Shared hosting is an ideal solution for those with small websites who want low-cost hosting that comes with plenty of features. While it’s also great for WordPress websites, the limited CPU, RAM and storage means it is never going to deliver the same performance as more advanced options like VPS, dedicated servers, or the cloud. For WordPress users to get the most from their shared hosting, they will need to optimise its performance. In this post, we explain the various ways to do this.
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The importance of WordPress optimisation
While WordPress makes it incredibly easy to build professional and highly functional websites, the way it works, by having a core program running alongside a theme and a range of plugins, makes it data heavy. In other words, when users visit your WordPress site, a lot of data needs to be sent between your server and the user’s browser. The more data that you need to send, the longer it takes your site to load and respond to user activity. With the limited resources available on shared hosting, this can impact the site’s performance when there are lots of visitors.
The big issue with poor performance is that it slows your site down, giving users a less-than-satisfactory experience. This can lead to visitors leaving your site and looking elsewhere. The longer it takes your site to load, the more visitors you will lose. Additionally, search engines take site speed into consideration when ranking websites in search results. The slower your site, the harder it will be to rank well, potentially causing fewer people to visit your site. As the combination of a loss in traffic and increased abandonment can have a serious impact on your business, it is vital to improve WordPress speed. Here are some of the key ways to optimise WordPress shared hosting.
Make the most of WordPress, read: What WordPress Can Do for You in 2024
Remove plugins you do not need
Plugins are great for adding functionality to your website, but each one you install increases the amount of data your server needs to send. When you have many plugins installed, the combined effect can seriously slow down your site’s loading and response times. If any plugins are not vital, then uninstalling them can have a positive impact on performance.
Additionally, you can replace essential plugins with lightweight alternatives that use less data. For instance, if you are using a plugin with lots of features, e.g., Jetpack, but you only need one or two of those features, using a different plugin could be more data efficient. You could also look for a single, multi-purpose plugin that can combine the functionality of several current plugins, thus helping to streamline your data.
Choose a lightweight theme
Choosing a lightweight theme has a similar effect as using a lightweight plugin that we mentioned in the last section. The demand for ever more sophisticated websites means that some of the themes available today are packed full of features and customisation options. In practice, there’s a good chance you will not need all the features on offer or want to make use of all the customisations. Taking the time to find a theme that has just the features and look you need, without all the unnecessary embellishments, can reduce the burden on your server.
Utilise gzip compression
Compression, sometimes referred to as zipping, involves restructuring or modifying data so that it can be shrunk in size. If you have ever downloaded large files from the internet and they have arrived with a zipped file icon, these are compressed files. To use them, they need to be unzipped and restored to their original format. As the compressed data is smaller in size it can travel quicker, thus speeding up transfer times. Website compression works in the same way, shrinking your website data so that it can load quickly. Gzip is a universally accepted way of compressing data and can reduce its size by up to 90%. This can have a considerable impact on performance for data heavy sites.
Enhance your WordPress site, read: 8 Indispensable Plugins for WordPress Functionality
Implement caching
Cashing involves leaving the unchanging or static parts of your website on your users’ computers so that if they revisit, they won’t have to download them again. Static elements do not need server-side processing and so can be stored in the browser cache and prerendered in the browser, speeding up loading times. This means the only things that the server needs to send to these users is dynamic content, such as personalisation, new content and so forth.
Allow lazy loading
Users abandon websites when what they see on their screens takes a long time to load. Delays to what appears on the screen can be caused by the browser downloading bits of the website that are hidden further down the page. Lazy loading overcomes this issue by prioritising the loading of what’s visible on the device’s screen. Only when this is fully loaded will it begin to load what’s below. In essence, therefore, lazy loading speeds up the delivery of the part of the website that matters most to the user, thus reducing abandonment and bounce rates.
Take advantage of a content delivery network (CDN)
It’s not only how much data your website transmits that has an impact on speed, the distance it has to travel also has an effect. As websites can potentially have visitors from the other side of the world, this means that loading times for those further away can be considerably longer than for those nearby.
A CDN is like an international cache service. It stores your website’s static elements in data centres in different geographical regions ensuring that wherever a visitor is coming from, the data takes the shortest route and arrives quickly. Although dynamic data will still need to be sent from your own server, the reduction in data size by using a CDN means it will arrive quicker than sending the entire website data
Keep your site protected, read: 7 Easy Ways to Strengthen WordPress Security
Use images with smaller data sizes
Images are key features of websites, especially for online retailers and businesses with extensive portfolios. However, image files tend to be large in data size and can slow down loading times. One of the main problems is that website owners often use images with unnecessarily high pixel densities, which makes the file size incredibly large. Website images can be any size on the page, but to keep file size low, they should be either .png or .jpg files and have a pixel density of no more than 72 dpi. There are several plugins that will optimise the images on your site automatically, saving you the trouble of doing it manually.
Opt for WordPress Hosting
If you want to remain with shared hosting but would like a hosting plan that is optimised to boost the performance of WordPress websites, then eukhost’s WordPress Hosting is the ideal option for you. Besides high-speed Apache and NGINX server technology, lightning-fast Intel-Xeon processors and SSD drives, the plans also come with WP Accelerated, a suite of advanced technologies that considerably improve performance. Its features include static full-page cache, which slashes load times by up to 80%; mobile-optimised cache, which boosts load times on mobiles; and HTTP/2 Push, which can further improve speed by up to 50%. Other performance-enhancing features include pre-caching, Google font optimisation, lazy loading, code minification and database optimisation and cleanup. With these features combined, our WordPress Hosting plans offer everything you need to optimise WordPress performance.
Conclusion
For WordPress websites on shared hosting, optimising performance is vital to ensure your site loads quickly, avoids user abandonment and ranks better in search engine results. By following the measures discussed in this article, you will be able to optimise WordPress shared hosting and improve WordPress speed.
Looking to upgrade to WordPress Hosting? Besides enhancing performance, our plans offer rock-solid security, easy multi-site management, a plugin & themes manager, a staging and synchronisation tool, GIT Access, 24/7 support and the WordPress Toolkit which eases and enhances site management. For more information, visit our WordPress Hosting page.
