One of the top-most priorities of businesses is for their website to take minimum loading time. This helps in securing website ranking on search engines like Google, Bing. This, in short, is server response time. So, how does one ensure reducing server response time for a smooth-sailing experience for visitors? Let us take a look at some of the useful ways to reduce server response time.
5 Useful Ways to Reduce Server Response Time for a WordPress Website
1. Reliable web hosting provider
This is the most important step. Most of the developers may want to go ahead with a cheap web hosting provider to save a couple of bucks, but it is crucial to note that in most cases, their servers are very slow and that can heavily affect your website’s performance, thereby affecting user performance. While choosing a good web hosting provider try to consider a web hosting provider that can offer affordable web hosting services and robust website performance.
2. Avoid heavy plugins
If you are hosting your website on shared servers, it may cause account suspension because 99% of web hosting providers allocate you specific resources and you need to manage your WordPress website just with those resources. So, avoid using heavy plugins as the first step to reducing server response time.
3. Image optimization
Due to some high-resolution images being heavy, the rendering process can take much longer thereby making it slower for your website to open or load. If you are using heavy images, it will also cause high bandwidth consumption and load on CPU, as a result, it will affect the server response time greatly. Ensure to optimize your website’s images in a way that makes it easier for your website to load. You can do it in the following ways:
- Name your images in plain language and descriptively
- Optimize your ALT attributes carefully
- Reduce the file size of your images
- Optimize your thumbnails
- Use image sitemaps
- Choose your product angles and image dimensions wisely
4. Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Another way to reduce the server response is by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). It is a group of servers which are distributed geographically and provide speedy delivery of web content by bringing the content closer to the users. A lot of CDNs are available in the market with heavy pricing and free plans. Choose what’s best for your business depending on your business’s needs, goals and objectives.
5. Optimize your WordPress Database
Optimization of WordPress databases may create a major impact on your server response time, i.e. website performance. All the contents of your WordPress website will be stored in the MySQL database in the form of tables which you are able to access from cPanel > Phpmyadmin. WordPress itself stores logs, temporary information, as a result, your database gets too heavy in size and when users request any content, the MySQL database may take some time to process it and provide the required output.
The Bottom Line
As there is fierce competition in the market, ensuring that your website loads easily and quickly is a basic necessity and the key differentiator. Moreover, having a reduced server response time is one of the most important aspects of having an online business. Only when your website loads smoothly without much delay, will it achieve good search engine rankings while offering the users an easy and trouble-free experience. On average, if your website is taking longer than 3 seconds to load, around 40% of your visitors will abandon your website. Therefore, begin with choosing a reliable web hosting provider.
