Your WordPress site is up and running, and it’s jam-packed full of relevant, informative, SEO-friendly content. You’ve planned your update schedule and found a niche to fill, but there’s no point having incredible content if people can’t get to it.

In today’s fast-paced online environment, webpages visitors on mobile and desktop alike expect efficiency and speed from sites. Sites which take longer to load are less likely to hold the attention of the visitor, and much less likely to successfully engage with click-through traffic.

Speeding Up Your Site

WordPress is a versatile, complex system which offers much in the way of customisation and optimisation options for budding bloggers and businesses alike. As your site grows and the storage demands for your content grow with it, it’s going to become necessary to ensure your site is optimised for performance. Technical aspects like this are increasingly factored in by search engine algorithms as a part of their ranking procedures, so improving your loading speeds and navigability will be reflected directly in your site’s online performance.

Image Optimisation

The first, and easiest, option to ensure you have fast WordPress sites is image optimisation. Taking up over sixty-percent of the average site’s data usage, high-quality, bandwidth-heavy images are prime targets for optimisation. Image compression utilities are available in significant numbers online, so taking the time to compress your images before you post them is a quick-fix for speeding up your site.

Content Delivery Networks

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are global networks of servers which allow users across the world to access bandwidth-heavy assets like images, JavaScript objects and stylesheets from servers which are nearer to their countries. Well, in brief, a content delivery network is a pivotal component in optimizing web content delivery, enabling businesses to deliver high-quality content promptly to their global audience. This approach ensures that individuals from various countries can efficiently retrieve these digital assets from nearby servers rather than distant ones, ultimately enhancing website performance and the overall online experience. Content is delivered faster and travels less distance, meaning quicker loading times and less latency which is important to note and be aware of. If you are unsure about how important low latency is to your website, you can check out websites like https://www.agora.io/en/blog/what-is-low-latency/ to understand it better. WordPress optimisation services online will often offer CDN assistance as a part of their optimisation packages.

PHP7 and Site Code Optimisation

The development of PHP scripting languages for HTML is an ongoing process, which churns out improvements and optimisations regularly and effectively. PHP7 is the latest iteration of Hypertext Preprocessing, and breaks the insofar constant chain of backwards compatibility. Making your website PHP7 ready will improve the speed of your site by up to 100%, at the cost of time spent switching over to the new system. Plugins are available online to check your site’s compatibility with the new system.

While you’re taking a look at your site’s code, you may as well get stuck in and start cleaning house. CSS, HTML, and site source codes can become bloated as your site grows and changes over time. Cleaning up your syntax and removing unnecessary whitespaces from your source code will speed up loading times without removing function. The same goes for your database. Make sure you’re deleting unused plugins and choosing minimal, attractive themes while you’re at it. If your posts are popular centres of discussion, consider removing comments on older posts as time goes on.

Optimisation can be time-consuming if you’re running a big site, so there are tailored optimisation services available online for those with a little cash to spend perfecting their WordPress performance.