{"id":8500,"date":"2020-02-01T23:16:40","date_gmt":"2020-02-01T21:16:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vipestudio.com\/?p=8500"},"modified":"2022-06-17T16:24:12","modified_gmt":"2022-06-17T13:24:12","slug":"speed-and-performance-in-wordpress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vipestudio.com\/en\/speed-and-performance-in-wordpress\/","title":{"rendered":"Speed and Performance in WordPress"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our WordPress Agency for Development<\/a> knows that the subject of WordPress speed and optimization<\/a> is one that keeps users, developers and hosting companies on their toes. Without a doubt, the speed of a website is something that matters a lot.<\/p>\n

The impact of page speed<\/a> is crucial to a website. Especially for a business-oriented website. According to a recent study, 1 in 4 users will leave the site if it loads for more than 4 seconds.<\/strong> And more than 40 per cent of the people will not get back to a slow or badly performing website.<\/p>\n

In this article, our WordPress development company<\/a> will try to outline some of the most important points and fundamentals that website owners and web administrators need to have in mind when trying to speed up and optimise their WordPress sites. Let\u2019s go!<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Make Sure Your Host Is Reliable<\/h2>\n

A lot of users tend to slip at the cheap shared hosting that many companies offer. But there is an old saying that claims the following: choosing cheap often turns out expensive.<\/strong> And there is a lot of truth in that. So, choose wisely and carefully.<\/p>\n

Anyone that hosts their site on a shared service will sooner or later experience slowness, downtime, and outages. Why is that? It is because the companies are filling the servers to the roof.<\/p>\n

Our WordPress Agency for Development<\/a> reminds you that, in some cases, your site might be on the same server as 1000 other sites. So, it is best to think ahead and plan accordingly. You may start cheap but once you start to grow you definitely need to consider some other options. This can be a cloud, a VPS solution or one of the premium WordPress providers.<\/strong><\/p>\n

*However, there is one company that excels at shared hosting and actually makes it worth considering. You can learn everything about that company (+ many other amazing hosting solutions) in our article \u201cBest Hosting Companies for High-Traffic WordPress Websites<\/a>\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

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PHP Version<\/h2>\n

Statistics show that many WordPress websites are still using PHP 5.6. However, recent tests in terms of speed and performance<\/a> showed that PHP 7.1-7.3 is several times better than the 5.6 version.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So our WordPress development company<\/a> suggests you make sure that you are using anything above 7.1 to ensure you are leveraging the power of the latest and best-optimised PHP.<\/p>\n

HTTP\/2 Plus SSL\/TLS<\/h2>\n

Make sure that your host has HTTP\/2 enabled and also utilises an SSL. The latter is somewhat mandatory nowadays. Both protocols are also optimised and can influence the website\u2019s speed and performance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

WP Themes<\/h2>\n

Be careful with the themes<\/a>, especially the ones with shiny features. Themes can influence website speed and overall performance in a big way. And even if you choose a so-called \u201cheavy\u201d theme, make sure to turn off any features that you do not use.<\/strong> In general, it is very recommendable to install only things that you absolutely need for your site.<\/p>\n

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Plugins<\/h2>\n

Our WordPress Agency for Development<\/a> recommends you remove all the ones that you do not use. With plugins<\/a>, the quality of code is the more important part, but it is never a good practice to have something on your site that you do not use or need.<\/p>\n

Implement Caching<\/h2>\n

This is one of the most important points in the current article. You need to utilise some sort of caching for your website. There are a number of plugins out there that can help you with this. You can also make sure that your host is utilising some sort of server-side caching.<\/strong> You can also consider object caching such as Redis or Memcached.<\/p>\n

Image Optimization<\/h2>\n

This is also a must as images that are not optimised can heavily influence the loading speed and overall performance. Again, in this case, there are plugins that can help you optimise your images<\/a>. Additionally, there are online tools such as GtMetrix and Google Page Speed<\/a> that can point you to the exact images you need to optimise.<\/p>\n

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Optimise Your Database<\/h2>\n

Our WordPress development company can tell you that recent tests have been showing the advantage of the InnoDB MySQL engine over the older MyISAM<\/strong> so you can consider using this database<\/a> engine.<\/p>\n

Consider Using a CDN<\/h2>\n

A content delivery network consists of many servers around the globe that store static website content \u2013 HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images. So, when someone visits your website, the content is delivered from the closest server which in fact makes the site load faster.<\/p>\n

Utilise Compression<\/h2>\n

Compression such as GZIP makes the static files even smaller in their size, thus allowing them to travel faster when a request is made.<\/p>\n

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Disable WP-Cron<\/h2>\n

Consider replacing the WP-Cron with a real cron job. Our WordPress Agency for Development warns you that the WP cron can sometimes interfere with some plugins and thus result in slowing down your site or badly influencing the website performance<\/a> due to a high number of executions.<\/p>\n

Leverage Browser Caching<\/h2>\n

You can specify how long web browsers should keep static files such as images, CSS and JS stored locally. This can be done by adding some rules in your .htaccess file.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript<\/h2>\n

This will basically reduce the size of the files that the browser needs to download locally. Our WordPress development company reminds you that minification is the process of removing white spaces and intervals from the code files.<\/strong> Again, there are plugins that can help you with this matter.<\/p>\n

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Why Does Your WordPress Site\u2019s Speed Matter So Much?<\/h2>\n

When we talk about the importance of speed<\/a> in the context of websites, we need to take into consideration people\u2019s attention span which has become increasingly shorter in recent years. In fact, our WordPress Agency for Development can tell you that, according to some studies, the average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to 7 seconds between 2000 and 2016.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, if you\u2019re an owner of a website, that means you have mere seconds to grab your visitor\u2019s attention and persuade them to stay on your site and engage with your content. Slow websites are the first to fall off from the race for online users\u2019 attention. People don\u2019t like waiting, and they will be sure to exit your website if it fails to load fast enough.<\/p>\n

A case study conducted by StrangeLoop, actually showed that a one-second delay in page load time can result in:<\/strong><\/p>\n