How to speed up your work WordPress is definitely a hot topic these days. Luckily, there are many methods you can use to get the job done. Therefore, we intend to list all the tricks that we know can make your WordPress site very fast.
Why would you need to speed up WordPress?
There are many reasons for anxiety, some of which can also cause severe anxiety:
- Search engines (such as Google) rank websites running slower than slow-loading websites. Therefore, if you want to improve your search engine ranking, increasing your speed should be one of your priorities.
- Research has shown that website loading speeds of more than 2 seconds typically leave the site to about 47 percent of visitors. Therefore, to keep about half of your visitors interested, you should speed up WordPress.
- Online shoppers are the most impatient lot; They expect the page to load within a second. Therefore, if you have a WordPress eCommerce store, you will be better prepared for significant improvements to make your business more profitable.
How to check your website loading time?
First thing, you need to analyze the current load time of your site. Please keep in mind that speed may vary from page to page as it depends on various factors, namely:
- The size of that particular page,
- How many requests it makes,
- Whether it is cached or not
- And finally, what kind of content (static or dynamic) it hosts.
The home page of a website is usually used as a reference for checking load times. To check website speed, the following three tools are widely used on the Internet:
- WebPageTest.org
- Toolss.Pingdom.com
- PageSpeed Insights (it doesn’t report page load times but highlights elements you can tweak to make WordPress faster)
1. Choose the best web hosting provider
The main factor affecting website speed is hosting your WordPress website. It may seem like a good idea to host your new website with a shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, email, domains, and more. However, we usually ignore this offering, but that the shared hosting environment may not provide good load time during peak hours and 99 percent uptime in any given month.
Shared hosting provides low performance because you are using the same server space with countless other websites, and it is impossible to tell how many resources others are using. Also, you don’t know how well the servers are optimized.
Fortunately, the web hosting industry has advanced with technology, and cloud hosting providers’ prices have decreased over time. You can currently buy dedicated cloud servers from SiteGrade, DigitalOne, Amazon Web Services, and even Google Compute Engine for a nominal price. However, configuring these servers can be challenging because you need to set up the server from scratch. There are web hosting providers like Cloudways (where I work) that make the task of installing customized cloud servers easy to click and launch.
2. Use a lightweight WordPress theme/framework.
With tons of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons, and many other colorful elements, WordPress themes are beautiful. But remember: if they have too many elements and large page sizes, they will hit your web server.
The best option here is to use light themes. One solution is to choose one of the default WordPress themes.
3. Reduce image size.
Images are the main factor in increasing the size of this webpage. The trick is to reduce the size of images without sacrificing quality.
If you manually optimize images using Chrome’s PageSpeed Insights extension, Photoshop, or any other tool, the process will take a long time. Fortunately, there are plugins for pretty much anything you can think of, including image optimization. Worth mentioning:
- Optimal
- WP Smush
- EWWW Image Optimizer
Using any of the above plugins on your WordPress site will significantly reduce the image size, increasing your site’s speed.
4. Minimize JS and CSS files.
If you run your website with the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, you will receive a notification that your CSS and JS files are shrinking in size. This means that by reducing the number of CSS and JS calls and the size of these files, you can improve your site’s loading speed.
If you are good with the WordPress theme, you can check the guides provided by Google and make some manual improvements. If not, there are plugins to help you achieve this goal; The most popular of these is AutoPetzyme, which can help optimize the CSS, JS, and even HTML of your WordPress site.
5. Use the advanced caching mechanism with the caching plugin.
WordPress caching plugins (such as the W3 Total Cache) has been around for a long time, making it easier to deal with the complex task of adding caching rules to your website elements. Combining these plugins with advanced caching engines like Varnish can help you improve your site’s loading speed and ultimately speed up WordPress significantly.
6. Use a CDN.
People visiting your site belong to different places globally, and of course, site loading speed will vary if visitors are far from what is hosted on your site. Several CDNs (content delivery networks) help reduce website loading speed for visitors from different countries. CDN stores a copy of your website in various data centers located in different locations. The primary function of a CDN is to serve a web page to a visitor from the nearest possible location. Cloudflare and MaxCDN are some of the most popular CDN services.
7. Enable GZIP compression.
Compressing files on your local computer can save a lot of disk space. Similarly, for the Internet, we can use GZIP compression. This maneuver will dramatically reduce bandwidth usage, and the time it takes to reach your site. GZIP compresses various files, so whenever a visitor tries to access your site; Their browser must unpack the website first. This process reduces bandwidth usage to a large extent.
You can either use a plugin like PageSpeed Ninja that enables GZIP compression or add the following code to your .htaccess file.
8. WordPress Database Cleanup.
Removing unnecessary data from your database will minimize its size and help reduce your backup’s size. Spam comments, fake users, old drafts of your content, and perhaps unwanted plugins and themes must be removed. All these will reduce the size of your database and web files and thus speed up WordPress – your WordPress.
9. Disable or remove plugins.
Storing unwanted plugs on your WordPress sites will add a tremendous amount of junk to your web files. What’s more, it will also increase your backup’s size and drastically stress the resources of your server when creating backup files. It’s better to get rid of plugins you don’t use and look for alternative ways to use third-party services to automate or schedule tasks (for example, post your latest posts on social media).
IFTTT or Zapier are two web services that help automate such tasks and reduce your website and server resource load.
10. Minimize the number of external scripts.
Using external scripts on your web pages adds a lot of data to the overall load time. Therefore, it is best to use only a small number of scripts, including bare essential objects, such as tracking tools (such as Google Analytics) or commenting systems (such as Disqus).
11. Disable pingbacks and trackbacks.
Pingbacks and trackbacks are the two main WordPress components that alert you when your blog or page is linked. This may sound useful, but you also have things like Google Webmaster Tools and other services to check your website’s links.
Pingbacks and save trackbacks can also cause undue load on your server’s resources. This is because whenever someone tries to link to your site, they generate a request back and forth from WordPress. This feature is often misused when targeting websites with DDoS attacks.
You can disable all this in WP-Admin -> Settings -> Discussion. “uncheck link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks).” This will help you speed up WordPress a little more.