Hey,
What’s up guys, in this post I’m gonna give you 6 main reasons why your website could be running slow and what you can do to improve the speed of your websites. So, I’ll be telling you the before and after of each step to give you some idea about how it improves website speed. Let’s discuss those 6 reasons below.
(1) NOT CLEARING CACHE
Number one is caching, yes caching is actually a very important feature that you should not overlook on your website. Websites load almost two times slower just by not having a caching plug-in. So, having a caching plugin on your website will really help speed up your website. Now, if you don’t understand what caching is, essentially it’s creating a replicated version of your website. So, let’s say you have a visitor that comes to your website and keep refreshing the page, the server doesn’t have to keep loading everything all over again. It gives the visitor a cached version of the website putting less strain on the server and not using as many resources. Now, if you’re gonna ask me that you need a caching plug-in and which one should you use? There are various free caching plugins out there. However, I use WP rocket, and the reason why I like this one is, it comes with a lazy load. So, for those of you who don’t know what lazy load is, it actually loads things as needed.
For example, someone comes to your website, refreshes the page and they click on get started, what is the point of loading everything on the bottom of the page? All the way down there’s no reason to even load all that stuff. So, by implementing lazy load on your website you can only load what is necessary, so I do recommend WP rocket. Caching is crucial, it’s very important and this is solid proof that you need to have a caching plug-in on your websites.
(2) OPTIMIZING IMAGES
This is probably the beginner’s biggest mistake where they just go ahead Google Images and they grab it in the image they find and they put it on their website. I am guilty of this too when I first started. Trust me, everyone does this but the problem with that is that those images are massive and you probably don’t even realize what you’re putting on your website because you don’t really see the size. You just see the dimensions of the image and you say, oh I’ll put it on my websites, that could really slow your website down.
Now, there’s one plug-in and one website that can drastically compress the image size. So, there is www.tinyjpg.com you can go ahead and upload images and this website will shrink it down to at least 50%. It does a really good job at compressing the images and as you can see there is virtually no difference, so you can save a lot of space on your website. Also if you have tons of images on your website and you don’t really feel like manually doing one by one, you can install WP smoosh or this will go ahead and smush the images on your websites. I don’t think it’ll be as efficient as if you do it yourself, but it helps. I’m sure, on your website you have several images. Now, if you’re gonna ask me what is a good page size and what size should my images be? I try to go for somewhere around 50 kilobytes per image. If you can get it lower than that, that’s good if it’s higher, yeah that’s okay too. Anything higher than like 200 kilobytes on an image, I would try to optimize it. If you’re gonna ask me about total page size, the average total page size according to the Internet in 2020 is around 3 megabytes and that is a little big but you can always get it down to 1.5 megabytes because a lot of this stuff is just images. If you optimize your images, you can definitely have a faster website.
So, go through each of your images and see the size of them, if any of them are on 1 megabyte get them out of your website right away. Simply by going through your images and compressing them and fixing them you can drastically speed up your website.
(3) DELETE UNNECESSARY PLUGINS
I know you like plugins because they’re free and adds a lot of functionality to your website. The problem with adding too many plugins is that it will slow down your website. It’s very important not to have too many plugins on your website because this will slow it down.
So, go through your website and go ahead and delete any unnecessary plugins and I guarantee you that will speed up your websites.
(4) ADD A CDN
A CDN stands for a content delivery network and it basically reduces the physical distance. A user has to travel through cyberspace all the way to your website by actually connecting to a local server, so a CDN will go ahead and take your website and create cached versions of it and spread them out on local servers. So that users can go ahead and just connect to local servers and they don’t have to go ahead and travel all the way to your server saving some loading time.
So, if your website’s on a global basis, it’s a very big deal, if your website is more of a local website, personally, I don’t think you’re gonna see that much of a significant difference not unless you have a lot of people connecting from your web sites or to your website from very far away.
But, SiteGround does offer free CDN, if you go to your hosting services you can actually get a free cloud fly or CDN and this is free for siteground users. Also, I believe was all offers are free CDN.
So, make sure to add a CDN.
(5) RECOMMENDED PHP SETTINGS
For cPanel users, it’s going to be down there by PHP version manager you would click on that, click on your website and then you can go ahead and adjust it there. Now you see there are several versions. I don’t think 5.6 is even supported anymore at the time I think 7.3 or 7.2 is currently what most companies are using as a standard. There is 7.4 but that will have some compatibility issues with some plugins also for you saw Softaculous users. If you go ahead and scroll down to the C there it is software then select PHP version and companies like siteground, I think they use 7.2 as their base it goes all the way to 7.4. But, if you’re using something like 7.0 or 7.1 I would go with the current 7.2 / 7.3. You can always go ahead and upgrade the PHP and then go back to your websites, if you see any problems then yeah you should go ahead and change it back but don’t take my advice, just backup your website just in case. But, by updating your PHP you can improve the performance of your website but just note that I would not recommend going to the highest PHP because if you’re using 10 plugins the odds of at least 2 or 3 of those plugins not being compatible with the newest version of PHP, you might get some weird errors of WordPress. If you’re using an old version, make sure to upgrade because that’s very important, they do have performance upgrades on those updates.
(6) USE LIGHTSPEED SERVERS
Make sure you are using Lightspeed servers. There’s a lot of server software out there. There’s Engine X which is good, there’s a patch, and also light speed which is the fastest among the three. You can always debate that but light speed servers are generally considered the fastest server software out there. So, when you’re signing up for a web hosting company, make sure that they have lightspeed servers. you can go with companies like [wpx] where they have Lightspeed servers, you can go with [name hero] they have Lightspeed servers, also [sycron] they have Lightspeed cloud servers as well because they are being hosted on Google cloud. just note that they do use Lightspeed servers also [liquid web], [click web] also uses Lightspeed servers. Be faster if you implement every single step I told you about in this post.
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