Having your website online is not just enough. You need a website that is fast for the users to interact with. There are a number of things that can either slow down your website or speed it up. Site speed is not exclusively dependent on the server that you are hosting your website.

In this article, we are going to cover what you need to do so as to speed up your website. You could use them to improve your website’s speed.

First of all, you need to check your website speed so that you can know what exactly you ought to work on. For this, we would recommend that you use a tool called GTMetrix.

How to Improve the speed of your website.

1. Use a solid theme.
   The theme you use for your website design will really determine the speed at which your website will load. Not all themes available load at the same speed. Before using a theme ensure you do a bit of research just to determine if the theme is lightweight and quite speedy.
2. Choose a good host.
   When starting out, a shared host might seem like a bargain if you don’t have too many visitors on your website. Check out the most ideal shared hosting packages for your site. But if you have more than 1000 visitors per day, you should use a VPS, or a dedicated server.
3. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
   Content Delivery Network (CDN), takes all the static files you have on your site such as CSS, Javascript, and images, etc and lets the visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible. This works perfectly in improving your website load speed.
   
   You can consider using a CDN like Cloudflare. It is very efficient in improving your website traffic.
4. Optimize images.
   There is an image optimizer owned by Yahoo! called SmushIt that drastically reduces the file size of an image. You should not worry because the quality remains the same, with no interference.
   
   Doing this to every image would be beyond a pain, and incredibly time-consuming. Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. No reason not to install this one.
5. Combining JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
   Using Autoptimize for combining JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Even the cache plugin supports combining those files, but sometimes it breaks JS scripts. Therefore we usually using this plugin for better combining and minifying files.
6. Use a Caching plugin.
   There are a number of WordPress plugins that are quite useful. Among them are the caching plugins. These plugins drastically improve page load time, and the good thing is that they are freely available for use. We recommend using WP Super Cache . Another plugin that you can use performing the same function is  W3 Total Cache .
7. Optimize Your Database.
   Optimizing your database can be a bit tedious if you are doing it manually. To avoid doing lots of manual work you can automate the optimization task by using a plugin called WP-Optimize . This plugin basically optimizes your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) hence reducing their overhead.
   You can as well schedule when you want the database optimization to take place. For this, we would recommend you use WP-DB Manager.
8. Add LazyLoad to your images.
   LazyLoad is the process of having only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window and then, when the visitor scrolls down, the other images begin to load.
   lazyload saves bandwidth and also improves the speed at which your website loads. For this case, you can use a plugin called jQuery Image Lazy Load
9. Keep Your WordPress Site Updated.
   WordPress being an open-source can also be highly vulnerable since it is widely used, As such WordPress Community regularly release updates with an aim of fixing bugs, security vulnerability as well improving its performance in terms of speed among others. Because of that, you should ensure that your theme and plugins are always up to date.
   As the owner of the website, it is entirely your responsibility to keep your WordPress site, theme, and plugins updated to the latest versions. Not doing so may make your site slow and unreliable, and make you vulnerable to security threats.
10. Use Latest PHP Version
    The main language used on WordPress is PHP. The latest PHP version is five times faster than its predecessors. That’s a huge performance boost that you must take advantage of in order to improve the speed of your website.

That’s it! We hope that you have learnt the actions you need to take from this article so as to improve the speed of your website and its general performance.

You can now proceed to try them out and experience the best loading speed that you have ever thought of. Remember to test your website speed before and after implementing these best practices. You’ll be surprised how these changes will work to boost your website performance.