If you have a website and want to level up the performance, then you are in the right place. Read the article to find out the top 5 ways to boost your website performance.
Well, the main part of a WordPress website is the theme it uses and the most important factor in a theme is its performance; no matter how beautiful your theme is, it will not attract visitors if it takes too long to load.
Now, let’s find out what these tips are!
1 – Optimize images
Images have the most effect on the performance of a website, followings are the most important things you should consider when showing images on a web page:
Properly size your images
Do not resize the images using CSS; instead, always load the images in the same dimension as the section you are showing the image into, for example never load a 1024 X 1024 image in a 500 X 500 section.
Compress the images
There are a lot of image optimizer tools available online where you can reduce your image size without losing its quality and use them to minimize the size of images you use on a web page.
You can do it with Photoshop as well (Learn how to optimize images for website using Photoshop)
Minimize the number of small images
If you are using icons as images, make sure to combine them into a single image and use CSS instead of the icons in the right place.
2 – Use a CDN (content delivery network)
CDNs boost the speed of websites by caching content in multiple locations around the world. CDN caching servers are typically located closer to end-users than the host, or origin server. Requests for content go to a CDN server instead of to the hosting server, which may be thousands of miles across multiple autonomous networks from the user. Using a CDN can result in a massive decrease in page load times.
3 – Optimize assets
Assets are usually called client-side files like JS, CSS, Fonts, etc. Optimizing them is the second most important thing for a website’s performance, let’s discuss some of the most important of them in a little more detail:
JavaScript Files
The best thing you can do with your JS assets is to minify them and load them into the footer of the theme except for the critical scripts that must be loaded into the header, like the Google Tag Manager script, etc.
Try to minimize the number of JavaScript libraries because they have a lot of features that you don’t even need in your website and they are loading useless.
CSS Files
Although it’s recommended to load the CSS assets into the header of the theme, it doesn’t help load the page faster, it’s only good for avoiding the messed-up display of the page in the initial page load but it still slows down the site speed. So, what’s the solution?
The best way of loading CSS files is to divide them into two parts:
- Common styles: Include the header, footer and other common styles into one file and load it on every page.
- Page-specific styles: Write the styles of every page into a single CSS file and load it only on that specific page.
Fonts
If you are using a custom font family and using @font-face to load them into the site, make sure to use font-display: swap; when declaring the font family, this will avoid the delay for the font family to load when printing the texts on the page; instead, the browser will immediately print the texts with an alternative font family and apply the custom font when loaded.
4 – Lazy-load off-screen contents
Off-screen contents are those that the user doesn’t interact with immediately, like background images, videos that are not auto-playing, etc…
Lazy-loading is the technique of loading non-important assets after the page’s main contents are fully loaded, in addition to off-screen contents you can lazy-load regular images as well but make sure to use a placeholder to display instead of the images until they are loaded.
5 – Avoid too many redirects
A redirect is when visitors to one webpage get forwarded to a different page instead. Redirects add a few fractions of a second, or sometimes even whole seconds, to page load time. When building a performance-optimized website, every second counts. Redirects are sometimes unavoidable, but they shouldn’t be used if not necessary.
Final thoughts
The performance of a WordPress website is directly related to the site’s image, plugin(s), theme and other assets, so make sure your website has a great performance.