With over 35% of websites based on WordPress, they are one of the most popular platforms to use worldwide. There are a ton of plugins, themes, and extensions you can take advantage of for your visitors’ experience!
While this is a huge advantage, a few wrong moves can cause slow loading speeds and server response time. This may lead to poor user experience and your site to rank lower on search engine pages!
Also, Google revealed that there will be an upcoming page experience update that will enhance the existing Core Web Vitals metrics.
So, how can you remedy a slow server response time? Based on an SEO specialist Sydney and a lot of research, here nine helpful tips you can follow:
- Use Managed, NOT Shared Hosting
A crucial factor to fast loading speed is a reliable and responsive hosting. There are many great shared hosting providers, but I don’t recommend using shared hosting.
If other websites overload the shared server, then it lengthens your own site’s response time, alienating your visitors!
Instead, opt for a managed solution, giving you full control over your hosting performance. You can also take advantage of the hosting’s automatic backups, updates, as well as advance security options for you and your visitors’ sake.
- Enable Caching
WordPress offers the option to build dynamic pages, meaning, users can change the content just by entering new information. Every time users revise page content, it takes time and resources to analyze intentions and prepare the necessary response to display on their browsers.
And if there are multiple visitors interacting with the site at the same time, it can overload your site, causing server response issues.
What you can do is to cache plugins, which prevent overloading and increase the server response speed by up to five times faster than before. A good WordPress plugin made for caching will create page templates for your recurring visitors. That way, your website won’t have to upload all elements each time someone revisits your website.
- Optimize Your Images
One of the best ways to catch your visitors’ and prospective customers’ eyes are to create and post appealing visuals. Add images and original design elements to your interesting text content, which will increase the chances of readers following the call-to-action.
But there’s one problem: visuals can increase your site’s response time!
Avoid slowing down the response time and site loading speed by optimizing all your media properly. Before placing them on your page, have it compressed using a WordPress plugin or free software to change the format.
This reduces the file size greatly without compromising quality, making it load faster and still look great.
- Update Your WordPress and Plugins
WordPress constantly goes through various updates, along with the plugins and themes it comes with. It’s needed to meet the current web requirements, which is why updates come regularly.
When you update your WordPress version immediately after new releases, you get to leverage the new features. It has you gain even more control over any new security and bug detection features, making it safe for you and your visitors.
Besides this, most of the WordPress updates also include some optimizations and bug fixes to make your program and website load quicker. It’s a win-win situation!
- Rationalize the Background Process
When you constantly backup and crawl your website, it may result in your response time slowing down.
Backups are advantageous, but you don’t need to do it daily if you update your content only a few times a week. Research and monitor your site’s low-traffic times and schedule your backups during these times. That way, the backups won’t have to interfere with your visitors’ experience.
Furthermore, ensure that the backup plugins you use are safe and easy to use.
Besides backing up your data, look into site crawling as well. Access the Google Search Console and see if your website is crawled frequently and thoroughly. If not, make the necessary adjustments.
- Choose a Good Theme
Did you know that one of the downfalls of a WordPress website is the poor choice of a theme?
Free WordPress themes are usually poorly coded, making them load even slower! Fortunately, you can customize the coding to have it load quicker and look unique and attractive to your viewers.
What if you don’t know how to code?
I highly recommend you invest in a premium theme, then. There are excellent premium themes that feature fast-loading designs without scrimping on aesthetics.
When selecting a theme, it should not only be fast-loading, but responsive for all devices. This doesn’t only help with load speed, but it also improves the user experience to prevent people from leaving!
- Use Speed Optimization Plugins
Another advantage to WordPress is how you have plugins not only useful for visitors but made for website performance, too!
There are website speed optimization plugins WordPress and its community puts out. These plugins can perform the following features to speed your website up, along with its server response time:
- Optimize and lazy load images
- Minify HTML and JavaScript
- Caching
- Early Loading
- Remove trashed contents and expired transients
- Optimize fonts
There are many speed optimization plugins to choose from, simply explore the list from your WordPress platform!
- Clean Your Database
Many speed and performance optimization plugins can also offer a database cleanup facility. With this helpful feature, it cleans up anything unnecessary from your website (such as trashed contents), to make it load quicker.
Besides this, you should also consider removing any widgets located in your site’s footer or sidebar. This may be a search box, opt-in form, list of blog posts, or what. Remove them, as they do more harm than good and take time to load, which affects your server response time!
Optimize your entire website, especially your homepage, to load quickly by:
- Show excerpts than full blog posts
- Reduce the number of featured posts
- Select smaller sizes for featured images
Wrapping It Up
I hope that these tips on reducing server response time gave you an idea on what you can do for a faster-loading site. Begin following these advices for better success and traffic today!
