Speed optimization considered as one of the important factors impact on SEO as well as site performance.
Therefore, it is important to consider the loading time for your site which is also a very important ranking factor for Google. So that you need to ensure the site will load fast which means site load in under 1.5 seconds.
Therefore, it is very important to pick a good web host company with faster load time and a better google ranking and consistent uptimes. I have chosen HostPapa as their prices are relatively competitive considering what they offer with free SSL certificate and with their 24/7 support via email, phone and live chat. I am really impressed with their great customer service and sorting out my issues so far.
In addition, Consistent uptimes is very important which HostPapa avoid downtime with 99.9 percent uptime.
Use HTTPS on your site:
An HTTPS connection is a more secure way of browsing the web. Many services now have HTTPS as a requirement.
It might be thought that HTTPS would make your site slower, since it takes some time to encrypt and decrypt all data. However, a lot of efficiency improvements to HTTP are only available when you use HTTPS.
As a result, HTTPS will actually make your site faster for almost all visitors and allow you to take advantage of new features that improve search rankings and can increase site speed and performance.
Keep WordPress and plugins updated:
Always use the most recent versions of WordPress and all the plugins you have active on your site. Both your website speed optimization and your website security will improve.
Keep your site PHP updated:
PHP is the coding language WordPress is built on, and its version is set at the server-level by your hosting company.
Updating to the latest supported version of PHP will retain visitors better and making your website more effective otherwise they will leave if site pages take too long to load.
Your WordPress site can be faster and more secure as the latest version of PHP is more efficient. Updating to the latest supported version (currently 7.4) can deliver a huge performance increase; up to 3 or 4x faster for older versions. As a result of a faster website, your site will be rewarded by search engines, so you’ll rank higher in search
Delete or deactivate what you don’t use:
Delete all themes apart from the one you use and the default WordPress theme, delete the plugins you don’t use and finally deactivate all plugins that you use only occasionally.
Use a lightweight theme:
Themes can be bulky. They feature a lot of graphics, custom code structures, and sometimes not necessary JavaScript libraries.
In order to check your website Speed, you can use Pingdom Tools and test one of your pages or in PageSpeed Insight.
Optimize your site for mobile:
Google has separated desktop from mobile search and sites that are unresponsive or lack mobile and responsive optimisation will be penalised in mobile searches.To check how optimized your site is, you can use Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
Optimize images on the site:
It has been demonstrated in detail in ‘Using optimized media’ section in SEO strategy above. It is not recommended to upload images that are bigger than they need to be. Most themes have max settings when it comes to the size of image that can be displayed in a blog post or page.
Normally image optimization is done via adobe photoshop. However, you can optimize your images by using Optimole, which takes your images and optimizes them automatically and picks the right image size for the visitor’s browser and viewport which is another way to make your blog load faster.
Pick the right image type:
JPG and PNG are two of the most common image types on the web. Use JPGs for photos and complex graphics, PNGs for simple graphics.