With WordPress being used by more webmasters and bloggers around the world than any other content management system, it comes as no surprise that there is ample development surrounding the platform. From plugins to themes, just about anything you desire can be found in one package or another. However, not all WordPress elements are ideal when it comes to maintaining speed and efficiency for your website. In addition, the lack of adding key components to any WordPress installation can significantly affect speed. In the following article, we’ll discuss some of the newer and more important ways in which you can alter WordPress to ensure optimal speed for your visitors.

Evaluate Plugin Selection

With so many plugins to consider for any WordPress project, it’s hard to know ahead of time which ones will work as intended and which ones will not. Because of this, we may inevitably install multiple or even dozens of plugins that don’t pan out in terms of performance. If these plugins remain installed – or worse, activated – then that can wreak havoc on your overall website speed. Please take the time to begin evaluating installed plugins one by one in order to figure out which ones are old news and which ones are truly being used. With this information sorted, you’ll be able to remove the offenders in question and start pinging search engines and visitors alike with faster loading times.

Use Responsive Design

The age of one size fits all web design and themes is long gone, so adapting to changing times is essential for a number of reasons. As it relates to speed, a potential majority of your visitors could be accessing your site through mobile devices, making it more difficult for them to adequately read or load pages if they are served up via themes that are calibrated only for desktops. Responsive web design will allow the site to determine which type of device is accessing it, and will provide a theme and design best suited for this device. This will help ensure that content loads in the most efficient way possible for mobile users in particular, who shouldn’t be left waiting for all traditional elements of a website to load.

Tweak Your Images

Multimedia is a huge part of loading times for your users, so it only makes sense to eliminate as much of this loading time as possible through optimization. With a variety of image editing and compression tools available on the web, most images can be substantially reduced in size without lowering the overall quality. There are even WordPress plugins that will automatically intercept uploads to your WordPress site and reduce their file size while being uploaded. Remember that all of this content is pinging search engines in one way or another, and search engines tend to be less forgiving of sites that take longer to load for users. In addition, metrics are pinged back to these search engines whenever a larger than average number of users leave your site due to slow loading times.