August 13, 2017

Struggling To Optimize Your WP Site Speeds? Here’s How Reduce Server Response Time

If you are angling to boost your online business’s performance, you will need more than a beautiful website. Today, every other business in your niche has a website and this calls for innovative thinking. With a WordPress website, you have a powerful tool that when fully optimized will help you stay ahead of your competition. WordPress CMS is one of the most popular platforms for all types of businesses and you can now leverage its limitless benefits especially when you have tuned its speed.

Read More: 12 Amazing WordPress Plugins You Should Install on Your Blog

Struggling To Optimize Your WP Site Speeds? Here’s How Reduce Server Response Time: eAskme
Struggling To Optimize Your WP Site Speeds? Here’s How Reduce Server Response Time: eAskme
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A recent survey shows that over 75 million websites now rely on WordPress and this gives you a glimpse of the power this content management system (CMS) has. Among these are New York Times, CNN, Mashable, and eBay among other top performing brands.

Harnessing the power of WordPress

By using a high performance WP website to run your business, you will be joining millions of other users who are reaping from this CMS. Among the advantages of a WP website include:
  •     Ease of customization: which helps you add your personality to your business website. This allows you to stand out from the crowd, which is an important factor in the crowded internet marketplace.

  •     Ease of installation and use: Anyone can install and use WordPress without the need for coding and programming skills. This saves you lots of money that would have otherwise gone to training your staff.As a browser-based CMS,WP allows you to manage your site from any location around the globe.

  •     Boosting SEO efforts: If you want to rank highly on search engine result pages (SERPs) for your target keywords, a WP website is a powerful tool to use. The largest percentage of sites on the first page of SERPs is made up of WP websites. Search engines love WP websites because of the clean and simple code used in web structure.
Other benefits of using WP CMS include the fact that no HTML Editing or FTP software is required, you have access to a large community of WP users for support, you have total control of your website and with thousands of free plugins, it is easier to boost functionality of your site to meet emerging demands.

Importance of Reducing Your WP Site’s Server Response Time

One of the most crucial factors in determining the success of any website is the server response time. While most website owners focus on the site’s aesthetics, what you should be worried about is in fact the speed.73% of mobile internet users have complained of encountering a website that was too slow to load.

Now, considering that 47% of users expect the websites they are visiting to load in less than 2 seconds, you start appreciating the importance of quick server response time.

In fact, 40% of internet users say they abandon a site if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds of less.A similar study shows 79% of users who have trouble using a website will never return and 44% among them will tell a friend.

The phrase speed kills might be cliché, but when it comes to your online company’s bottom-line, there is much to learn here. Slow speed could be gradually killing your business considering a 1-minute delay in loading leads to a 7% reduction in conversions.

If your WordPress is slow, you cannot leverage the benefits that come with the CMS and worse still, you will never achieve your business objectives.

With this in mind, it is important to reduce server response time of your WordPress site and the following techniques will go a long way in helping you do this:

1)    Choose The Best Framework Or Theme

There are thousands of WordPress themes to choose from, some of which are free and others premium. This wide selection makes choosing one quite a daunting task. Most of the themes you get will have built-in features that are supposed to boost the appearance and functionality of your site. However, such feature-rich themes will affect server response time. To reduce server response time, you need a simple framework with your focus being on speed.

2)    Use A Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) helps speed up your website response time by taking away the strain of your hosting servers and distributing the workload over a network of servers.

A CDN works by identifying the server nearest to the user whatever their geographical location to enable faster delivery of scripts, CSS, images. When choosing the CDN to use, make sure it is compatible with the caching plugins you plan to install.

Read More: How to install WordPress Plugin from Your Blog Dashboard

3)    Optimize Your WordPress Database

One of the best things about a WP website is the ease in editing posts and pages on your site. Anyone can manage this site, but as you continue using it,all the tasks will be stored on the WP database. This might not seem like a big issue, but it is.This is one reason your site could be slow. You should keep revisions to the minimum in order to reduce the server response time.

Read More: The Best Way To CleanUP Your WordPress Database With WP Sweep

4)    Optimize Images

There is no denying that images play a crucial role in boosting your SEO efforts. Publishers are now using as many images as possible in order to captivate the attention of readers. This comes with a downside in terms of reduced load times. By using large file sizes, you will hamper fast server response time. Optimizing images means you minimize file sizes without compromising their quality.

5)    Minify JavaScript And CSS

It is standard procedure to add JavaScript code before the </head> tag or edit the site’s CSS file when customizing your site. Of course, this allows you to get that unique personal design to have you stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, both page elements slow down your page loading time as they require an HTTP request to fetch the information from3rd party sites. Downloading a plugin to minify JavaScript and CSS is the best option as it is highly likely that you can’t remove these elements. This removes unnecessary characters and spaces.

There are other simple but effective methods to boost server response times for your WP website. They include use of lazy load plugins, using a reliable VPN or dedicated web hosting, reducing the number of WordPress plugins among other approaches. All in all, a fast loading WordPress is an incredibly valuable tool that allows you to stay ahead of the competition. You can now run a customized site, increase conversion rates, reduce bounce rates, and build brand authority with reduced server response time on your WP website.
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