Speed up and make your Wordpress website more sustainable by decluttering

Most Wordpress websites have the same problem: slow loading speeds which causes most visitors to leave and find another alternative instead, but luckily it doesn’t have to be like that. What if I told You that You can speed up your Wordpress website’s loading speed significantly just by doing some decluttering?

In this article we will go through the most important places you can declutter on your website in order to achieve faster loading speeds. Remember: There is no magic trick to making your website faster. It happens because of a mix of bloated content, unoptimized media, too many or too heavy plugins and giant unoptimized themes.

What is the optimal loading speed goal?

I have seen many statistics and researches done over the past years, but almost every single one of them have one thing in common: The maximum loading speed should be 3 seconds.

According to almost every study your website needs to load and show the first paint within three seconds in order to keep the visitor there. You see we are spoiled and we hate to wait, therefore if it takes too long time to load a website, we rather want to take the extra time to go back and locate a new and faster loading website. Therefore it is good to keep in mind that 3 seconds should be your overall goal and when we mention overall it is not only from your location. If your server is located in London for example, then it also needs to load and be ready within 3 seconds if a person from India is visiting your website. Longer distances requires longer travel time.

Remove unnecessary plugins from your Wordpress website

The first thing you can do to speed up your website is to remove unused, unnecessary and heavy plugins from your Wordpress website.

Every plugin installed takes up space on your SSD drive and if it is running in the background it will use up RAM and CPU unnecessary. When the plugin is running in the background it will require your server to use more energy which is both polluting and also slowing down your website.

Be critical and go through all of your plugins. Ask yourself: Do i really need this plugin and does it do anything good for my website? If you can answer no to these questions you better delete the plugin. Deleting the plugin will free up space and power which all gives you more speed in the end and it will also help making your website more sustainable/environmental friendly.

Remove unnecessary scripts and style sheets

When you have walked yourself through the long list of plugins you can start looking for unnecessary scripts and style sheets to delete. Of cause you shouldn’t be removing the ones that your website really needs, but lets pretend you added the Google Tag Manager script but it served no purpose and you haven’t used it, then your website would be better off without it.

If you have installed a Wordpress theme on your website, chances are that there will be tons of unused CSS in the stylesheets that came with the theme. By going through the style sheets you will be able to detect things here and there that isn’t used anywhere on your website. It’s not easy to find CSS that is unused so every time you find things to delete, you have to test the effect and check if anything broke when you removed the styles.

Find yourself a light Wordpress theme

Removing unnecessary scripts and styles can be hard and take long time. If you are looking for an easier option finding yourself a lightweight Wordpress theme might be the way to go.

Many themes bought through websites such as themeforest comes bloated because they already from the beginning contains styles from 1-20 different designs depending on which theme you choose. Finding the right lightweight Wordpress theme can be hard, but once you do you will see significant changes to your loading speeds. The theme you should be looking for is simple/minimalistic, only contains 1 layout option and comes without tons of animations.

Wrapping up

Decluttering your Wordpress website from unused plugins, scripts and styles will speed up your website’s loading speed. The less data your browser has to download and process the faster it will go.

Decluttering your Wordpress website will cause less data to be downloaded and processed, which also makes your website more sustainable. The internet is a big polluter and if it was a country it would be the 6th worst polluter in the world. By making our websites as lightweight as possible and host them using green renewable energy we can lower the impact the internet has and together make the situation better.

If you would like to read more about sustainable and renewable web hosting, please read our article specifically about this topic here: https://sustainablewww.org/principles/what-is-green-web-hosting-and-why-should-you-use-it-in-2021

Author

Michael Andersen

I am a self-taught and highly passionate web developer currently living in Sweden, where I use my skills to make the internet a better place through ethical and sustainable web design.