3 seconds. That’s how much time your website needs to load to lose you 50% of prospective customers. So if you want to achieve success with any online business, you have to focus on cutting down the website loading speed to 2 seconds or less.
This won’t be an easy thing to do as today’s pages must contain a lot of high-quality visuals to be appealing. However, using these simple tricks to speed up a WordPress website will help you achieve the desired results.
The best thing is that any business will be able to afford these solutions as they revolve around clever optimization and looking for the best deals available.
1. Choose a fast-loading theme
WordPress theme libraries contain thousands of options that can fit any requirements. However, not everyone knows that these differ not only by design, but also the speed of loading. Be sure to look for the fastest-loading WP themes and once you choose, test your website with a Pingdom speed test for good measure.
Note that fast-loading themes aren’t necessarily simplistic and devoid of visual decorative elements. Instead they are extremely well-optimized by experienced pros.
2. Move your website to a great host
One of the most effective ways to speed up a WordPress website has nothing to do with the actual page design. What it does involve is moving your entire website to a new host. You’ll need to find one with guarantees of high speeds and great performance as well as secure servers.
iPage Hosting is a great option for small businesses as it’s very reliable and very cheap for the initial run. As your website will definitely perform well with this host, you should be able to afford a renewal by the time the initial contract expires.
3. Install an efficient caching plugin
Best WordPress caching plugins of today are quite affordable, so you should be able to afford a good one. These solutions have a tremendous impact on website loading speed for your frequent visitors.
Basically, the caching plugin allows storing a copy of the website in the user’s cache. This means that when they go to your page again, it will load exponentially faster as all the ‘biggest’ elements are already there.
4. Optimize your homepage…cleverly
If you want to speed up a WordPress website cheaply, you need to focus on optimization. Aside from resizing your images and videos, you can also cut down the homepage loading speed by:
• Limiting the number of posts to 5-7
• Showing excerpts instead of complete posts
(This will also serve as an added incentive for the visitor to ‘hang around’ on your website. Be sure to make those excerpts short, catchy, and intriguing.)
• Cut the widgets
(Remove all widgets that aren’t necessary for the page’s performance. This includes social media sharing widgets as those should only be placed IN the posts.)
• Keep your homepage clean and to the point
5. Prevent leeching by disabling hotlinks
Did you know that other websites can link directly to the images and videos on yours? That might sound like something good for SEO, but it really isn’t. Instead, hotlinks increase the load on your server and bring down the website loading speed when your visitors are trying to access it.
You can prevent this elaborate form of bandwidth theft with a few lines of code:
/* hotlink blocking */
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?otherapprovedwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [F]
These changes must be added to the root.htaccess file. If you don’t feel confident in your ability to change everything correctly, you can find an affordable freelance web master who’ll fix this issue for you in a jiffy and might even offer some more useful tips on how to speed up a WordPress website.
