Speed up WordPress Site – website viewers browse content and they need it fast and efficiently. As people spend more time looking at different content and data, the attention spans have dropped significantly as the technology has advanced.

They are continually exploring out the next mouthful of information, trailing only for a few seconds before jumping on to the next piece.

As the owner of a website, it means that you only have a few seconds to grab people’s attention and convince them to stay on your website. If your website is slow, they might leave it before it even loads up completely which could result in a loss of conversions.

This means that you lose out on the opportunity to sell products, services or even signing up people to your mailing list.

Furthermore, Google now considers site speed as one of the ranking factors in its ranking algorithms. It means that with the slow speed of your website, not only could you lose visitor conversions, but you could also lose rankings on the various search engines – meaning even lesser traffic.

The realization of this fact leaves many website developers and business owners questioning how to speed up a WordPress site.

There are ways to improve your site speed through proper management of your theme, plugins, images, and other content on your website. While the internet is filled with information on how to do this, there are no properly structured methods on how to do this and it can be really confusing trying to find everything you need in one place.

So today, we are going to share with you everything we know about speeding up WordPress, over 11 years of collected experience, and lessons learned in one ultimate guide. You could be starting to use WordPress CMS or an experienced developer, we assure you that you will discover something useful in this guide.

We will dive deep into the practical steps that you can take right now to notice improvements on your WordPress website. We will also share some of the valuable resources that have helped us in our venture to speed up WordPress sites.

The primary reasons for a slow WordPress website

With all the website base tools, people add fancy themes, plugins, and many other elements to make the website look distinct and help the company/personal branding shine through. Regrettably, these types of tools can slow things down irrespective of the content management system being used.

• Web Hosting – When your website hosting server is not correctly configured, it can affect your website page speed.
• WordPress Configuration – If you don’t set in your WordPress site to serve cached pages after minifying and merging all the CSS & JS files, then it will overload your server with a lot of requests and thus causing your website speed to be really slow.
• Page Size – Apart from CSS & JS files, the page size increases mainly because of large unoptimized images.
• Bad Plugins – Installing badly coded plugins can significantly slow down the website speed.
• External scripts – Lastly, external scripts such as analytics code, google fonts, ads, etc can also have a huge effect on your website speed performance.

Let’s fix all these issues on a WordPress website to increase the page load speed.

1. Select a good hosting server

Initially, a shared hosting server might seem like a bargain (“unlimited disk space!”), however, It is attained at another cost: incredibly slow site speed and regular downtime during high traffic periods.

Shared hosting servers as they are known, are shared by many people who have purchased the hosting with the specific company. While you have your own control panel, behind this, the same server resources are shared by many.

We are not suggesting that everyone should purchase the VPS or dedicated servers, however, you shouldn’t aim at getting the cheapest hosting servers as well.

If you read across various Facebook groups and web forums, you see suggestions of various hosting servers. When you see the pricing of those recommended hosting servers, you might find them very expensive.

On the other hand, we are pretty sure Google understands that not everyone can purchase expensive hosting solutions.

Before you delve into purchasing a more expensive hosting server than your current one, we will highly suggest that you optimize your website completely and then see if your hosting server is the real culprit to your website loading up slowly.

We have achieved great loading speeds on many hosting servers by just following the guide and checklist that we have shared in this article.

One thing that you should make sure is that the hosting server runs on at least PHP 7.2 version.

2. Use a lightweight fast loading WordPress theme

Everyone loves a brand new website design, however, don’t go out and grab the one with all the shiny features. Every element you see in a readymade WordPress theme, it has some impact on the overall speed of your website. With thousands of website themes out there on various marketplaces, there are both good and bad ones.

How are you supposed to know which theme to choose? We suggest going with one of the following two options:

• A fast lightweight theme that is coded with only the features and elements you need and nothing more.
• A feature-rich WordPress theme, however, one in which you can disable specific features that you are not going to use.

You should be able to disable elements such as Google fonts, Font Awesome icons, sliders, galleries, video, popups, maps and parallax scripts, etc if you don’t use them by default in the theme. We can’t show you 100 different methods to remove such elements through coding.

Instead, you should start or change to a WordPress theme that is either lightweight from the beginning or gives you these options. Most of the themes are bloated with features, and accordingly, there will be lots of CSS and JavaScript involved.

So we highly suggest not to go for those shiny readymade themes with a lot of animations or differently styled elements. Most of the people around the world browse websites majorly on their mobile devices. All the animations and jazziness are useless on a mobile device.

You should aim for a simple website with good contrasting colors and fonts. The last bit on your website should be covered with really nice images and videos to convey your products and services to the customers.

2.a. Some advice on choosing the right theme to speed up WordPress site

• Avoid ‘Multi-Purpose’ themes – you will see such themes everywhere. The theme developers try to cater to different business markets and end up adding a lot of features – ultimately bloating the theme code. While you may see different demos of such themes specific to your business, all the different features & elements are coded inside a single theme.
• Choose a theme that is built for your purpose. Select themes that specifically serve the purpose of your business such as a theme for a blog, or eCommerce, landing pages, forums, etc. Don’t get a theme that tries to cater to all businesses’ designs. This reduces the disarrays on a theme and really helps to speed up a WordPress site.
• Choose a theme that doesn’t need multiple additional plugins to work.
• Check for Last Updated Date – properly optimized themes coded by responsible developers will have the theme updated within the last 60 days.
• Theme reviews – also check the number of sales, comments, and reviews to get an overall idea about the quality of the theme.
• Advance audit – run the theme’s demo URL through Pingdom or GTMetrix to find out how many CSS and JS files it loads up. More the number of size of these files, slower the theme could run. You can also check the total page size and the loading speed to get a good idea about the theme.

All the above factors are important while choosing the right theme to get a website on which you won’t have to spend a lot of time to speed it up.

3. Too Many Widgets or Plugins

A lot of website owners tend to get pleased with additional features and functionality on the website. As mentioned in the theme section, any feature added by a WordPress plugin to enhance the look of the website can affect the speed of the website.

A major problem with a lot of website owners is that they try to create a website that they like instead of creating a website for their viewers.

You should never have distracting elements on a website such as fancy animations and styles. Your viewers land up on your website for specific information or to look for a specific product or a service.

The sole purpose of the website should be to guide the visitors to your products, services, contact page, or your newsletter subscription. All the additional features that are not even required could either delay your customers in getting what they want or lose them completely.

Keeping plugins to a minimum is vital to preserving excellent website performance. Also, the quality and functionality of WordPress plugins installed matters far more than the number itself. Sometimes, 10 well-coded plugins wouldn’t affect your website speed and sometimes one poorly coded plugin could ruin your website performance.

4. Always keep your WordPress theme, plugins, and the core WordPress CMS software updated

Website owners are constantly flooded with update notices on all their devices and with time, you tend to become indifferent to all these messages. On the other hand, there are people who get nagged when they see update notifications and press the update button as soon as they see them.

Although, when it comes to WordPress, while you should always make sure to update every aspect of your site, but you also need to know when to do so. Unless it’s a security patch or feature optimization that is released, you don’t always have to update WordPress.

There are times when the latest version of WordPress doesn’t work with your theme or the installed plugins on your website. Or sometimes the latest functionality in the theme or plugin is not supported by your old configured hosting server. When you make updates in such a scenario, your website could break apart. You have to be careful and create a backup before updating anything on your website. You can also hire a company for WordPress website maintenance services.

Ultimately, keeping your site up to date will ensure that it remains fast as well as secure. The core WordPress team is always improving the core software to be faster and better optimized. By updating, you’re ensuring that every aspect of WordPress is running at peak performance.

5. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

Primarily, a CDN (content delivery network), takes all the files you have on your website (CSS, Javascript, and images) and serve them to your website visitors as fast as possible from the servers closest to them. One of the most popular and free CDNs is Cloudflare.

6. Optimize images to speed up WordPress site

The biggest reason we have seen for websites to be running slowly is unoptimized images. We have noticed website owners uploading full-sized images to the website. They neither resize the dimensions of the image according to where they are uploading it on the website nor optimize its actual size. Fortunately, there are WordPress plugins available that can compress images on your website.

There are quite a few combinations available to do this. We love Imagify which is an image compression, optimization, and a WebP image converter as well. While the WebP conversion is free, it has a 25MB limit of optimizing images every month. If you don’t have a lot of images on your website, this is a perfect plugin to optimize images on the website and convert them to WebP.

Other plugin options to optimize your images are reSmush.it (limit of 5MB for each image file), Ewww Optimizer (runs on your own server), Compress JPEG & PNG images (limit of 100 images per month),  ShortPixel Image Optimiser (100 images per month), and WP Smush (which has rave reviews of not fully optimized images).

6.a. Why converting to WebP images is important?

If you have ever used Google’s PageSpeed Insight tool to audit your website, you will see one of the page audit factors as “Serve images in next-gen formats”.

WebP is an image format (just like png and jpg) which is developed by Google. Images in WebP format (.webp) are usually much smaller in size, which ultimately makes websites run faster.

Some outdated browsers and Safari still don’t support WebP images. We have to serve WebP images to browsers that support them and original images to browsers that don’t support WebP images.

A plugin to serve images in WebP format is WebP Express. It has a couple of methods to server WebP images and you can play with its configuration according to your hosting server.

The main idea is to optimize your images and convert them to WebP.

6.b. Responsive images to speed up WordPress site

You also have to make sure that your images are loading up responsively instead of rendering bigger sized images on smaller screen size. WordPress 4.4 and above support responsive images (not scaled down by CSS – which is a browser intensive process that slows down the website speed).

WordPress automatically creates several sizes of each image uploaded to the media library. Then, it includes the available sizes of the images into a srcset attribute, browsers then download the most appropriate size according to the device dimensions and ignore the other sizes.

Right-click on any of the images on this article, and then click on inspect. You will see two things: WebP image being served (if you are using Google Chrome, Firefox) and different image sizes.

7. Optimizing the content on your home page

This not very difficult. Make sure you don’t add a lot of elements and animations on the home page of the website. You want to convey the right message to your site visitors about what the website is about along with the correctly placed ‘Call to Action’ (CTA) buttons.

• Lesser the number of different elements, lesser would be the different HTML entities that add up to the total DOM size. This is another audit factor that you will see on Google’s PageSpeed tool and will help to speed up WordPress sites
• If you show a list of blog posts, show only the excerpts instead of full posts. Then, follow them with “read more” links to the longer version of the blog post.
• Reduce the number of blog posts (excerpts) on pages. Instead of showing 12-15 different blog posts excerpts on a single page, limit them to 5-7.
• Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (include them only in posts)
• A clean home page design will help your site page not only to convert better but load faster as well.

8. Setup Hotlink Protection

Technically, it is possible to use images on your website that have been uploaded on another website – without needing to download and then upload that image to your site. This is called hotlinking. You can simply find the URL of that image you want on on someone else’s website and use the link in your WordPress editor to add an image. This is called Hotlinking.

Unfortunately, for people whose images are hotlinked with this method, they could notice an increase in their server resource usage. Fortunately, you can avoid this from happening to your own server by enabling hotlink protection on your website.

You will need to edit the .htaccess file on your WordPress website’s root folder and paste the following code in it.

#Prevent Hotlinking
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)mydomainname.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteRule \.


Replace mydomainname.com with your website’s actual domain name.

Make sure that you are not using the WordPress admin to edit the .htaccess file. Always edit the website files through SFTP or your hosting server’s admin panel (cPanel, Plesk, etc). The reason is that if you make any mistake while editing the .htaccess file, your website could stop working completely, and then you will ultimately have to open the server admin panel.

9. Optimize your WordPress database, control the number of Revisions stored, Clean up Transients, delete spam comments and empty Trash

All of these things can be done by using a plugin called WP-Optimize plugin, which I run on all of my sites. The other premium option through which you can do all of the above + super optimize your website is WP Rocket. Always take a backup of your website and database before doing any optimization work on the database.

When the database is optimized, it will perform better in serving all the requests the website files make through the browser. This can help a lot to speed up a WordPress site.

You can also limit or completely disable WordPress post revisions on your WordPress website. Use one of the following codes and insert it in your wp-config.php file.

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3 );

You can change the number “3” to the number of revisions you want to be saved.

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

If you set it to the above code, “false or 0” means – do not store any revisions (except the one autosave per post)

The best place to place any such codes in the wp-config.php file is right below the following code line:

define('WP_DEBUG', false);

10. Changing the WordPress memory limit in wp-config.php

WP_MEMORY_LIMIT option allows you to specify the maximum amount of memory that can be consumed by PHP. This setting may sometimes be necessary when you receive a warning/error/ message on your website such as “Allowed memory size of 324xxxxx1 bytes exhausted”.

In such cases, you need to add the following to your wp-config.php file, just before the line that says “That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging.”

define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' );

Another method is to increase the memory limit by creating a php.ini or php5.ini file on the website root folder of your server. Sometimes, both the methods don’t work, and then you have to contact your hosting service provider to increase the memory limit.

11. Use .htaccess file to add various codes in it to speed up your WordPress site

An .htaccess file is a file used on Apache webservers to configure the server software. There are other types of servers such as Nginx, Microsoft’s IIS, and Google’s GWS, however, a larger share of websites run on servers based on Apache and so we have decided to cover this type of server in this post.

Below are a few quick ways that you can improve your load times with your .htaccess file. Snippets of code can be added before #BEGIN WordPress in the .htaccess file.

Note: We recommend backing up the original .htaccess file and testing your website after each change in this file before making the next update. This will avoid issues that may come up on the website while editing the .htaccess file. A single typographical error in the .htaccess file can crash the website.

Also, make sure that you are either using the cPanel admin on your browser or SFTP to edit this file. Don’t edit the .htaccess file using the WordPress admin.

11.a. Enable Gzip and DEFLATE Compression to speed up WordPress website using .htaccess

GZIP is a module on the server for compression and decompression. GZIP compression is enabled on the hosting server-side that allows you to reduce the size of the overall HTML, stylesheets, and JavaScript files.

When GZIP compression is activated, it can help in reducing the overall size of the website page. This not only decreases the time to download the website resources from your hosting server, but it also decreases the data usage for the user client.

By checking whether the “content-encoding: gzip HTTP header” exists or not, a browser finds out if the website server has GZIP enabled or disabled. If the header is detected, it serves up the compressed and smaller files. If the header is not detected, then it serves up the uncompressed files.

If GZIP is not enabled, you will most probably see warnings and errors in speed testing tools such as GTmetrix under the ‘Enable Compression’ section.

Add the following code to your .htaccess file. After adding the code, check, and test your website.

# GZIP Compression Starts
<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</IfModule>>
# GZIP Compression Ends


Not all servers handle gzip without error. If this method does not work on your hosting server, you may want to do this using the deflate instead.

# Compress resources
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript


You can also do the same thing as above using the FilesMatch directive which is a little less messy.

# Or, compress certain file types by extension:
<FilesMatch *.(html|css|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|ico)>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>


Along with GZIP, it’s important to add the ‘Vary: Accept-Encoding HTTP header’ code as well. Failing to do so can cause your website to fail if it is being served through a Content Delivery Network, firewall, or proxy. The vary: Accept-Encoding header tells the browser whether or not the client can handle compressed versions of the content. If this isn’t properly set, you might see a warning that you need to “Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding Header.”

#Set Header Vary: Accept-Encoding
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
<FilesMatch ".(js|css|xml|gz|html)$">
Header append Vary: Accept-Encoding
</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>


11.b. Add Cache-Control and Expires Headers (set Cache Length)

Every script on your WordPress website needs to have an HTTP cache header attached to it which determines when the cache of the file expires. In order to configure this, make sure that your hosting server has the proper cache-controlheaders and expires headers configured.

While both the Cache-Control & Expires headers can be used together, you don’t fundamentally need to add both of the headers. Cache-Control is newer and usually the recommended method.

If you don’t add one of these headers, you will most likely see warnings about requiring to add expires headers or leverage browser caching in speed testing tools.

Some newer optimized hosting servers already have these headers configured. If your server is missing these headers, you can add them manually. You can find this out when you test your website through various PageSpeed tools: Pingdom, GTMetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, and WebPageTest.

Add Cache-Control Header to optimize website communication with the hosting server which ultimately helps to speed up WordPress site:

<filesMatch ".(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|svg|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=84600, public"
</filesMatch>


Add Expires Header in Apache

#EXPIRES HEADER CACHING#
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/svg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"
#EXPIRES HEADER CACHING#


Note: You can only add HTTP cache headers on resources that are hosted on your server. If you are still getting a warning about adding expires headers, that would most probably be for scripts and files that are externally hosted such as Google Analytics script, Youtube video embed scripts, Facebook, and Twitter elements scripts, etc. You can use some plugins such as CAOS or WP-Rocket to host the scripts locally. These plugins definitely help out to solve these PageSpeed scores and also speed up WordPress websites.

11.c. Enable Keep Alive – Speed up WordPress using htaccess

Enabling Keep Alive is another great htaccess trick to speed up a WordPress website. It enables your server and website browser to download resources on a single connection, hence it increases page load speed.

Add the following htaccess code to enable Keep Alive and increase website page speed.

#Enable Kep Alive Start
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Connection keep-alive
</ifModule>
#Enable Kep Alive End


Usually, Keep Alive comes enabled on most of the modern Apache hosting servers, however, if you are using an older Apache versioned server, you can manually enable Keep Alive through htaccess to speed up WordPress sites.

11.d. Enable mod_pagespeed – Increase Page Load Speed

This htaccess trick is another method to increase page speed and to optimize your website running on an Apache server.

Mod_pagespeed module was developed by Google to increase page speed of websites and it can be enabled by adding the following code to the htaccess file.

#Enable Mod_PageSpeed Start
##COMBINE CSS, COMPRESS IMAGES, REMOVE HTML WHITE SPACE AND COMMENTS
<IfModule pagespeed_module>
ModPagespeed on
ModPagespeedEnableFilters rewrite_css,combine_css
ModPagespeedEnableFilters recompress_images
ModPagespeedEnableFilters convert_png_to_jpeg,convert_jpeg_to_webp
ModPagespeedEnableFilters collapse_whitespace,remove_comments
</IfModule>
#Enable Mod_PageSpeed End


12. Remove Query Strings

Remove query strings is a popular warning that people see on speed test tools.

What exactly are query strings and why are there numbers in front of the CSS and JS file names and how does removing query strings from these file paths help to speed up WordPress site?

Developers add version numbers in JS and CSS files to keep a record of what was added in which version of those files. So for example, if a developer updates a CSS file from version 5.6 to 5.7, the URL of the style script may get displayed as https://domainname.com/wp-content/themes/themename/style.css?ver=5.7 instead of the old path which was https://domainname.com/wp-content/themes/themename/style.css?ver=5.6. Note that both these paths/URLs become different because of the version numbers, even if the main path of the actual file is the same.

Version numbers on files are added by WordPress developers to work around caching problems. When the CSS or JS is updated, the version number tells the browser to flush the old cached CSS & JS files and use the newer ones. Some servers and proxy servers are unable to cache query strings. So by removing them, you can sometimes improve your server caching. However, when you remove the version numbers or query strings, the browser wouldn’t be able to identify the change in the updated version and will still display the old cached files.

So whenever you update files on the server, make sure you flush the full cache of the website.

You can add the following code manually to your theme’s functions.php file. Make sure, you do this on your Child Theme’s functions.php file. If you don’t have a child theme yet, you can learn how to do so here. A better and a recommended alternative is to use a free plugin like Code Snippets to add this custom code functionality.

function remove_query_strings() {
if(!is_admin()) {
add_filter('script_loader_src', 'remove_query_strings_split', 15);
add_filter('style_loader_src', 'remove_query_strings_split', 15);
}
}
function remove_query_strings_split($src){
$output = preg_split("/(&ver|\?ver)/", $src);
return $output[0];
}
add_action('init', 'remove_query_strings')


13. Remove jQuery Migrate

The jQuery Migrate file which is located at wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery-migrate.min.js on your server is automatically loaded on your WordPress website from WordPress version 3.6 onwards,

It is not needed in many cases if you have built your website with newer versions of WordPress and so this is just adding an extra HTTP request unnecessarily. This following code prevents the jquery migrate file from loading. Just like how we removed the query strings in the previous method, you have to paste this code in your functions.php file or a plugin that we mentioned above.

//Remove JQuery migrate
function remove_jquery_migrate( $scripts ) {
if ( ! is_admin() && isset( $scripts->registered['jquery'] ) ) {
$script = $scripts->registered['jquery'];
if ( $script->deps ) {
// Check whether the script is dependendent on other files
$script->deps = array_diff( $script->deps, array( 'jquery-migrate' ) );
}
}
}
add_action( 'wp_default_scripts', 'remove_jquery_migrate' );


Some themes or plugins which are still using old jQuery versions (1.10.2 or below) will require this file. So check your site after activation and make sure everything works as expected. If you see any problem, remove the code.

If you are running plugins or a theme that uses older jQuery code, it is better to update them or switch to an alternative plugin that is updated regularly.

14. Disable Gravatar images

I don’t find the idea of showing Gravatar great on WordPress blog posts unless you are using a really great hosting server. If you are using one of the shared hosting servers, removing Gravatar can help a little to speed up WordPress sites. Every trick counts.

In the WordPress admin, go to Settings >> Discussions. Scroll down to the Avatars section. Here, you can either uncheck the box before “Show Avatars” to completely disable it or choose “Blank” in the “Default Avatar” section.

Additional methods through which you can directly or indirectly decrease the site page loading time.

The following are some of the additional methods that will help you in decreasing any load on the hosting server or optimize the performance of your website when someone opens it.

LazyLoad your images

LazyLoad allows the images on a website to load only when they come in the viewport. Viewport means when you scroll to a particular section of the website page and that section is being displayed on your screen. The sections which you haven’t scrolled down to yet, are out-of-the viewport.

When you opened this article, all the images didn’t load. They only loaded up when you scrolled down to them. So instead of loading up all the images on your page, through lazy loading, the images will load only if a person reaches those sections where images are to be displayed.

This method doesn’t overload your server with multiple HTTP requests, saves bandwidth of the server as well as the user who is checking your website page (if they don’t see the whole page).

Delete unnecessary, inactive plugins

Sometimes you install a plugin, check how it works, and then deactivate it if you don’t like it or hard-pressed on time to check it completely. Such plugins stay deactivated in your WordPress backend. Note down the names and authors of those plugins, and then DELETE them. You can always re-install them later.

Disable Google Maps, Facebook Page like box, Twitter followers or any other external embed codes

Unless you absolutely need Google Maps on every page, you can keep them on the website. If not, limit displaying Google Maps only on the ‘Contact Us’ page. We have seen people embedding Google Maps in their website footer that loads up on every page of their website. Similarly, you can simply add icons/links for people to view your business on Google Maps or your Facebook page.