankings on search engines like Google.
Tools Available To Determine The Page Speed Of A Site
The following are some of the main tools available to check the page speed of any site.
What Is Our Take On The Techniques of Optimizing Your Web Page Speed?
We sincerely believe that all the afore-mentioned steps play an important in increasing the page speed of your site.
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