WordPress is undeniably one of the most efficient and popular content management system (CMS). This platform is used by businesses belonging to various industry verticals. Reports have found that a majority of the sites on the internet use WordPress.

Businesses of different scales use WordPress for promoting, advertising, and selling their products and services.

It goes without saying that the performance of this platform is essential for the overall success of the website. If you go online, you’ll find a myriad of tips and tricks to speed up the WordPress site posted by industry experts. As, optimizing your WordPress website for boosting the overall performance will help your website improve user experience and also rank higher in the search engine ranking.

As per the reports, websites that load slowly have higher abandonment rates. Just a few seconds of delay can turn the customer away from the website. This can have a huge impact on your business and also affect the long-term relationship with users. Given the high competition in the digital world, it has become critical for businesses to ensure that their website performs fast.

Online businesses regularly conduct speed tests and take certain measures to maintain the speed and performance of the site. However, there are plenty of factors that can slow the site’s speed and force users to abandon the site due to the slow speed. Additionally, search engine giants such as Google also give better rankings to websites that load faster and are well optimized. The search engine ranking can have a direct impact on the online presence of your WordPress site. Websites with high rankings get more traffic and better conversion rates.

Today we’re sharing a few useful tips with you that can come in handy. With these tips, you can boost your WordPress site’s performance to a great extent. We’re letting you know about the best ways to break down the HTTP requests to be able to increase the overall load time of the site. Listed below are some of the tried and tested ways to boost the performance of your WordPress site. From disabling emoji characters, embedding feature to hosting Google fonts, there are plenty of ways to break down the HTTP requests and reduce the latency of your website.

Disable Emojis

A lot of industry experts recommend website development companies and WordPress professionals to limit the number of HTTP calls for improving the speed of the WordPress site. While, there are numerous ways to do so, disabling emojis is considered to be the most efficient way to increase the site speed. Emojis were introduced with the release of the WordPress 4.2 version. This feature allowed site owners to spice up the appearance of the website. However, using emojis on the posts, posts or blogs can slow down the speed of the website.

That is the reason why, most experts urge site owners to disable emojis on their website to enhance the performance of the WordPress website and ensure better user experience. The wp-emoji-release.min.js file shows the numerous emoji icons on this platform. The choice of disabling emojis is completely yours. Disabling this feature may prevent you from adding fun emoji characters on the site, however, it will also help you speed up the website and ensure that the users spend accurate time exploring your website. Listed below are the two simple ways to disable emojis.

1. Code to Disable Emoji

To disable emoji characters from your site, all you need to do is put a code in the functions.php file. Here is the code that you can use to disable emojis and increase the site’s performance and speed.

/**
* Disable the emoji’s
*/
function disable_emojis() {
remove_action( ‘ks29so_head’, ‘print_emoji_detection_script’, 7 );
remove_action( ‘admin_print_scripts’, ‘print_emoji_detection_script’ );
remove_action( ‘ks29so_print_styles’, ‘print_emoji_styles’ );
remove_action( ‘admin_print_styles’, ‘print_emoji_styles’ );
remove_filter( ‘the_content_feed’, ‘ks29so_staticize_emoji’ );
remove_filter( ‘comment_text_rss’, ‘ks29so_staticize_emoji’ );
remove_filter (‘ks29so_mail’, ‘ks29so_staticize_emoji_for_email’);
add_filter( ‘tiny_mce_plugins’, ‘disable_emojis_tinymce’ );
}

add_action( ‘init’, ‘disable_emojis’ );

/**
* Filter function used to remove the tinymce emoji plugin.
*
*@param array $plugins
@return array                     Difference between the two arrays
*/
function disable_emojis_tinymce( $plugins ) {
    if ( is_array( $plugins ) ) {
        return array_diff( $plugins, array( ‘wpemoji’ ) );
    } else {
         return array();
    }
}

2. Plugin to Disbale Emoji

Alternatively, you can use a plugin to disable the emoji feature from your WordPress site. There are multiple plugins available that site owners can use to disable this feature.

However, while picking a plugin for the purpose of disabling emoji, it is crucial to pay attention to the total size of the plugin. It is highly recommended to use lightweight plugins. These plugins do not occupy much space or lower the speed of the website. One of the best lightweight plugins that you can use for your WordPress site is Disable Emojis.

Disable Embeds

Embeds were released with the 4.4 version of WordPress. This is an innovative feature that allows site owners to embed media from other sites. Embedding media like audio and video from external sites to your WordPress site will help you engage the users. However, the biggest drawback of this feature is that it can slow down the website’s performance to a great extent. It is shown as wp-embed.min.js script and while it is a great feature there are other ways to embed media from sites such as Youtube, Twitter, etc. Like emoji, embeds can also be disabled using either codes or plugins. Here we’ve mentioned the ways to disable embeds and increase performance and page responsiveness of your website.

1. Code to Disable Embeds

This is similar to the process of disabling emoji. Just put the following code into functions.php file to disable the embed feature.

// Remove WP embed script
Function speed_stop_loading_wp_embed() {
         If (!is_admin() ) {
             ks29so_deregister_script( ‘wp-embed’);
         }
}

Add_action( ‘init’, ‘speed_stop_loading_wp_embed’);

2. Disable Embeds with Plugins

Using plugins is also an effective way to disable embeds feature from this CMS platform. There is an abundance of plugins for disabling the embed feature.

However, not all are lightweight and using the one that takes up space may do more harm than good. One of the top-rated plugins that you can use is Disable Embeds. With the size of 3KB, this plugin boasts multiple useful features. By using this specific plugin, you can avert other websites from embedding media from your WordPress site, and stop all the script related to the embed feature.

Implement Caching

Implementing caching is a time-tested way to improve the overall performance of your website and enhance user experience. Caching not only eases the server load and allows your website to handle traffic without any delay or hassle. By implementing caching, you can improve the load time of your website to a great extent. For this purpose, you can use a myriad of plugins. However, if you’re looking for a lightweight plugin that is both inexpensive and robust, then Cache Enabler plugin is an ideal choice.

Created by KeyCDN, the size of this plugin is 15.4 KB and it ensures time-saving caching and helps your website load faster. A lot of WordPress experts have tried implementing caching through this plugin and successfully improved the load time of the website. In a majority of instances, the HTML DOC load time improved by notches.

Try using this performance-enhancing tip to give your website’s speed boost and offer faster and better experience to the site visitors.

Use a Content Delivery Network

Once your have disabled emoji and embeds and implemented caching, it is best to move on to the next tip that can help speed up the website’s performance. Content Delivery Network (CDN) serves cached static content such as videos, JavaScript, and images from multiple servers. It has been found that using content delivery network on the WordPress site is a surefire way to enhance the speed of the site.

For proper optimization and site performance, it is essential to use the content delivery network service. It helps reduce the time taken to load a particular page on the website. You can either use a free CDN or a paid one. One of the best CDN that you can use for your site is the WordPress CDN Enabler.

Lightweight and packed with multiple critical features, this particular plugin is free of cost. Just enable the CDN setting to reap the rewards of this incredible feature. Once you have done that, you will be able to see a major difference in the total load time of the website.

Remove Query Strings

Removing query strings is another effective way to improve website speed. Reports have found that query strings cause the website to load slowly. Removing them from the static resources of your site will help give a performance boost to your site. When it comes to removing query settings, there are three different ways that you can try. You can use code, plugin or content delivery network to ignore query settings.

1. Use Code to Remove Query Strings

The below stated code can help you reduce your site’s latency.

Just put the below code in the functions.php.file.

function _remove_script_version( $src ) {
        $parts = explode( ‘?ver’, $src );
        return $parts[0];
}

add_filter( ‘script_loader_src’, ‘_remove_script_version’, 15, 1 );
add_filter( ‘style_loaded_src’, ‘_remove_script_version’, 15 ); 

2. Use Plugin to Remove Query Strings

A plugin can also be used for removing query strings and boosting website performance. One of the most used plugins is Query Strings Remover. It is lightweight and effectively removes query strings from the network.

3. Cache and Ignore Query Strings with a CDN

While using codes and plugins can help you remove query strings, using content delivery network is considered to be the most effective one. It is the method that is mostly recommended by WordPress experts. KeyCDN makes it rather easy and convenient for you to remove query strings. Without the hassle of entering codes in the function file or using plugins, you can just use content delivery network to eliminate the query strings from the network to enable faster load of the website.

Host Google Fonts

Google fonts is a part of the WordPress theme that usually impacts the overall site performance and speed. The DNS lookups involved with Google fonts can adversely affect the speed of your site. Mentioned below is an example of different fonts.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Merriweather
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Montserrat

merriweather-v13-latin-700.woff
merriweather-v13-latin-700.woff
merriweather-v13-latin-700italic.woff
merriweather-v13-latin-700italic.woff2
merriweather-v13-latin-900.woff
merriweather-v13-latin-900.woff2
merriweather-v13-latin-900italic.woff
merriweather-v13-latin-900italic.woff2 
merriweather-v13-latin-italic.woff
merriweather-v13-latin-italic.woff2
merriweather-v13-latin-regular.woff
merriweather-v13-latin-regular.woff2
montserrat-v7-latin-700.woff
montserrat-v7-latin-700.woff2
montserrat-v7-latin-regular.woff
montserrat-v7-latin-regular.woff2 

Experts urge site owners to lower the number of DNS lookups generated to tackle the slow speed problem. This is where content delivery network can come to your site’s rescue. You can just migrate the fonts to the CDN and improve the overall site performance. The CDN Enabler plugin can be used for hosting Google fonts as well. At first, you will be required to disable this feature in the WordPress theme.

Disable Gravatars

By now, the number of DNS lookups should have come down. Lastly, the thing that you need to do to boost site performance is disable gravatars. Just access the dashboard of your WordPress site and find the secure.avatar.com option. Uncheck it to disable gravatars. This is the last HTTP request that you need to fix to optimize your WordPress site and help it load faster.

The above stated steps can help you tackle the slow speed problem of the WordPress site in an effective and timely manner. Follow these steps and use the right code and plugins to disable the features that slow down your website. When choosing plugins online, make sure to pick the ones that are lightweight and come with multiple features to ensure optimum results. You can fix your WordPress site’s performance issue or hire professionals to take care of the latency problem.

Website development companies and WordPress experts specialize in such tasks. They can implement the right changes and disable the features that harm the overall performance of the WordPress site. Use their services and boost your site’s performance and help ensure a seamless experience for the users.