The speed and performance of your website is very important nowadays. The expectations of the users have grown and their patience has decreased. If your website loads too slowly, users won’t wait for it to load. They will just move on to another website. Even if they don’t leave your website, it will leave them disappointed, frustrated, and would likely to leave your website in the midst of shopping.

Google has stated that the speed of a website affects its ranking in the search results. So if you want to make your users happy and stay on the top of search results, you have to pay attention to your website speed. 

Optimizing the speed of your website isn’t that simple. In this post we will share with you five things you can do to speed up your website.

5 Fundamental Ways to Improve Site Speed

1. Use a Good Web Hosting Plan

It all starts with choosing the proper WordPress hosting plan with the right hosting company. Even without talking about speed, you should have a reliable company with solid and reliable hardware to host your site. If your site is unreliable, speed won’t matter because your visitors won’t even visit your website. So do some research about hosting companies.

Going back to our main topic, which is speeding up your website, most hosting companies, like Bluehost, offer a range of hosting plans, starting with cheap shared hosting and moving up through virtual servers, dedicated servers and cloud servers. The prices increase as you move up through different types of hosting, but the quantity of resources dedicated to your website also increases. Although it’s ok to start with shared hosting if you’re just starting your website, make sure to always track your traffic volume and resource usage so that you can upgrade to a better hosting plan before visitors start noticing your website being sluggish.

2. Enable Caching

Caching is the technical term for storing information in a temporary storage area. This will improve your website’s performance since most of your page’s content is already prepared and available and doesn’t need to be fetched and processed to be displayed for a user. It also lessen the load of various system resources on your server.

3. Use a Content Delivery Network

Using a content delivery network is another effective way to speed up your website. A CDN is a worldwide network of servers that lets you duplicate and store your website’s static elements. These elements are then delivered to visitors from a server that is closer to them. For instance, if your website is hosted on a server in the U.S., visitors from other countries will have to wait for a long time for your content to be shown on their browser. With a CDN, that time is reduced because the static content will be provided from a local server much closer to them instead of the one from across the world.

4. Optimize Your Images

Image size is another issue for page speed. Some images can be reduced in size with the use of graphic-editing tools or plugins without reducing its quality.

Here are the important things to remember:

• Use JPEG format whenever possible. PNG is also fine. Avoid BMP and TIFF formats.
• Crop your image to get rid of unnecessary elements and to reduce the size.
• Resize your images. It is not necesary to upload a 2000 picel-wide image if the size of your web page is only 600 pixels wide.

5. Minify HTML, JavaScript, and CSS

Websites and web applications are dependent on CSS and JavaScript, that’s why it’s important to reduce the size of these text files. Minifying them is a great way to do that. This means getting rid of comments, extra spaces, extra line breaks, etc. in the code in order to reduce the size of the file and the amount of data that has to be transferred - reducing the time needed to load a page.