Having a superb online experience is quite important for building a stable amount of traffic to your website. While a positive online experience can lead to amazing results, one that doesn’t keep up with the expectations of the web can actually fail quite miserably. Google has actually discovered that many websites have loading times that take much too long for many people, and they often leave to find a site that loads much faster.

User experience is something that Google takes into high consideration when it comes to placing a page on the ranking Algorith. With that being said, a slow loading website can fail quickly because the SEO rankings are also effected by the slow sight loading times.

Read along and learn more about what you can do to improve your WordPress site performance. The below tips will be useful in case you run into issues along the way that can affect your site’s performance.

Run a Speed Diagnosis

So the first thing you’ll want to do is run a WordPress speed test, which will help you determine the reason why your site is running so slow.

To do this, you would insert the URL for your site, and let the test run. Once this test is completed, you will be emailed an analysis regarding how fast your site runs, as well as some recommendations for speeding your site up.

For those of you that use WP Engine, you can utilize the Page Performance feature inside the User Portal. It’s quite similar to the test mentioned above. You will still receive similar recommendations on ways that you can speed up your site performance. You will also have the option of scheduling regular tests that start up automatically, so that you are able to keep your site up and running its best.

Configure A CDN

No matter what your location is, your content can be delivered quite fast. Sometimes this isn’t always as easy as what it should be to accomplish if your site doesn’t have data centers in certain parts of the world. Sometimes distance can cause lagging content-wise on your WordPress site. So this is where a content delivery network like a CDN can come in handy.

A CDN is able to make your pages run faster with the use of an optimized server near your visitor. Static content files are stored at the data center that is closest to where your visitor lives, which in turn ensures that they receive the desired information rather quickly. Now you wont have to worry about external HTTP requests being made.

You’ll know whether or not you will need a CDN for your site depending on how popular your site is. The following are some CDNs you can choose from for your WordPress site:

• CacheFly
• Cloudflare
• MaxCDN

Splitting up Comments into Pages

If you are receiving a lot of comments for your content on your page, then this could cause some major lag issues. If you simply break your comments up into page sections then you can take some of the pressure off of your load times.

All you need to do is go to Settings > Discussions, and from there you will be able to choose the number of comments per each page. This will also improve the amount of memory used on your WordPress site.

Removing unused plugins and themes

If you have unused plugins and themes on your site, it can cause your site to be more vulnerable to security issues, but it can cause overall performance issues on your page.

Simply deactivating them can cut down on the coding of your site as well as decrease the load times of your page.

Removing unused media

Media Cleaner is actually a good plugin to use to help you remove unwanted media that is clogging up your WordPress site, affecting the loading speed and overall performance. You can also remove the unused media manually by going to Media > Library and choose the unattached option.

Minify CSS, HTML, JavaScript

With the use of minification, you will be able to optimize your site and have it cleaned up for a normal super speed performance. You would be able to reduce the size of your JavaScript, HTML and CSS files. This will remove characters, spaces, and line breaks that aren’t needed. So the data on your WordPress site will be reduced and in return your load times will be a lot faster.

So there are plenty of plugins that can be used for the purpose of minifying your site. You can use the following:

• WP Rocket
• Autooptimize<

Clean Up Your Database

So many people often abandon their site database, not realizing that this alone could be the issue as to why WordPress is running so slow. It is true that over time, your WordPress database will start to collect clutter and can affect the speed of your website. You will want to remove your overheads as well as clean up leftover tables. You can clean your database manually with the use of phpMyAdmin. However, if you do this manually, you need to make sure that you know what you are doing because you can damage things on your website if you don’t.

If you know for a fact that you won’t know what you are doing manually, then you should go with the safer route of cleaning your database by using an automated app such as WP-Sweeper or Advanced Database Cleaner. These are both safe to use for clearing your database of junk and clutter.

Upgrade to PHP 7.3

It’s important that you use the most updated PHP version that is available to improve the performance of your WordPress site. You will realize that this PHP has more optimal security and performance. The majority of people who have switched from 7.2-7.3 have realized that their site runs a lot better and that there is a 15% decrease in site processing times.

Before you upgrade to PHP 7.3, you might consider first consider testing your PHP Compatibility to make sure none of your plugins will have compatibility issues.