No matter which CMS you are using, Page speed is always required for you. If someone told you that you should focus on improving your design rather than page performance, don’t believe them because Google consistently says page speed is a ranking factor. Furthermore, in 2018, Google announced that “mobile device page speed is now a ranking consideration for mobile searches also“.

Before we go into How to Increase Google Page Speed of a WordPress Site, let’s go over a few basic concepts that will help you to understand page speed better. If you don’t have time, use the table of contents to navigate to the main area.

What does Google PageSpeed Insights do?

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that measures your website’s performance. It helps you by providing information about the load time of your website. For both mobile and PC, Google assigns a score. The higher your score, the more benefits you’ll get. It also provides you with a detailed result so that you can quickly fix the issue. To check the speed of your website, go to Google PageSpeed Insights and type your URL. It will show you the results.

Why does Page Speed matter?

Let’s say you go to a website, and it takes 15 seconds to load. What would your reaction be? For sure, You will be irritated, and there is also a 70% chance that you will leave the site due to the slow loading.

According to a survey, more than 40% of internet users left a website because of its slow loading speed. That is why Page speed should always be one of the essential requirements for any website.

Google also recommends focusing on the page’s speed. The Search team announced in 2010 that page speed would be used as a ranking factor for desktop searches. In July 2018, Google also announced that page speed in a mobile device is also a ranking factor for mobile searches.

Since Google says that page speed affects ranking, why don’t you do this to improve your ranking?

Why is your website speed slow?

There might be several reasons for your website’s slowness. It can be a theme or hosting issue. Below, we’ll go through a few significant points; you might get a great result if you fix those.

How to Increase Google Page Speed of WordPress Site

In this post, we will learn how to increase the Google page speed of the WordPress site. As I previously said, there are a variety of reasons why websites take so long to load. I’ll show you some tips that will surely help you increase your page speed from now on. If you want to improve your speed, you must follow them.

#1 Consider Using a Good Hosting 

The most important need for your page performance is good hosting. Unfortunately, hosting providers sometimes fool people. They claim to give “unlimited” websites, bandwidth, space, emails, domains, and other features on a shared plan. However, people are unaware that their hosting provider does not guarantee 100% uptime, and their server is hosted on a single server in a certain location. As a result, visitors from another state may find their website to be slower.

That’s why our recommendation is to use a cloud server to host your website. You can get a cloud server from DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, and even Google Compute Engine.

However, in the majority of situations, it is quite costly. If you are a beginner, the shared plan is also an option. However, you must select a trusted hosting company such as Siteground, GreenGeeks, A2 Hosting, or Hostinger. For a better result, you should also use a CDN. We will also discuss this topic further down.

#2 Choose a Lightweight Theme 

The next thing you have to consider is a Lightweight theme. In the majority of cases, Many people choose themes that are too heavy. But you’ll need to think of a light theme. There are a lot of lightweight themes on the market.

Astra, Blocksy, GeneratePress, and Kadence are some of the finest options. Because they are the fastest, lightest, and most customizable.
Whether you’re creating a portfolio website or a website for your company, you should always consider using a lightweight theme.

#3 Optimize your images

An oversized image is one of the major causes of a slow-loading website. It’s important to keep in mind that it’ll take longer to load if the image is larger in size. As a result, image optimization is an important factor in page speed.

You should first edit the image that you want to use. Also, try to keep the image as small as possible. And, if possible, save the image in jpg format instead of png format. Because, when compared to png, jpg has a smaller file size. For more information, you can read this comparison.

Secondly, you have to optimize your image. There are numerous sites where you can optimize your images online. Squoosh is one of the best websites, and it is one that I personally use.

You can also use a plugin. There are also many image optimization plugins available for WordPress. You can use Smush for that. It comes with many other features like lazy loading. So you can definitely go with this Plugin.

#4 Use Browser Caching

Caching for a website is a technique used to improve the performance of websites by storing web pages that have been retrieved so that they can be delivered more quickly to users. It’s important because it means that your site will load faster and also use less bandwidth. So if you’re looking for an easy way to speed up your site, consider caching!

Many free caching plugins are available for WordPress, such as WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, Comet Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, WP-Optimize. You can use any of them. But if you want to spend money, then you can try Wp-rocket. It is a premium plugin, but it comes with many more features. I can write a specific post about increasing page speed using the wp-rocket Plugin if you guys want. Let me know in the comment section.

#5 Minify JS and CSS files

Minifying JS and CSS files mean removing unneeded characters from the code, shortening it as much as possible without changing its functionality. Minification is done for two reasons: to reduce file size and to improve load time performance.

Minifying your JavaScript will make the browser’s job easier because it has less work to do when loading your website or app. The same goes for minifying CSS – this speeds up page rendering by reducing the amount of data that needs to be downloaded before displaying your content on screen.

This also saves bandwidth since browsers can render more efficiently using fewer data overall, which reduces page latency for users too! You can minify your JS and CSS with those caching plugins.

#6 Use a CDN

CDN stands for content delivery network. A CDN is a way to store your website’s files across the world so that people in different parts of the world can access them faster by connecting to servers that are closest to them.

For example, if you’re on the west coast of America, accessing files from Europe would take longer than accessing files from Asia or Australia because they’re further away. Using a CDN will make it seem like there are more copies of Cache of your site around the world and make it easier for users in other countries to connect with your site quickly.

Many CDN services are available. Cloudflare is the most popular of them. Cloudflare also provides a free plan, so you can surely use it.

#7 Make sure your site is mobile-friendly 

If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re dealing with a page speed problem. Consider using mobile-friendly themes to improve page speed. You can always use the lightweight theme we suggested before. Those themes are also compatible with mobile devices.

#8 Enable GZIP compression

Compress your page to save load time and bandwidth. The GZIP compression algorithm is a simple way of compressing files, which takes up less space on the server. This means you can use a faster connection or have more free disk space for other things on your server.

WP-Optimize can be used to enable GZIP compression. This Plugin can also be used to cache and minify JS and CSS.

#9 Use a low amount of Plugin. 

The more plugins you use on your site, the heavier it will become. So always consider those plugins which are necessary for your work. Installing a plugin for minor issues should always be avoided. Also, permanently remove any plugins that aren’t in use from your site.

#10 Clean up your database

The longer you use your WordPress site, the more your database fills up with outdated and unneeded files, which will slow down the site. On the other hand, Delating your database will also remove Spam comments, fake users, old content drafts. So cleaning up the database is necessary to speed your site.

Bonus Tips

• Using a cache plugin is always a good idea. However, if you’re willing to invest money, then go with Wp-rocket.
• Use less amount of Plugin.
• Disable google font. You can use this Plugin for this ” Disable and Remove Google Fonts. “

WarpingUp

I’ve seen this happen with many companies, where they only focus on design. It doesn’t matter how wonderful your website appears if users can’t get in because it takes too long to load. Google has also made clear that page speed should be a high priority when designing digital properties.
So, always ensure that the speed of your website is enough. If you need any more help with improving your page performance or optimizing your WordPress website, you can contact us.

You can read the following articles also :

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