As of now, WordPress is used to power 43% of the internet. As a result of this, many various themes, plugins, and technologies must all work together in order for the site to function properly. WordPress users may rapidly discover that this is a nightmare when their site begins to slow down and they are unable to determine why or how to repair the problem.
As a result, we’ve put together a detailed guide on how to speed up WordPress. In this video, we’ll talk about why speed is important, what factors affect your WordPress site’s speed, and how to check it out. Following that, we’ve put together a list of the best ways to improve your site’s performance. They include simple and more complicated steps, so even people who don’t have a lot of experience can use them, or else you can opt for WordPress speed optimization service, in the end the choice is yours .
So now let’s see the steps.
For what reasons should you increase the speed of your WordPress Blog?
If your website loads in less than two seconds, it can have a big impact on how many people buy from you and how happy they are with their experience.
It’s because studies have shown that even a one-second delay in the loading time of a web page can have an almost 7% decrease in sales. According to a new study, 53 percent of people will leave your site if it takes more than three seconds to load.
This means that a slow website can make visitors angry, leaving you with a very small window to get them to stay on your website and buy your products or services.
Also, optimising your website’s performance is important for search engine rankings. June 2024 was the first time that Google used your website’s speed as a ranking factor to figure out what kind of experience your users will have when they visit your site.
Search engines, like Google, give more weight to pages that load quickly than those that take a long time to load. In other words, if you want to rise in the SERPs, one of your main goals should be to make your site faster.
In studies, 47 percent of people who visit a website that takes more than two seconds to load usually leave. So, if you want to keep about half of your visitors interested, you should make your WordPress better.
In the world of online shopping, people are usually very impatient. They want a website to load in less than a second. So, if you run an eCommerce store on WordPress, you should be ready to make a lot of changes in order to make your business more profitable.
1) Determine which hosting service is best for your needs
An easy-to-use WordPress site is built on a strong foundation of good web hosting. A hosting company and plan must be chosen that will meet your needs for bandwidth and speed, so make sure you do this. Most WordPress servers offer a wide range of hosting options, including shared hosting, dedicated hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), and managed WordPress hosting.
When you buy a WordPress hosting package, you usually get what you pay for, but it’s not always the case. When it comes to web hosting, there is shared hosting on the one hand. This package lets you host your website on the same server as a lot of other sites. Because shared hosting prices can’t be beat, newbie WordPress users can use this option to build up their online momentum before upgrading. Because you will be sharing the same resources, your speed will slow down if another site on your server gets a lot of traffic.
Established websites that have a lot of content and get a lot of traffic should instead look for a dedicated, VPS, or managed hosting plan from a reputable company. These plans will be able to handle more traffic without slowing down load times.
2) Remove old plugins
When too many plugins are running at the same time, it can slow down your site’s load times. Each plugin is like a piece of software on your website. Even if you don’t use a certain plugin, there’s a chance that it’s doing extra work in the background. Maybe it’s time to cut back.
There are some plugins you’ll never use again, so start by taking them off. It’s a good idea to check your site after each deactivation, then remove these plugins when you’re sure everything works. Then, one by one, turn off the plugins to see which ones make a difference in speed. Consider looking for lightweight plugins that aren’t as big as these ones.
3) Compress the size of the image
It could take a long time for images to load if they aren’t compressed. Because images are usually the biggest files on a website, they may not be compressed.
Fortunately, there are some great programmes out there that can help you compress your files. WP Smush.it indexes photos, it automatically strips metadata from JPEGs and unnecessary colours from photos that have been tagged. It is now being run by and supported by WPMUDEV.
Tiny PNG is another great programme that lets you remove colours that aren’t needed when you’re compressing a file.
4) Minify JavaScript and CSS Files
If you run a Google PageSpeed Insights or ySlow test on your WordPress site, you’ll get a warning that JavaScript and CSS files need to be compressed. In order for the server and file size to be better, you need to cut down on JS and CSS calls. By cutting these down, you’ll see that the site loads a lot faster than it did before. This will help you gradually cut down on how much broadband you use.
5) Lazy-Load Long Pages
When it comes to one-page websites and websites with a long main page that need to load quickly, lazy loading can be a huge time saver. This is referred to as “Lazy Loading.” and it works by delaying the loading of lower-level objects on your website until the user scrolls down to see them (as opposed to loading them immediately). When you do not load the entire content of your big page at once, you can expect your site to load more rapidly in the beginning. BJ Lazy Load is a plugin that is often used to do this.
6) Utilize a Scalable Theme
There are a variety of eye-catching and visually appealing themes available on the WordPress marketplace from which to choose. Some themes, such as those that include a lot of dynamic information, such as a slide show or a sidebar, can cause your hosting server to take a long time to react to requests.
Always make sure that your WordPress theme is optimised, or that you choose a light WordPress theme wherever possible. It is possible that you will not need to purchase any further themes if you plan to start a blogging website. Make certain that the themes you choose are built with Bootstrap and Foundation so that you can take advantage of their additional features.
7) Enable Page Caching
Before, we talked about how WordPress makes an HTML version of your pages when someone wants to see them.
Because this is one of the things that is slowing it down, wouldn’t it make sense to always have the HTML page ready? Because of this method, you can cut many steps.
That is what page caching does, and it is one of the best ways to speed up your WordPress website’s page load time. Also, the CMS has a lot of plugins for caching. The most popular are WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, and W3 Total Cache.
It’s possible to pay for a premium all-in-one cache plugin to help you with this, but be careful because some can be very big and have more features than you need, which can cause your site to break. Also, it would be a good idea to check with your web host to see if they offer server-side caching (see below) before installing any caching plugins.
Keep in mind that page caching is often used to hide performance problems caused by poor hosting, slow plugins or themes, or even a bloated database. All of these things should be done first so that your site doesn’t have to use page caching. Those who run WooCommerce stores know this all too well.
8) Optimize Your Comments
If your site has a lot of people commenting, it could be a big drain on your computer’s resources. By default, each comment makes an HTTP call to Gravatar to get the user’s picture. Also, comments add weight to your database and require more database queries to load.
The only way to get rid of all the comments on your blog is to turn them all off:
- Go to Settings → Discussion
- Uncheck the box to prevent others from leaving comments.
9) Use latest PHP
This one change alone could almost double the speed of your WordPress installation, making it run much more quickly. Many WordPress websites still use PHP 5.6, which is no longer supported. PHP 7.4 is the most recent version, and it makes a big difference in speed.
Your web hosting company takes care of the PHP part, and you can either check the version of PHP your WordPress site is running on yourself or just call customer service:
Which version of PHP does your WordPress site use?
In this case, you can ask them to switch to the most recent version of PHP if it is less than 7.0 or 5.6.
10) Limit the Number of Social Media Buttons
Social networking has risen to become an important component of nearly every website nowadays. Is your website primarily for personal use or for business? It doesn’t make a difference. You must make use of social media in order to make your website more appealing to visitors. That is perfectly acceptable, and you should go ahead and do it.
Despite this, when it comes to social media symbols, less is more in most cases. While you may have profiles on a dozen different social media platforms, just the buttons for the platforms on which you are regularly engaged will be displayed. It is possible that your site will take a long time to load because each button will load its own image and other data.
Summary
The faster your site is, the better your rankings, the more search engines can find it, the more conversions, the more time spent on the site, and the less people leave. Not to mention that everyone likes to visit a website that loads quickly.
That’s what we hope happened after reading this tutorial on how to speed up your WordPress site. You should have taken away some ideas and used them to speed up your own site, as well. If so, would you please share it?
Did we miss something important? People would like to know if this is true. Let us know what you think about how to speed up WordPress in the comments below.
Rids has been working with WPWeb – A WordPress Development Company since Jan 2019 as Content Manager. He is a passionate content writer and has a love for WordPress so he spends a significant amount of time writing about it.