How to Speed Up WordPress Website

Recently updated on December 11th, 2022 at 10:28 am

WordPress is an excellent CMS and blogging platform but It has one weakness: it can be slow when using default settings.

You could have a slow site if you don’t make some optimizations or tweaks. This will cause problems for your customers and visitors, but it can also lead to lost subscribers.

This quick guide “How to Speed Up WordPress Website” will cover the top ways to speed up WordPress website”.

What is the Importance of WordPress Site Speed?

When visitors arrive on your website for the first time, they only have a few seconds to grab their attention. While most people are aware of the importance of your site, how high do you set the bar?

Be prepared to fall asleep at night. According to a Microsoft search team report, a delay of 2 seconds in page responsiveness can reduce user satisfaction by 3.8%, increase lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and decrease clicks by 4.3%.

Poor performance can lead to lost gain and a loss of money. People will exit your page and site if it takes too long to load. Google’s ranking algorithm now considers site speed.

This means that site speed has an impact on SEO. If your site is slow, visitors will be impatient, and your ranking in search engines will drop. Let’s ensure that this doesn’t happen.

How to Speed Up WordPress Website

These steps to speed WordPress up are not arranged by importance. Here’s everything we know about speeding up WordPress page load times. You will see a significant improvement in your WordPress site if you apply a few of these tips.

Run Performance Tests

Let’s first understand the performance of your site. This is not a comprehensive metric. Performance varies based on the location of visitors, their internet connection speed, and whether they cache your site.

Page speed can also vary between pages depending on how much content is present. While website homepages are the best way to estimate load speed, you should also test any pages that receive high traffic.

Pick a Great Web Hosting Service

A shared host may seem like a good deal when you first start. However, it comes with a steep price: slow site speeds and frequent downtime during peak traffic periods.

Shared hosting is not the best option if you want to publish popular content or run a website with high traffic. WPEngine-managed WordPress hosting is the only WordPress host we recommend.

WordPress sites we have run, are fast and never experience downtime, even when we get mentions or links from large publishers. The back-end is also very user-friendly.

Their customer support is always helpful and responsive, which is essential when hosting. They are friendly, patient, knowledgeable, and very familiar with WordPress. They will be your safety net in case of any problems.

Visit their homepage to learn more about their services. You can also shop around for another platform with a proven track record of speed, uptime, and excellent customer support.

Get Started With a Solid Framework/Theme

Many of the default WordPress themes are light and fast, which may surprise you. This is mainly because the pieces are effortless in functionality and features.

This is the opposite of many bloated drag-and-drop frameworks that offer tons of features but slow down your site to crawl, regardless of what their homepage says.

According to my experience, the Thesis Framework is the best premium framework for loading fast, particularly the Focus skin. This site is a stripped-down version.

We love simplicity. The thesis is far more customizable than the standard WordPress themes. It is a solid framework that will not slow you down by adding plugins or custom edits.

You can make changes directly from the theme, so there’s no need to worry about bloating while customizing. It’s okay.

Make Sure You Use an Effective Caching Plugin

WordPress plugins can be handy. However, some of the most effective fall under the caching category. They dramatically improve page load times and are also free to install on your website.

W3 Total Cache is my favorite caching plugin. It has all the features you need, is easy to use, and is very simple to install. Install the plugin and then activate it to see your pages load faster because various elements are cached.

Optimize Images

Image optimizers can help you reduce file size without drastically reducing the quality of your images. This is a good thing because large.png files embedded throughout pages are one of the main culprits for slow loading times.

Squoosh, developed by the Google Chrome team, is the best free image optimizer on the internet. MozJPEG is the default file Squoosh uses.

This reduces file size by 50-80% without affecting quality. You can choose from other lightweight file types such as Web. Like me, it can take a long time to optimize each image manually.

Smush is a free plugin that will automatically optimize your images when uploading them to WordPress. This plugin is a must-have.

If you’d instead manage it on your desktop, we recommend Squash to Mac users.

Hotlinking and Leeching your Content Should be Disabled

Hotlinking can be described as a form of “theft” of bandwidth. It happens when other websites link directly to your images from their articles, increasing the load on your server.

This is a good thing because it allows other bloggers and websites to scrape your images or posts after becoming famous. It’s also a good idea to regularly create custom images for your website.

Optimize Your Homepage

While there is no single way to optimize your WordPress homepage for maximum performance, there are some minor tweaks you can make.

Because new visitors will find your homepage frequently, it is a vital part of your website and the beginning of the customer journey.

These are some steps to speed up your WordPress website’s homepage:

• Display excerpts rather than total posts
• Reduce the number of posts on your page. we prefer to show between 5-7.
• You can remove unnecessary sharing widgets from your home page and only include them in camps.
• You can delete inactive widgets and plugins you don’t use.
• Could you keep it simple? Could you keep it simple? Readers come to your site for content and not for 8,000 devices.

A clean, focused homepage design will help you get your visitors to the places they want. It will also make your website load faster.

Optimize Your WordPress Database

This post is an excellent example of how we get a lot out of the word “optimize”. You can either use the plugin to optimize your WordPress database or through a tedious manual process.

This plugin allows you to do one thing: optimize your database. To reduce their overhead. The WP_DB Manager plugin can also be considered, which will enable you to schedule data optimization dates.

To Static Resources, Add an Expired Header

An Expires header allows you to specify a future date, so clients (browsers) don’t need to re-fetch static content (CSS files, javascript, images, etc.).

This can significantly reduce the load time for your regular users. Copy and paste this code into your root. htaccess file

Expires Active On

ExpiresByType image/gif a2592000

ExpiresByType photo/png A2592000

ExpiresByType photo/jpg A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

These numbers are for one month.

Images of Gravatar Adjustments

You may have noticed that some websites don’t have a Gravatar image. It isn’t an aesthetic choice. We made it to improve page load speeds by removing images from areas that would typically have a silly Gravatar logo.

Some blogs even go so far as to block comments from their website. Either way, it is possible. However, you will see a decrease in site speed if the default image (under “Discussion” in the WordPress dashboard’s settings tab) is set to a blank area instead of a default.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN (content delivery network) takes all static files from your WordPress websites, such as CSS, Javascript, and images, and lets visitors download them quickly by placing them on servers as close as possible.

The StackPath content delivery network is the best for WordPress websites. It’s very affordable and easy to use.

LazyLoad can be Added to Your Images

LazyLoad refers to removing images from the fold of the only photos visible in the browser window. The other photos load as soon as the reader scrolls down.

This will speed up page loading and save bandwidth. Users who scroll down may not see all of your pages. Install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin to do this automatically.

Do not Host Videos On Your Web Server

Do not host or upload videos on your hosting server because videos are the most resource-intensive files you can store on your web host server.

Videos can take up space and slow down the page’s loading speed. Even a single video can slow down your website speed.

if you want to grab the attention of your visitors then videos are a great way to do this. Instead of uploading videos directly to your web server, you can use video hosting websites like YouTube or Vimeo.

With the help of these video hosting websites, place video links or video embeds codes on your web pages. This will improve your user experience without affecting your website speed & performance.

Video Tutorial: How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

Summary

You can increase the speed of your WordPress website by the above-mentioned methods. By having good website speed, your site visitor gets a good experience as well as the ranking of your website on the search engine improves.

We hope that you liked our article “How to Speed Up WordPress Website“. If yes then please share this article on social media platforms and if you have any questions related to this article, you can ask us in the comment section.