How do you know how fast your website loads?
There are several website speed testing tools that can help you understand whether your website is slow or fast:How can you improve the speed of your WordPress website?
Update the system
It may sound trivial and too easy, but many website owners don't bother to update WordPress to the latest version, which is a shame. WordPress releases frequent updates that improve system performance and allow the site to be more efficient and faster. Don't forget to back up your site before updating to the new version.Choose a better website hosting service
Fast, high-quality web hosting (and if you're targeting an Israeli audience, you should prefer web hosting in Israel) will give your WordPress site a better starting point. You can make improvements even if you are using poor or remote hosting (for example, servers in the US), but if the infrastructure is problematic, it will be difficult to improve the speed of your website. Choosing the right hosting should be a top priority if website speed is important to you. Some hosting services offer dedicated WordPress hosting, which is sometimes a better option than regular hosting.Reduce the size of your home page
Everyone wants to show off everything they have to offer, and for some reason, everyone chooses to do so on the website's home page. Checking your analytics data will show you that many visitors don't even see the home page, but arrive at internal pages via Google searches. And even if everyone looks at the home page, a cluttered and heavy page does not serve your purpose. The page should be beautiful, accessible, and useful, but not at the expense of site speed. Check what can be removed from the home page—blocks of content, images or videos that are too heavy, irrelevant content, and more. After you've slimmed down the home page, check the site speed again and see if it has improved.Replace the visual page builder
Many websites these days are built using Elementor or another visual page builder. While these are convenient, high-quality tools that greatly simplify the website building process, they often create large amounts of unnecessary code that slows down the website. Do you really need it? It's worth checking out—and if possible, replacing the editor with the default WordPress editor (Gutenberg), which allows for visual page building that is not bad at all.Use a CDN (content delivery network)
A CDN distributes your website content across servers around the world, allowing users to receive content from the server closest to them, thereby improving loading speed.Install a cache plugin to improve site speed
There are quite a few WordPress plugins that help improve website speed. The various CACHE plugins compress the website files and serve the website faster to users. These plugins can be a little complicated, but they do not require any coding knowledge. Back up your website before using the various cache plugins, just in case. Please note that not every cache plugin is suitable for every hosting server. For example, if you host your website on a Lightspeed server, we recommend choosing a cache plugin such as LSCache, which works directly with the server. If the server is of a different type, LSCache will not work properly.Compress the images on your website
When you upload images to your website (product images, images for posts, etc.), it is important to compress them as much as possible so that they take up as little space as possible. The rule of thumb is that an image should be less than 100KB. You can compress an image using editing software or an app. The image format is also important—today, it is preferable to use WebP images (rather than PNG or JPG), as this is the leanest and most efficient format for images on the internet. If you didn't make sure to upload small images from the outset, you can compress them retrospectively using various plugins, such as TinyPNG, ShortPixel, and EWWW Image Optimizer. Again, don't forget to back up your site before running such a plugin.Choose a minimalist template
For most standard websites, there is no need or reason to choose an overly elaborate design template with lots of features and heavy graphics. Choose the lightest and leanest template you can (taking branding constraints into account, of course), and try to use as few heavy graphic features (such as sliders) as possible.Remove unnecessary plugins
The disease of a significant portion of WordPress sites today is unnecessary plugins. Go through your list of plugins, remove old plugins that haven't been updated in over a year and plugins that are not in use. If a particular plugin is too heavy, find a replacement for it, find a way to enable its functionality using code, or give up on the functionality and delete it completely.Optimize the database
Optimizing your WordPress database is an essential component of improving site speed, and it is often overlooked. The database stores all of the site's information, from posts and comments to theme settings and plugins. As the site grows, the database fills up with unnecessary data, drafts, old revisions, and other irrelevant information. This leads to a bloated database, which slows down the site's loading times. Cleaning and optimizing the database, using dedicated plugins or SQL queries, removes unnecessary data, reorganizes tables, and reduces its volume. As a result, the site loads faster because the database takes less time to retrieve information.Have you tried to improve your website's speed and gotten stuck? Contact us and we'll be happy to help!