The loading time of a website has become a pertinent issue today. Site owners are losing visitors, and users are losing interest if their wait times cross even by a few seconds. Most websites today are built on WordPress and need to be optimized for speed.

Here’s how-

Choose the right host

There’s a reason they say that your website is as good as your host. Depending on the server and its resources your hosting provider uses, you can expect a certain level of performance, which also includes loading time. Opt for the best cloud hosting provider which offers you the efficiency of operations and smart plans within a budget, so your site can perform its best.

Always update your applications

Always make sure that you run the core updates whenever prompted or at regular intervals. Also run updates on your themes and plugins, to help keep the security level in place. The best way to do this is to set an upgrade alert.

Use verified plugins and themes

Tools and plugins are the fanciest features of WordPress. But always only use applications which are downloaded/purchased from trusted sources. Any unverified plugins can affect your site performance and even become a security threat.

Integrate caching

Caching radically reduces the number of requests that your site handles every minute. By removing them from the site server and browser and storing them temporarily in a subdirectory, it can speed up the load time.

Optimize images

WordPress definitely allows you to explore your creativity to the full extent. But creativity cannot be a deterrent to your website’s performance. You can manage this by using compressed images, so you can maintain the visual appeal but keep them from slowing down the loading speed. There are a host of tools and plugins that can reduce and resize images without losing their quality.

Reduce redundancy

As your site grows with more data and applications, it all piles up on the backend. Over time, this can slow down the loading speed. Hence you need to periodically clean up any unused themes, plugins, images, or other data that become obsolete.

Use a Content Delivery Network

Content Delivery Networks or CDN helps distribute your entire site data across a network of smaller servers spread over different locations. Thus, it allows the user to access the server geographically closest to them. This radically cuts the time taken to obtain a request from the website front end to the central server.

Summing up…

These are some of the tried and tested ways to improve the loading speed of your WordPress website. Even from the perspective of SEO, a faster loading website helps your site rank better on the search result pages and improve your score. Keeping this score high can yield better search ability and thus, more traffic to your site.