No site has a chance of being successful if it takes too long to load. In fact, studies have shown that nearly 40% people will rather leave a site than wait for it to finish loading if it takes more than 3 seconds. This percentage doubles when only taking ecommerce websites into consideration. In fact, even Google, while deciding the rank of your website, takes into consideration the speed with which the website loads. With these statistics, it is imperative for your success that your website loads quickly.

With this in mind, here are some methods to increase the speed of your website from which you can benefit:

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Your Caching Plug-in should be great

Browser side caching can significantly help you increase the speed of your website especially if you have static images, Java Script and CSS that generally do not change.

Caching refers to storing specific parts of your website so that are only required to be loaded just once instead of having to load them every time a user enters your website. This is advantageous for the people who visit your website on a regular basis, while also helping the people who want to visit various pages of your website.

W3 Total Cache is one such caching plug-in run by various popular websites and aims to increase your website’s performance by 10 times, provided that it has been correctly and completely configured. On the other hand, if you are looking for a user friendly cache, then the WP Super Cache may be more suited to your requirements as you do not need to possess server administration skills to set it up.

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Compress Images

Images are usually the largest file and take quite some time to load if not compressed. However, there are some terrific tools that you can utilize in order to compress the images.
WP Smush.it can not only strip the meta data off your photos or images, it can also remove colors that are unused from the indexed images.

Tiny PNG is another tool which can strip off the unused colors from the images to allow for better compression and smaller file size of the photo.

You may also prefer lazy loading if your website has a large number of photos or images. For this, you can use the jQuery Image Lazy Load WP Plug-in that is loading pictures only on the visible part of the webpage. This means that the image only appears once the user scrolls down to the image, which increases the speed of the website while also using up less bandwidth for visitors who do not scroll down the entire page.

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Remove unnecessary Javascript, HTML and CSS

This means that you should try to remove all the white space from the code if possible. Even though the tabs and spaces allow the code to be more easily read by humans, all it does for the browsers, servers and search engine spiders is lower their speed. Removing the unnecessary items will result in a more effective and smoother performance for your website.

Instead of having to go through your own code for any such occurrences, you can leave this arduous task to different plug-ins such as the W3 Total Cache and the WP Minify which can remove the excess code.

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Reduce the HTTP requests

Whenever a person visits your website, the appropriate files need to be sent to the computer of the visitor; these files include Javascript library references, CSS and images as well. The greater the number of files needed to be sent, the greater the load on your website and the slower it will respond.

Hence, if you decrease the objects present in your website, you can also reduce the HTTP requests which are necessary for loading the page and hence, you will ending up increasing the loading speed of the pages of your website.

You can achieve this by combining both Javascript and CSS files, which can be accomplished by the W3 Total Cache’s minify section.

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Database tables should be optimized

You need to optimize your database tables; it is the equivalent of changing the oil in your car or defragging the computer. Basically, it helps ensure that your database operates efficiently while simultaneously freeing up considerable space.

Your database tables can be optimized manually with a plug-in or if you use phpMyAdmin.

On the other hand, you can repair, backup, restore and optimize your database too with the help of WP-DB manager. You can also use the WP-Optimize that optimizes your database while allowing you to remove comments present in the spam queue, comments that are not approved and items that are present in trash.

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Conclusion

Using any of the above methods is almost guaranteed to ensure that the loading speed of your website improves significantly and helps attract and sustain more visitors to your website. If you optimize your website, you will reduce the time taken to load and allowing your visitors to experience and enjoyable visit, which will convince them to return to your website again.

The best part about these tips is that they are very easy to implement and will not require much time and effort at all while rewarding you with satisfied customers.

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