Lightning Fast Websites
Top 5 Trade Secrets
#1 Use Premium Hosting
Most people cannot understand difference between web hosting performance but everybody understands price. So providers compete on price and most of them are cheap and low quality.
High quality hosting isn’t even expensive. I use Kinsta because it is widely recognized as the industry leader for WordPress sites. It costs about $15 a month more than bargain web hosting services, but if you are running a business this cost is more than worth it.
#2 Fast theme and plugins
A theme is a collection of files that work together to determine the design and functionality of a WordPress website. Plugins are pieces of software that add functionality to a site.
Every wordpress site uses them but they are not created equal.
By using the ones that are optimized for speed and using very few plugins in general your site will be much faster.
#3 Optimize Images For Speed
Images are normally the thing that slows down websites the most. There are 2 things you can do to minimize the file size.
First shrink all images down to the size they will be on the website. For example if your image is 1000×1000 pixels, but it will only ever be 500×500 on the website then shrink it before uploading.
Second use the webp image format. Google invented a new image format called webp that can often shrink the file size of an image by 50% or more without losing any human detectable resolution.
#4 Use the native editor
WordPress comes with a native website editor called Gutenberg. The only problem is that is kinda hard to use.
Other companies have created website builder plugins that make it easier to build websites. The most popular is Elementor. The problem is that they slow down websites.
I went through the difficult process of learning how to build beautiful websites with the native editor so my sites are faster.
#5 Test Page Speed
Nobody is perfect and everybody makes mistakes. The key is to test actually test your work so you can identify short comings and improve them.
Google provides free tools to test website speed and they will point out areas for improvement. Web developers just need to use them and make the improvements.
