WordPress is the most popular and most preferred CMS in the world. It is simple to use, affordable to everyone, and with interface friendly for those without any technical experience, you can customize WordPress website for any purpose and any business. But no matter how friendly it is, WordPress is not simple – it has plenty of possibilities that can upgrade your websites to the pro look if you know how to use them. However, choosing a poor design theme, or adding some non-important plugins can drastically slow down your website loading speed, and trust me, you can't afford that in 2020. Speed loading is everything.

It's important for search engines because better speed loading means better search ranking. Also, it's important for user experience – if your WordPress site is slow and forces users to wait (2 seconds is enough) they'll go to another website and won't ever come back. And that's bad for your business.

a newLuckily, there are many things you can do to avoid this scenario. In this article, we are giving you some tips on how to redesign your WordPress to avoid speed problems, keeping your stunning content and everything.

1.     Choice of theme is important, so choose a light one

Your website framework is a crucial factor in determining how fast (or slow) your website loads. Framework usually gets full of features you think that you'll need, but you never use them. That kind of theme that is bloated with too many useless features can really slow down your WordPress site because every one of those features comes with its own weight of required coding. No matter whether or not you use all the theme's functions, these functions occupy precious space and run in the background. Because of that, you should think about a new theme with better and more functional experience. You can find lots of lightweight themes that have a great performance and also great plugins and all essential features but without compromising speed. Sometimes it's not just a theme that is slowing down your site, but it may be a poor hosting provider. Before you start to radically change everything better check if everything is ok with your hosting company, and choose a reliable provider with good reviews. Hostinger has affordable packages for WordPress and also a very affordable price, so you can check such hosting offerings out. Lightweight themes are also stunning and fashionable, but much more optimized and speed-friendly. This kind of theme allows you to turn off all features that are not in use, so your website will be both fast and good-looking.

Besides lightweight themes, simple design is also good for your website because it's more memorable, puts more focus on your content, and it also makes a great first impression.

2.     Reduce image size

Images often make a half of website content – they are interesting, they are "a pause" from the text and they keep users attention. WordPress has several sizes for images allowing you to choose the perfect one. However, uploading a full-size image and then resizing it while it's already uploaded will cause your website to slow down. Full resolution images can literally kill your site speed. There are plenty of tools that can help you to resize or compress images without compromising its quality, and it can save you a space and also speed-up your WordPress website. You can try with PhotoShop and compress images, or you can find plenty of online programs that will do the same job for you.

3.     Avoid Hosting Videos on Your Own Site

Videos are media that slow down websites in the most obvious way. True, WordPress is absolutely capable of hosting and playing videos, but it's not always a good idea. Videos occupy a large space (much larger than images) and format doesn't play a big part. All media files that will make your WordPress website bloated, but videos are the number 1. But you don't need to avoid videos - instead of uploading video directly to the website, try some specialized dedicated video hosting sites, like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. Once you upload your video on it, the only thing you need to do is to copy the link and paste to your WordPress editor. Voila!

4.     Disable hotlinking

Besides it's illegal because it's stealing your content, hotlinking images can also slow down your website. How? When some other website hotlink your image, it drains the resources of your server. Even though the image appears on some other website, your WordPress website will still need to process all requests and deliver the image to that site. If the "thief" website gets a lot of traffic, there will be lots of requests for your server, and it will surely slow down your website. You can find very useful plugins especially made for WordPress that will help you to prevent hotlinking images. Besides that, if you have technical experience, you can do it manually.

5.     Update WordPress, theme and plugins regularly

As an open-source project with many contributors working towards, WordPress is updated frequently with new features, bug fixes, and security updates. All those updates are very helpful because they are representing your safe-zone because WordPress is always working to give the best performance and security experience for its users.

You should update your WordPress site regularly because themes and plugins that are out-of-date can drastically slow down your site speed, and give you a poor performance.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are plenty of options to work on your WordPress website and get the best performance. Once you find what's the problem with slowing down your website, it'll be easier to solve it and prevent it any other time. We are hoping that these tips were helpful, and that'll become your usual routine because an enjoyable experience on your website for users is just your responsibility.