1. Choose the Right Shared Hosting Provider
The quality of the hosting provider makes quite a difference in the performance of your website. While choosing a shared hosting provider, keep in mind uptime reliability, customer support, server speed, and what they offer in terms of technology such as PHP versions, SSD storage, etc.
Make sure that your hosting service at least has a 99.9% uptime guarantee, plus excellent customer support. Choose one that also has optimized servers for your needs in CMS or websites, which can make quite a difference.
2. Implement Caching for Fast Loading
Caching plays a very important role in optimizing your website’s performance. This retains the copies of all your web pages, so that whenever visitors return to your site it will load quickly without pressurizing the server.
Enable browser caching to store your static files in your users’ browsers. Page caching stores static HTML files so that your site loads faster. For WordPress sites, you can easily implement the above techniques with the help of popular caching plugins like WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.
3. Optimize Your Images
Large images are among the most major culprits when it comes to slowing down website load times. To improve page speed, you will have to optimize your images by reducing the file size without sacrificing quality.
Compress images with TinyPNG or JPEG-Optimizer. Also, use proper file formats (JPEG for photos, PNG for graphics, WebP for better compression), and ensure that images appear at an appropriate resolution and dimensions. Using responsive images via the srcset attribute also ensures images load at appropriate size based on the user’s device.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributes your website’s content across multiple servers around the world, ensuring that users download content from the server nearest to them. This reduces latency and speeds up the loading process.
Cloudflare, KeyCDN, and StackPath are excellent CDN providers that can help reduce the load on your shared hosting server, improve load times, and enhance your website’s global reach.
5. Minimize and Optimize CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Too much CSS, JavaScript, and HTML inflates page size and slows down your website. Minifying scrubs these files of unnecessary characters such as spaces and comments, which reduces the file size and helps performance.
You can use plugins like Autoptimize for WordPress or online tools like CSS Minifier, JSCompress, and HTML Minifier to automate this process and speed up your site.
6. Enable GZIP Compression
GZIP compresses your website’s text-based files (such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript) before they are sent over to a visitor’s browser; this makes it faster to transfer and reduces page load time. To enable GZIP compression in your shared hosting, add this code to the.htaccess file: bash CopyEdit # Enable GZIP compression <IfModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript application/json application/xml
This simple optimization can significantly enhance the loading time of your site.
7. Enable Lazy Loading of Images and Videos
Lazy loading means that images, videos, or all other media are loaded upon the event when it comes into the user’s screen view. It enhances the load time because it reduces the amount of data to be loaded upfront, especially for media-heavy sites.
You can also allow the loading of laziness with the help of different plugins in WordPress, like a3 Lazy Load, or, by default, set the attribute loading=”lazy” for HTML <img> and <iframe> tags.
8. Optimize Your Database
As time goes by, the database gathers lots of garbage, old post revisions, trashed posts, comments marked as spam, etc., which may slow down your website performance. Cleaning and optimization will keep your site at the highest level of performance.
For WordPress, plugins such as WP-Optimize and WP-Sweep can help clean up your database and remove any bloat. Also, consider running regular optimizations on your database tables to improve query performance.
9. Limit the Number of Plugins
While plugins can extend the functionality of your website, they can also cause performance issues, particularly if they are poorly coded or too numerous. Too many plugins can slow down your site, so it’s essential to:
Regularly audit your plugins and retire or delete those not needed.
Use lightweight plugins that do one thing well instead of a feature-packed, heavy plugin.
Replace plugins with custom code where you can for tasks that are simple enough not to be worth adding another plugin for, like light SEO tasks or adding a small feature.
By limiting the amount of plugins, you minimize how hard your hosting resources have to work, which in turn improves website performance.
10. Update PHP to 7.4 or above
PHP is the language your WordPress site runs on. Generally, older versions of PHP are slower and less secure, so you should always upgrade to the latest stable version wherever possible.
Most hosting providers now support PHP 7.4 or higher, which offers some great performance improvements compared to earlier versions. You can often upgrade your PHP version via your hosting control panel-cPanel or similar.
11. Optimize Your Website’s Theme
It is important to understand that some theme you apply can considerably make your website behave differently in performance. Many featured, complicated themes may be really heavy and hence slow down your site. Concerning this point, to assure better performance you should:
Apply a lightweight theme-themes such as GeneratePress, Astra, or Hello Elementor, are lightweight, and considered fast.
Kill unused elements in the theme-disable the features of that theme which are not in use, such as some extra widgets or animations.
Minify CSS and JavaScript files used by the theme. A fast-optimized theme means that even when your website is on shared hosting, it’s going to load faster.
12. Website Performance Monitoring and Testing
You will ensure the website stays on track only with periodic testing, including regular assessment of how long it loads. Such analysis would include suggestions as provided by resources like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom regarding a website’s actual performance.
Test your website to ensure no such bottleneck starts occurring that results in bad performance.
Conclusion
While the optimization on shared hosting is more complicated compared to the higher plans, with the proper techniques, you can definitely have a fast and reliable website up and running without needing to upgrade to the higher, more expensive hosting plans. Here are 12 pro tips to make your website run smoothly, load fast, and deliver an excellent user experience-all within a low budget.
