Nowadays, when Google has started considering website speed as a ranking factor so it becomes important for us to speed up our websites. This not only helps us in getting better rankings in search results but it also helps us in providing a great user experience to our visitors. After all, who likes a slow loading website.
Some researches show that websites that take more than 2-3 seconds to load have higher bounce rate than websites that load within 2-3 seconds. Also, a slow loading website can cause you a loss of revenue.
If you run an eCommerce store on WordPress or you are an affiliate marketer then your website must load faster. Due to slow loading of your website you can lose a potential customer.
Now that you know why your website speed matters so let’s understand how you can check your website speed ?
How to check your website speed ?
There are lots of online tools through which you can test your website speed. But, the three most popular tools are:
I personally like GTmetrix the most. These tools not only test your website speed but they also suggest you the ways to improve your website speed. So, simply run a speed test with them and analyze the results to understand the improvements your website needs.
Once you have done testing your website speed, so, you can move ahead and take some necessary actions to speed up your WordPress website.
How to Speed Up your WordPress Website ?
To speed up your WordPress website you can follow the below steps:
Choose a better Hosting Provider:
If you have already tried many things but still your website is loading slow then it’s time to change your hosting provider. There are lots of hosting providers in the market that offer cheap hosting for your website. But, not all of them are good. You must be selective while choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress website.
For WordPress websites, SiteGround is one of the best hosting providers in the market. If your website doesn’t receive much traffic then you can go for its shared hosting. But, if your website receives lots of traffic then you can consider upgrading to cloud hosting.
SiteGround also offers cloud hosting but its plans are expensive. If you want to switch to cloud hosting then you can consider Cloudways for hosting your website. It’s cheap and offers better services than most of cloud hosting providers.
If you don’t like managing things like speed, security, performance etc by yourself then you can go for managed WordPress hosting providers. WP Engine and Kinsta are two best managed WordPress hosting providers.
Use a Speed Optimized Theme:
This is the next thing that you need to consider. Check whether your theme is optimized for speed or not. If possible read the reviews about your theme and find whether you are the only one experiencing the slow loading times or there are other persons too.
If your theme is not optimized for speed then you can consider switching to a theme which is optimized for speed. A speed optimized theme can reduce your website load times by huge margin.
You can purchase a high quality speed optimized theme from MyThemeShop. It is one of the best theme sellers in the market. It also offers a great support.
Compress your Images:
If you have a good hosting provider and a speed optimized theme but still your website is loading slow then it’s time to look for other factors.
The first thing that you need to consider is to check your images size. If you are uploading heavy images to your website then they are surely going to slow down your website.
So, to optimize your images for speed, you need to compress them. You can compress your images before uploading them to your website. You can use some online image compression tools like Optimizilla or TinyPNG to compress your images. Both of these tools use smart compression techniques to reduce the file size of your images and at the same time they maintain the optimum level quality for your images.
If you don’t like compressing images by yourself then you can install a plugin to do that for you. There are two popular plugins that compress your images automatically.
Both of these plugins are good so you can use anyone of your choice. I personally like WP Smush more and use it on all of my websites.
Use a Caching Plugin:
Many hosting providers like SiteGround, Bluehost, Kinsta etc offer server side caching with their hosting plans. However, if you like then you can install a caching plugin to your WordPress website.
Caching stores your website files locally on your visitors computers. So, when you visitors return to your website then your website loads almost instantly for them.
Using a caching plugin is one of the most important things if you want to speed up your WordPress website. Caching reduces your website’s loading time by huge margin. There are several plugins that you can use to speed up your WordPress website.
Some of the best caching plugins are WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache. WP Rocket is a paid plugin whereas rest of the three are free plugins. However, these free plugins also offer their premium versions.
Many professional bloggers use WP Rocket for speeding up their websites. They call it the best caching plugin. However, i have never used it so i can’t say much.
For me W3 Total Cache is the best plugin. It is free and provides an advanced level caching. W3 Total Cache offers lots of customization. So, you can configure it for best performance.
However, if you don’t like configuring much things then you can go for WP Super Cache. It is also one of the best and simplest to use plugins.
Use a CDN:
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and its main work is to reduce the latency. We can define latency as the delay between a request for your website and the actual loading of your website.
Let’s understand it with an example. Suppose your hosting server is located in UK and a visitor from US tries to access your website. So, the user will experience a slow loading of your website as his request has to travel across the Atlantic. This actually takes few seconds but these days we can’t afford delays.
So, a CDN overcomes this issue by distributing a cached version of your website on multiple servers located on different geographical locations. So, whenever a visitor requests for your website then your CDN delivers a cached version of your website from your visitor’s nearest data center This makes your website load extremely fast.
There are lots of CDN providers available in the market. But, the best providers are StackPath, BunnyCDN, KeyCDN and Cloudflare.
The first three are paid CDN providers whereas the last one is a free CDN provider. However, it also offers a paid version.
StackPath is the best CDN provider in the market. However, BunnyCDN and KeyCDN are also good. I use BunnyCDN for my website as it is easy to setup and it’s cheap too. A website with few hundred visitors can pass its complete year with BunnyCDN for just $10 or $20.
KeyCDN is another very cheap option. However, if you don’t want to invest any money on purchasing a CDN then you can go for free Cloudflare CDN. It is also a good option for starters.
Minify HTML, JavaScript and CSS files:
If you want to make your website faster then you need to minify your HTML, JavaScript and CSS files. Minifying these files actually reduces the number of HTML, JavaScript and CSS calls. It also reduces the file size of these files. You can minify these files through W3 Total Cache plugin. However, it may break your website.
In my case i use Autoptimize plugin for minifying my HTML, JavaScript and CSS files as W3 Total Cache breaks my website. Though, i use ‘combine’ feature of W3 Total Cache to combine all my JavaScript and CSS files to reduce the calls.
If you ask me then i would recommend you to use Autoptimize instead of W3 Total Cache for optimizing your files. The plugin author is very supportive so if some of the features of your website stop working after optimizing your files then you can take help of the plugin author on WordPress support forum.
Enable Lazy Loading For Images:
You can improve the speed of your WordPress website by enabling lazy loading for images. Lazy Load is a feature that loads only those images which are above the fold and delays the loading of remaining images. This simply means that if a visitor comes to your website then only those images will load that are above the fold and the rest will load only once your visitor scrolls down.
As your visitors start scrolling down then the images that present below the fold will start loading.
This powerful feature is used by most of the professional blogger. I also use this feature on all of my websites. Many premium themes come with this feature so you are not required to download any specific plugin. All of the MyThemeShop themes come with this great feature.
However, if your theme doesn’t have this feature then you can use some popular plugins like a3 Lazy Load, Lazy Load by WP Rocket etc. Both of these plugins are great so you can use any one of your choice.
If you are using Autoptimize plugin then you are not required to download any specific lazy load plugin. Autoptimize plugin has this feature so you can enable it from its settings section.
Use PHP 7 or Above:
The core of the WordPress is written in PHP. Even your plugins and themes are written in PHP which make PHP a very important language for WordPress. If you run your website on latest PHP version then it will improve your website’s overall performance.
Like a new WordPress version, PHP also brings lots of improvements with its new versions. PHP 7.3 can handle 3X requests per second as compared to PHP 5.6. This shows how important is to upgrade your PHP version.
Most of the hosting providers offer support for PHP 7. They even offer different versions of PHP so that you can choose the best one of your choice.
Many hosting providers like Bluehost, Kinsta, WP Engine etc offer support for PHP 7.3 which keeps your website ahead of your competitors in terms of performance.
Choose a Server Nearby to your Visitors:
If you want to speed up your WordPress website then you can choose a server nearby to your visitors. By choosing a nearby server to your visitors you can reduce the latency and hence the loading time. For doing this first you need to know the location of your majority traffic.
If you are starting a new WordPress website and targeting visitors of a specific country then you can choose a server which is near to your visitors location. Hosting providers like SiteGround and Cloudways allow you to select your data center location.
Reduce The Number of Plugins:
Lots of plugins can slow down your website. So, always use those plugins which are necessary for your website. If you have two plugins that perform almost similar tasks then uninstall one of them. In short, use only necessary plugins and remove any unwanted plugin.
Cleanup Your WordPress Database:
Cleaning up your WordPress database on a regular basis is important if you want to keep your website fast. Cleaning up reduces the size of your data base and web files, thus, improves your website speed.
For cleaning your WordPress database you can use WP-Optimize plugin which removes spam comments, post revisions, fake users etc. I use this plugin on all of my websites to keep my WordPress database clean.
Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks:
Pingbacks and Trackbacks are two core components that notify you whenever your website receives a back link from other blogs. Your website can also get self-pingbacks when you link to an article within your blog. This might sound useful to you but it adds an additional strain on your servers. It also increases spam which you don’t want on your website.
The lesser the number of requests your website generates the better is your website speed. So, by disabling pingbacks and trackbacks you can speed up your WordPress website.
You can turn off this feature from your WordPress dashboard by visiting settings section. Simply click on ‘Settings‘ and then click on ‘Discussion‘. In discussion section simply deselect “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts” and save changes.
Final Words:
If you can follow all the above mentioned steps then your website will surely start loading fast. You can do several more things like adding expires header, reducing DNS lookups, using premium DNS, reducing HTTP requests etc but all of these things require some technical knowledge.
There are lots of tutorials available on the internet for doing the above mentioned things. But, the steps that i have mentioned in this post are more than enough to get a 90+ scores on all of the major speed testing tools.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this post. If you have liked it then please share it with your friends or anyone who needs this information. It would be a great help for us !
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