Optimizing Wordpress For Speed In 2021
Date: 10/27/2021

It is 2021, and WordPress still remains one of the easiest and most convenient ways of quickly putting up a website with full functionality and features. However, a lot of developers tend to get confused due to the wide range of plugins and other add-ons that WordPress has to offer. While many offer excellent added features, a lot of these add-ons can slow things down and increase page load times.

As developers well know, site loading speeds are considered an essential component while ranking. For this reason, developers need to take extra care while designing WordPress sites in 2021 to fully optimize for speed. This involves making some decisions and using some tricks. Let us talk about some of the most important ones.

Take Care While Using Themes and Page Builders

Very frequently, the main culprits when it comes to slowing down WordPress websites are themes and page builders. In fact, some comparative studies have shown that WordPress websites can become bloated and difficult to load if you use certain themes and page builders. this means that extreme care and caution should be exercised while choosing these add-ons for your WordPress website.

In most cases, the default WordPress theme and the built-in page builder work well in terms of optimizing for speed. However, if you look around, you might be able to find even better options that can cut page load times down and help your website score better in relevant tests. Using these options can help you rank better with search engines and result in a more satisfying user experience.

Optimize Images

Frequently, images that are large in size and resolution lead to a significant increase in Page load times. For this reason, it is crucial that you optimize your images while using them in your WordPress website. While it is definitely an option 2 manually resize your images, there are WordPress plugins available that can help you accomplish this automatically.

Using one of these plugins, you can upload one full resolution version of any image that you use and declare rules that will govern how the plugin will resize the image based on certain criteria. For example, you can set the plugin to use a very low-resolution version of the image if your website is being loaded on a mobile phone browser while maintaining a higher resolution if it is being loaded on a desktop or laptop computer.

Caching and Compression

One of the most important ways to speed up your WordPress website is to use the caching and compression features that are automatically available to you for any WordPress install. Usually, you would require to turn on relevant options on your hosting control panel as well as inside WordPress to enable these options.

Caching helps improve speed by retaining frequently accessed data in a faster part of the memory while compression, also referred to as GZIP compression in WordPress, automatically compresses data so that it takes much less bandwidth to transfer the same data when a user accesses your website. With these two processes working in tandem, you are sure to notice significant speed gains on your WordPress website.

Speed and Rankings

While these may be fairly simple steps, they can have a profound impact on your page load times and serve to make your WordPress website much faster in 2021. Taking care of these basic steps from the very outset can help you keep your WordPress website optimized for speed and help improve rankings and user experience.