It’s a common issue for most of the website owners, how to make the site faster. Improving website speed is very necessary for some reasons. First of all, Google loves a faster site. It also gives a better experience for your customers or visitors, and faster websites always increase conversions.
6 Tips for Reduce server response time in WordPress
Several important factors can create an impact on the performance of a website. Server response time is another essential thing for site load speeds. We will describe some specific operations that you can take to speed up your website. Especially these factors can help you to reduce server response time. It will surely help your site to load quickly.
1. Perform Caching
The server always queries your database back and forth if a user sends a request to fetch a page on your website. Then it needs to generate dynamic content from external sources, as well as it has to pull the static resources like images and the theme files from one area. These things demands for repeated server calls.
It can be a common issue for one user. But, when thousands of people are making requests for the same page, which can create a lot of excessive loading. There is a solution for the issue, implement of caching allows your server to save these rendered versions to serve the new visitors. It decreases a lot of server calls and reduces server loads.
There are a bunch of different ways to do caching. You can do it with some typical caching plugins. WP Super Cache or similar plugins has an excellent rundown. By forcing the caching through Apache, it also can be implemented on the server side. It may be a bit difficult, but you can do it if you feel comfortable.
2. Try To Reduce Plugins
WP plugins can expand the functionality of the Word Press platform. That’s why WordPress is so much popular among the website developers. Though it is hard to be comfortable without using the plugins, it may produce a negative effect at server speeds. Some crucial WP plugins just like security plugins, spam-filtering plugin are must need for a website.
Always try to update the plugins and it can speed up your site. Defected plugins can create a lot of Word Press problems; it’s just not about speed. In this case, you need to be careful about what are you installing and how many you need to install. Always keep in mind that, different developers write WP plugins with some varying skills.
The exact number is under 20 plugins that you should keep on your sites. It will be more fantastic if you don’t use any plugins. Otherwise, you can remove any inactive or unusual plugins that you don’t need. If you think your speed is more important, then go ahead without certain features of these plugins.
Try to use those plugins which perform more than one function instead of 2 plugins. You can apply some tools to find slow plugins. Then remove the particularly slow WP plugins. Always try to perform your necessary tasks outside of WordPress such as broken link checkers, analytics or email.
Another tip is to disable plugins that you don’t use regularly. You may don’t know that premium plugins with encrypted code can slow down your server. These plugins go back to a 3rd-party server to decrypt the code. It’s a complicated process that significantly slows the load time.
Re-direct plugins also can slow down the site speed. All in all, plugins can create a huge impact on the speed of your site. So be careful about what plugins are you installing.
3. Minimize External Scripts
The existence of too many external scripts is the common cause for slow down Word Press sites. Social media buttons or other useless options are examples that can have a significant impact on the server load time. It will limit your options when you load from other sites. It depends on how you can treat that script.
Your site speed will improve surely by removing some of these features. Simply run your website with a minimalist design and give focuses on the content. It will be great if you don’t use any externally hosted forms. You have to live without certain features because it will give a significant boost in server speed.
Remove some common external scripts such as video embed scripts, chat plugins, share buttons for blog posts, pop-up scripts, external font scripts, web tracking services or commenting plugins. You can use some tools like Pingdom Site Speed Tool or GT Metrix to find out which scripts are particularly big. These online tools will tell you how many external JavaScript files are loading at your site. It may help you to decide how should you combine them.
Often scripts take some time to load the function. But the good script takes milliseconds to execute. The main problem is the placement of the script. If you place a script at the top of your page, then the script will be executed before anything further down the page. No one will accept a script acting as a gatekeeper unless the proper loading of the subsequent content.
We can tell you the simple solution especially if you don’t want to mess with lazy loading. Put the scripts at the bottom of your page. In this way, there is less delay before the content is up and visible for users. The front page also will appears loaded before it fully loads. Most importantly there is no functional difference in this process.
4. Hosting
Upgrade your managed Word Press host from a cheap shared hosting provider. This is another fastest and simplest way to increase page speed, especially if you’re experiencing outages due to bandwidth limitations. Upgrading hosting is a better idea to reduce server response time.
You will get more customers if you have a faster website with increased uptime. You should upgrade your damn hosting when Google Page Speed Insights tells you to reduce the server response time. Cheap hosts may help you at the beginning. But you can’t go ahead without a managed WordPress host for ultimate performance.
It doesn’t mean your site will run faster if you have your own server. Sometimes dedicated server clients struggled to get high performance and speed booster websites. Some of the top hosting providers have a smart way of managing Word Press sites. They have a built-in CDN that serves images and also can manage caching and re-directs.
To reduce the server response time, they can limit some specific plugins. If your entire site load in 5 or more seconds then it will be obviously a big problem. Under 1 or 2 seconds is good enough and you might not need to upgrade your hosting.
5. Clear Old Baggage
The sheer amount of old baggage that has accumulated on your website site over the years can slow down your site. You should re-check the theme on your site and then you may notice a significant improvement. You will found that the website is filled up with unnecessary code.
Though your site may be built a few months ago. Coding a new theme for your site meant shorter code. Some other old stuff can slow down a WordPress site. Here are some examples- a huge database of WooCommerce sites with lots of old orders, website which filled with too many images, additional themes or plugins.
You have to keep your website clean regularly. Because there is no real quick fix to this baggage issue. To solve the baggage issue properly, you can follow these steps.
Try to remove older orders.
If any backup plugins are running, then dismiss old backups.
Remove unused plugins and old themes.
Start as a fresh site every few years with nice clean code.
Delete spam comments.
Always store media files externally.
Don’t expect your site to perform the same way if you leave your website in the same condition for long years. You should audit your site properly and clear out old baggage you don’t need, at least once a year. Must very careful when removing records from website databases. Most of the website developers use database cleaners to erase bad records or files. So clear old things up and run your server much more smoothly.
Conclusion
It’s essential that you have a beautiful design for your website. As well as you probably need some decent size images on there. You may have to spend weeks to fine-tuning all of the elements and getting all the things perfect. In this post, we discussed a few primary reasons why a website runs slow.
Your fine-tuning is a waste of time if you can’t solve these issues. You should also keep some additional things in minds such as the physical size of the site, speed architecture or scaled image. Fast loading user experience also helps to rank in Google. That’s why the ideal timing of your website loading time should be under 2 seconds.
