WordPress is a great framework to use for many different types of websites. But if you find that your WordPress site has started to slow down, this can become a problem. Your site loading speed can affect your SEO results, and of course it can also be a hassle for visitors to your site. You definitely don’t want to lose out on potential customers because of the load speeds of your site!
To help you with the problems of slow WordPress page load speeds (or to help you prevent this problem from happening to your site in the first place), here are 4 simple tips for speeding up your WordPress site:
1. PHP Executions
Right now your site is probably set up to make many different PHP calls. The thing is, many of these PHP calls that your site is now performing are actually probably unnecessary. For those dynamic PHP calls, it is pretty easy to change many of those to be static HTML instead (without affecting the actual functionality of your site). Doing this can help speed up your site significantly.
2. Super Cache Plugin
WP Super Cache is a plugin that can help to speed up your site quite a bit. Most WordPress sites are automatically set up to access their MySQL database whenever a visitor visits their site. The WP Super Cache plugin makes it so that your site, instead of accessing that database every time your site is visited, it will instead create a static HTML copy of each of your pages and show those HTML versions to visitors instead. This will make a huge difference with page load speeds.
3. Database
When working to speed up your site, you will also want to make sure to optimize your database. As your site ages and grows, you will probably end up with different rows or tables of data that you may not need anymore. If you periodically go through your MySQL database, optimizing it for the data that is still relevant and needed, you can get rid of a lot of tables that you may no longer need. Cleaning up your database, getting rid of all of the excess “junk,” can help to improve your site’s speed.
4. Eliminate Unnecessary Plugins
The more plugins you have the slower your site will be. That in no way means that you should stay away from plugins all together. Plugins are an extremely beneficial, even necessary part of any WordPress site. But you want to be careful with just how many you are using, so as not to bog your site down too much. So just make sure that you are only including plugins that you are actually using and that actually benefit your site. Anything that isn’t helping your site’s design and functionality, search engine optimization efforts, user experience, etc you may want to think about getting rid of.
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