9 tips to increase the speed of WordPress for your website

Do you want to increase the speed and improve the performance of your WordPress site? Of course you want that because this helps the user experience, as a study was conducted by “StrangeLoop” on large sites such as Google and Amazon, and it turned out that delaying the site’s loading by one second reduces the conversion rate by 7%, reduces the number of page views by 11%, and reduces user satisfaction by 16%. You must also know that site speed is one of the main factors in ranking your site in search engines.

Search engines penalize sites that have slow loading speed and place them in late results, which means that it will reduce the number of visits that come to your site. You can know the loading speed of your site or some pages on your site through this wonderful free tool “Pingdom,” which gives you an analysis of your site’s performance from various places.

It analyzes your site's performance based on

Know the loading speed of all pages of your site. Just enter the address of your site or the page whose speed you want to know in the URL and click on Start Test and find out the loading speed of your site (it is best for the loading speed to be less than 2 seconds). The lower the loading speed, the better.

If you find that the loading speed of your site is fast (10 seconds, for example), what is the reason that makes your site slow? Hosting your site: Do not rely on a company that provides you with bad servers, as this affects the speed of your site and the slow loading of its pages.

WordPress configuration: Increasing the temporary memory on your pages increases the loading speed, so it is necessary to delete the temporary memory periodically. Page size: Make sure to format the images before uploading them to your site. • Bad plugins: Installing plugins that are programmed in an unprofessional manner and with bad code will have a negative impact on your site

It caused slow loading of its pages. External scripts: such as advertisements, template tools, etc., if relied on in an unprofessional manner, are one of the reasons for slowness.

Therefore, in this article, we will talk about some tips and ways to increase the speed and performance of your WordPress site by making some improvements and installing some plugins. 1.

Choosing good hosting The first thing that must be taken care of before creating a website is choosing a good hosting service provider for you, as it is the foundation on which you build your website. Otherwise, if you put a lot of effort into the content you provide and internal and external improvements to your website while it is on a bad service provider, this means that your effort is worthless!! Choosing the type of host depends on the nature of your site’s work and its purpose, as well as the number of targeted visitors, so choose the appropriate hosting based on the goals you want to achieve from your site.

2. Use a good template When you choose a WordPress template for your site, it is necessary to pay attention to configuring the template before obtaining it. Some of the paid templates have their code written in an unprofessional manner, which makes it a burden on your site and reduces its speed. If you are using one of the free templates provided to you by WordPress, do not worry about this matter because WordPress reviews it. However, if you are using a paid external template, for example, review this template and look at people’s evaluations of it and the strength of its performance.

Also beware of stolen templates that are uploaded in forums and blogs. Do you think he bought the template and uploaded it to you for free without charge? Of course not! You are the opposite, as most of these templates are filled with backlinks, viruses, and many files that are harmful to your site.

Try to use simple templates and additions, and remember the Arabic saying, “The beauty of calligraphy is its clarity.” If you purchased your template from famous template stores such as Themeforest, StudioPress, Themify, & Array Themes, do not worry about this because the management of these companies reviews and ensures the quality, speed, and good configuration of the template.

3. Installing the “Dynamic” WordPress cache plugins. This means that WordPress builds virtual pages every time for each person who visits the page. WordPress performs a complex process with several steps to come up with the required information and present it to the visitor. This slows down your site when a large number of visitors visit it.

As you can see in this drawing, when a visitor browses one of the pages of your site that was designed in PHP, the server retrieves information from the MySQL data memory and your site’s PHP files, and then places this data in the HTML content to appear well to the visitor.

The solution is very simple

In order to speed up the steps of this complex process, it is necessary to install one of the plugins that deletes the temporary memory, as it increases the speed of your site 3 times more than the normal rate. There are many add-ons for this purpose, but what we advise you to do is install this free add-on

WP super cache

Activating it is very easy, as it does this task for you. 4.

Create images used on your site

You may use a lot of images in writing the content of your site in order to provide a better experience for the user because the image is faster in conveying words than writing. This is good and increases the visitor’s love of reading the content by 80%, but there is a big problem if you do not prepare these images well, as they will reduce the loading speed of your site’s pages. Therefore, if you use one of the pictures that you take with your camera or use professional pictures from sites that provide you with this service, try using a program (Photoshop) or a tool such as tinypng to reduce the size of the image.

The best extension recommended to use for websites is ‘PNG’. This extension does not compress images, maintains their quality, and does not lose any of the image’s properties. However, if the image contains a lot of colours, its size will be large and will take a long time to load on your site, so you need to compress it and convert it to ‘JPEG’.

. 5.

Use the latest WordPress update

Because WordPress relies on open source software, it makes updates periodically to display more features and solve some security or technical problems, as well as some of the plugins that you use in WordPress. Always try to keep your site updated, moment by moment, from time to time with the latest available versions of WordPress, your site template, and the plugins you use. There may be some disadvantages in the old version.

6- Split comments on more than one page

Do you get a lot of comments on your blog articles? This is great and indicates the success of your blog! But this large number of comments reduces the speed of the page containing the article, and the solution is very easy: split the comments so that they appear on more than one page.

Go to Settings » Discussion and mark the “Break comments into pages” option. 7- Use YouTube to upload videos. You can upload videos directly to your site and the video will play in the 'HTML5' player, but this will cost you a lot of Bandwith and may weaken your site, even if your plan includes unlimited Bandwith!

The ideal solution for placing videos on your blog is to rely on video uploading services such as (YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc.).

Etc.) These sites can upload thousands of videos without problems, and all you will do is put the ‘URL’ of the video on your page and the video will be downloaded and appear automatically on the page. 8- Reduce

Saved copies of content modifications

You may make many modifications to one article, but WordPress stores these copies individually. He may keep these copies after publishing your article, so what is the benefit of keeping them?

You can control these copies by adding this small code in the wp-config.php file define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 ); This will make WordPress keep only the last 4 copies you have stored and automatically discard the old ones. 9- Reduce the loading time of your site’s home page. There are some improvements that we advise you to make to your site’s home page to increase its loading speed because it is often the most important page on your site and the most used page by visitors.

Here are some tips: Show excerpts of your articles instead of displaying them in full. Reduce the number of articles that appear on the home page (preferably 5-7 articles appear). Delete unimportant widgets for your home page. Delete unimportant widgets and add-ons. And remember that distracting the user on the home page will not help you at all.

In the end, I hope that you have benefited from these tips and tried to apply them to your site, and you will, God willing, find a noticeable change in the speed of the site before and after using these tips.