Introduction
Your website is the face of your business. It's the first place customers look when they want to find out more about your company and interact with you. So, your site must be fast, responsive, and easy to use. Here are some steps you can take to make sure that happens:
Choose a responsive WordPress theme.
The first thing you should do before creating a website is to choose a WordPress theme that is the best and most responsive. This can be difficult because there are thousands of WordPress themes on the marketplace, and many of them are poorly coded and designed.
The best way to find the right responsive theme for your needs is by reading reviews from other website owners who have used it in the past. A good responsive WordPress themes will have all of these features:
- Fast loading times - most people won't wait more than five seconds for their web pages to load
- Lightweight code - this makes it easier for search engines like Google (and humans) to crawl through your pages
Use your code and minimize the use of plugins.
If you want to make your WordPress website more responsive, you can use your code and minimize the use of plugins.
- Use a CDN:
A content delivery network (CDN) is a service that delivers files from cache servers worldwide. It's faster for users because it saves them from having to download files from their location.
- Use a caching plugin:
A caching plugin will store static versions of your pages on a CDN so visitors don't have to load all the scripts and images each time they visit your site. It also speeds up server responses by serving cached content first before fetching new data from WordPress.
But this comes at the expense of performance due to having multiple layers between users and servers each time they load any page on your site.
- Minimalize plugins:
By minimizing plugins, we mean uninstalling unnecessary ones or disabling those that aren't used often enough anymore so as not to affect performance negatively.
- Optimize images:
If you're already using an image optimization tool like TinyPNG or ImageOptim (Mac only), then great! You probably won't need anything else since these tools do most work themselves, but if not, look into them!
Use a caching plugin.
A caching plugin can significantly reduce load times. When a user visits your site, the browser requests all of the files from your server to load everything needed for the page or post.
This process can take quite a bit and result in slow loading times for users, especially if you have lots of media or images on your website.
A caching plugin can drastically speed up this process by storing copies of these files locally on each user’s computer, allowing them to load much faster the next time they visit your site.
Caching plugins also make it easier to run WordPress on mobile devices since they don't need as much processing power--this is especially important when considering how many people browse websites with their phones!
Optimize your images.
When it comes to images, the best way to ensure your site is responsive is by using the right tools. There are many different ways to optimize images on your WordPress website.
- Use a tool like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to compress your images. They're both available as browser extensions and plugins for WordPress, so you can use them without downloading any software.
- Another option is to use the WordPress image compression plugin (also called "WP Smush Pro"). This plugin compresses all of your existing JPEGs into smaller sizes while retaining the quality and reducing file size, which will make them load faster in most browsers when they're displayed on mobile devices.
- If you have many large images on your homepage or featured posts page that isn't optimized yet, consider using either the WordPress responsive image plugin or a CDN (content delivery network) such as Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront for faster loading times across devices and less data usage!
Reduce redirects.
Reduce redirects. Redirects are a useful tool to force SSL, show different content depending on the user's location, or even change your URL structure. However, they have one drawback: they can slow down your website.
To reduce redirects (and thus speed up your site), you should use them only when necessary by replacing multiple pages with one page with many URLs pointing to it.
Enable compression and use browser caching.
There are two ways to speed up your website: enabling compression and using browser caching. To enable compression, you need to use an app like W3 Total Cache, Akamai Fast CDN, or Cloudflare’s free plan (depending on your budget).
For example, if you have a WordPress site hosted in Canada with Cloudflare CDN enabled, then it will compress all the files and serve them from their servers in California instead of from your server in Canada.
This is because the distance between both locations is shorter than going directly from Canada to San Francisco, so it takes less time for data packets to reach their destination.
If you don’t have an extra budget for this kind of service, then consider hosting your site with us at SiteGround because we provide free CDN as part of our hosting packages. This allows faster loading times thanks to reduced latency between users and servers.
Use a content delivery network (CDN).
A content delivery network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and performance.
A good way to think about it is this: if you have a website, when someone visits your site from New York City, he or she will likely be connected to one of the servers in that area. If someone visits from California, he or she will likely be connected to servers there.
This helps speed up websites because the server closest to them can respond faster than if they were connecting worldwide every time they visited your site.
There are several different ways you can use CDNs in WordPress:
- Use a free service like Cloudflare, which automatically detects changes on your website and distributes them across its global network of data centers (like other CDNs).
- Use a paid service like MaxCDN, which also automatically detects changes on your website but gives you access (via APIs) so that you can customize how each function works.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways to speed up your WordPress website. Some of the tips we've covered here will be familiar from previous sections, like using a CDN or caching plugins. But it's important that you understand what each tool does and how it works before implementing them.