12 Steps to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

Speeding up your WordPress website is important for providing a good user experience and improving your search engine rankings.

As seasoned web developers, we understand how crucial it is to have a fast website, especially for businesses and projects. Search engines like Google take page speed into account as a ranking factor since it directly affects the user experience. WordPress offers several tools and features that can influence your website’s speed, and We can help you utilize them to improve your website’s performance.

By improving your website’s loading time, you can increase your rankings on search engines, reduce your bounce rate, and ultimately achieve higher conversions. That’s why we are here to guide you through those actionable steps that can significantly speed up your WordPress site. With expert insights, you’ll learn valuable tips and gain a better understanding of WordPress speed optimization. Let’s get started!

First Of All, Test How Fast Your WordPress Website Is Right Now

It’s important to conduct speed tests before working on a website to assess its performance and identify areas for improvement. There are many freemium speed test tools available, such as GTmetrix and Pingdom, that can help you measure your website’s speed.

To optimize your speed test results, you should focus on the core web vitals metrics. These metrics include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures the time it takes for the most significant elements on the page to load. It’s essential to aim for an LCP score of 2.5 seconds or less to provide a good user experience.
• First Input Delay (FID): FID measures the interactivity of a page, specifically the time it takes for the web browser to respond to the first user interaction. A good FID score is 100 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures the visual stability of a page by calculating unexpected layout shifts. Aiming for a CLS score of 0.1 or less is recommended.

By focusing on these core web vitals metrics, you can optimize your website’s speed and provide a better user experience for your visitors.

Great Methods To Speed Up WordPress Website

After testing your site speed, here are 12 ways to speed up your WordPress website, listed based on their difficulty level:

Beginner-friendly Methods:

1. Choose the Right Hosting Plan: Select a hosting provider that offers optimized servers for WordPress and a plan that suits your website’s needs.
2. Use a WordPress Caching Plugin: Use a caching plugin like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache to cache frequently accessed pages and improve your website’s speed.
3. Optimize Your Images: Compress your images using tools like Smush or ShortPixel to reduce their size without compromising quality.
4. Minimize HTTP Requests: Reduce the number of HTTP requests by minimizing the number of plugins, scripts, and stylesheets you use.

Intermediate Methods:

5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN like Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront can significantly improve your website’s speed and performance by caching your content on servers worldwide and delivering it from the server closest to the user.
6. Optimize Your Database: Optimize your WordPress database by removing unnecessary data and optimizing tables using plugins like WP-Optimize.
7. Use Lazy Loading: Use lazy loading to delay the loading of images and other content until they are needed, which can reduce page load times.

Advanced Methods:

8. Deliver Content Over HTTP/2: Deliver your website’s content over HTTP/2 to speed up its loading time.
9. Minimize Redirects: Minimize the number of redirects on your website, as they add additional HTTP requests and slow down your website.
10. Optimize Your CSS Delivery: Optimize your CSS delivery by reducing its size, combining it, and loading it asynchronously.

Expert Methods:

11. Optimize Your JavaScript: Optimize your JavaScript by reducing its size, combining it, and loading it asynchronously.
12. Use Advanced Caching Techniques: Use advanced caching techniques like object caching and fragment caching to speed up your website further.

1. Choose the Right Hosting Plan:

It’s important to understand the factors that influence the speed and performance of a WordPress website. One crucial factor is the web hosting provider and plan you choose, which can significantly impact your website’s loading speed. Here are some factors to consider when selecting a web hosting provider:

• Fast Web Server: Look for a hosting provider that offers a fast web server to optimize page speed. For example, FASTDOT uses LiteSpeed Web Servers (LSWS) with an advanced cache engine that stores compressed cache files, improving loading speed.
• WordPress Features: Choose a hosting provider that offers features specifically designed to speed up WordPress websites.
• Reliable Customer Support: Select a hosting provider that offers reliable customer support to fix any issues promptly, including downtime or slow loading time.

Once you’ve chosen a hosting provider, it’s essential to pick the most suitable plan for your WordPress site. Hosting providers typically offer various hosting types for WordPress, such as:

• Shared Hosting: An entry-level type of hosting that supports multiple websites on the same server, sharing its resources.
• Cloud Hosting: A premium type of hosting that offers dedicated resources from a network of multiple servers.
• Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting: A type of hosting that gives users root access and dedicated resources but requires technical expertise to set up and maintain.
• WordPress Hosting: A type of shared hosting specifically designed for WordPress performance optimization and security.

FASTDOT offers various WordPress hosting plans with different pricing and allocated server resources to fit your website’s needs. By understanding these factors and selecting the right hosting plan, you can optimize your WordPress website’s speed and provide a better user experience for your visitors.

I understand that budgeting is important, but investing in hosting should be a top priority. Hosting is a fundamental investment that can significantly impact your website’s performance and overall success. While it’s natural to want to save money where possible, skimping on hosting can end up costing you more in the long run. So, it’s worth allocating a reasonable budget for quality hosting that can help boost your website’s speed, security, and overall performance.

Check our Boutique WordPress Hosting Solution

2. Use a WordPress Caching Plugin:

I highly recommend using a caching plugin for your WordPress website. A caching plugin like WP Super Cache or WP Rocket can significantly improve your website’s loading speed by caching frequently accessed pages and serving them from the cache instead of generating them from scratch every time.

Caching plugins work by storing static copies of your website’s pages in the cache, which are served to visitors when they visit your site. This reduces the number of requests made to your server, which can help reduce the loading time of your website.

Using a caching plugin is easy, and most caching plugins offer beginner-friendly options to get you started. You can configure the caching plugin settings to suit your website’s needs, including specifying which pages should be cached, setting cache expiration times, and more.

By using a caching plugin, you can significantly improve your website’s performance and provide a better user experience for your visitors.

3. Optimize Your Images:

I highly recommend optimizing your images to improve your WordPress website’s loading speed. Large and unoptimized images can significantly slow down your website, leading to a poor user experience and higher bounce rates.

Optimizing images involves compressing them to reduce their file size without compromising their quality. You can use tools like Smush or ShortPixel to compress your images automatically or manually before uploading them to your website.

In addition to compressing images, you should also consider using the right file type for each image. For example, JPEG is a good choice for photographs, while PNG is better for graphics with transparency. Using the right file type can also help reduce the image file size and improve loading speed.

Another way to optimize images is to use responsive images, which automatically adjust their size and resolution based on the user’s screen size. This can help reduce the amount of data that needs to be downloaded and improve your website’s loading speed on mobile devices.

Large and unoptimized images can significantly slow down your website, leading to a poor user experience and higher bounce rates.

Optimizing images involves compressing them to reduce their file size without compromising their quality. You can use tools like Smush or ShortPixel to compress your images automatically or manually before uploading them to your website.

In addition to compressing images, you should also consider using the right file type for each image. For example, JPEG is a good choice for photographs, while PNG is better for graphics with transparency. Using the right file type can also help reduce the image file size and improve loading speed.

Another way to optimize images is to use responsive images, which automatically adjust their size and resolution based on the user’s screen size. This can help reduce the amount of data that needs to be downloaded and improve your website’s loading speed on mobile devices.

4. Minimize HTTP Requests:

. HTTP requests are made every time a browser loads a resource like an image, script, or stylesheet, and they can add up quickly, leading to slower loading times.

To minimize HTTP requests, you should aim to reduce the number of resources that your website needs to load. Here are some ways to do that:

• Minimize the number of plugins you use. Plugins can add extra scripts and stylesheets to your website, leading to more HTTP requests.
• Combine and minify your CSS and JavaScript files. Combining multiple CSS and JavaScript files into a single file and minifying them can reduce the number of HTTP requests made by your website.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN can cache your website’s resources on servers located around the world, reducing the number of HTTP requests made to your server.
• Use inline CSS and JavaScript. By including CSS and JavaScript directly in your HTML files, you can avoid additional HTTP requests.
• Optimize your images. As mentioned earlier, large and unoptimized images can increase HTTP requests. Compressing images and using the right file type can help reduce the number of requests and assists to Speed Up Your WordPress Website.

5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN):

A CDN is a network of servers distributed around the world that work together to deliver website content to users’ browsers more efficiently. By caching static files, such as images and videos, on servers located closer to the user, a CDN can significantly reduce the distance and time it takes for data to travel, resulting in faster loading times and a better user experience.

Using a CDN is especially helpful for WordPress websites with a global audience, as it allows your website to load quickly regardless of the user’s location. It can also help reduce the load on your server, leading to improved website performance and reduced server downtime.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) works by caching static content of a website, such as images, videos, and other files, in servers located around the world. When a user requests to view the website, the server closest to them will load the cached content, reducing the number of external HTTP requests and improving loading speed.

WordPress works seamlessly with various CDN options available in the market to Speed Up Your WordPress Website, including Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, and MaxCDN, among others. These CDN providers offer plugins that integrate smoothly with WordPress and allow you to easily set up and manage your CDN. By using a CDN with WordPress, you can improve the performance of your website, reduce server load, and provide a better user experience for your visitors, no matter where they are located.

6. Optimize Your Database:

Over time, your website’s database can become bloated with unnecessary data, slowing down your website’s performance.

Optimizing your database involves removing unnecessary data, optimizing database tables, and performing regular maintenance tasks. Here are some ways to optimize your database:

1. Remove unnecessary data: Delete any unused or unnecessary data from your database, such as spam comments, post revisions, and trashed items.
2. Optimize database tables: Use a plugin like WP-Optimize or WP-Sweep to optimize your database tables and reduce their size.
3. Use object caching: Object caching can significantly reduce the number of database queries needed to generate your website’s pages. Use a plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket to implement object caching on your website.
4. Disable or limit post revisions: By default, WordPress stores a revision history for each post or page. Limiting or disabling post revisions can help reduce the size of your database.
5. Schedule regular maintenance tasks: Schedule regular database backups, optimize your database tables, and remove any unnecessary data to keep your database running smoothly.

7. Use Lazy Loading:

Lazy loading is a technique that delays the loading of images and other resources until they are needed, reducing the amount of data that needs to be downloaded when a user visits your website.

Lazy loading works by only loading the images that are currently visible on the user’s screen. As the user scrolls down the page, more images are loaded as needed. This can significantly reduce the amount of data that needs to be downloaded and improve your website’s loading speed, especially on pages with many images.

Most modern browsers support lazy loading, and there are several plugins available for WordPress that make it easy to implement. Popular options include Lazy Load by WP Rocket and A3 Lazy Load.

8. Deliver Content Over HTTP/2:

HTTP/2 is a newer version of the HTTP protocol that offers several improvements over the older HTTP/1.1 protocol, including faster loading times and better security.

HTTP/2 offers several performance optimizations, such as:

1. Multiplexing: HTTP/2 allows multiple requests to be sent over a single connection, reducing the number of connections needed to load a page.
2. Server push: HTTP/2 allows servers to push resources to clients before they are requested, reducing the time needed to load a page.
3. Binary protocol: HTTP/2 uses a binary protocol that is more efficient than the text-based protocol used by HTTP/1.1.

Most modern web servers and browsers support HTTP/2, and there are several plugins available for WordPress that make it easy to implement. Popular options include the HTTP/2 and SSL plugin and the WP HTTP/2 Server Push plugin.

9. Minimize Redirects:

Redirects are when a browser is redirected from one URL to another, which can add extra time to your website’s loading time.

Minimizing redirects involves reducing the number of times a user is redirected when they visit your website. Here are some ways to minimize redirects:

• Avoid using unnecessary redirects: Try to avoid creating unnecessary redirects, such as redirecting users from HTTP to HTTPS if it’s not necessary.
• Use permanent redirects (301): If a redirect is necessary, use a permanent redirect (301) instead of a temporary redirect (302). Permanent redirects are cached by browsers and search engines, while temporary redirects are not.
• Reduce the number of domain name redirects: Each redirect from one domain to another adds extra time to your website’s loading time. Try to reduce the number of domain name redirects whenever possible.
• Update your internal links: Make sure your internal links point directly to the correct URL and avoid using redirects where possible.

10. Optimize Your CSS Delivery:

CSS is a critical component of web design, but large CSS files can slow down your website’s performance.

Optimizing your CSS delivery involves reducing the size of your CSS files and improving how they are loaded. Here are some ways to optimize your CSS delivery:

• Minimize your CSS files: Use a CSS minifier tool to remove unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other data from your CSS files. This can significantly reduce the file size and improve loading times.
• Use inline CSS: By including CSS directly in your HTML files, you can avoid additional HTTP requests and reduce loading times.
• Use a CDN: Using a CDN to deliver your CSS files can reduce the distance they need to travel and improve loading times.
• Load CSS asynchronously: By loading CSS files asynchronously, you can prevent them from blocking other resources from loading, which can improve overall page speed.
• Combine multiple CSS files: Combining multiple CSS files into a single file can reduce the number of HTTP requests needed to load your website.

11. Optimize Your JavaScript:

JavaScript is a critical component of modern web design, but large and unoptimized JavaScript files can slow down your website’s performance.

Optimizing your JavaScript involves reducing the size of your JavaScript files and improving how they are loaded. Here are some ways to optimize your JavaScript:

• Minimize your JavaScript files: Use a JavaScript minifier tool to remove unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other data from your JavaScript files. This can significantly reduce the file size and improve loading times.
• Load JavaScript asynchronously: By loading JavaScript files asynchronously, you can prevent them from blocking other resources from loading, which can improve overall page speed.
• Use a CDN: Using a CDN to deliver your JavaScript files can reduce the distance they need to travel and improve loading times.
• Combine multiple JavaScript files: Combining multiple JavaScript files into a single file can reduce the number of HTTP requests needed to load your website.
• Use deferred loading: By deferring the loading of non-critical JavaScript files, you can improve initial page load times and prioritize the loading of essential resources.

Caching is the process of storing website data, such as HTML pages, images, and other resources, so that they can be quickly accessed by visitors.

Advanced caching techniques can significantly improve your website’s loading speed by storing data in more efficient ways and reducing the number of requests made to the server. Here are some advanced caching techniques to consider:

1. Object caching: Object caching stores frequently accessed data in memory, reducing the number of database queries needed to generate a page.
2. Opcode caching: Opcode caching stores compiled PHP code in memory, reducing the time needed to generate a page.
3. Page caching: Page caching stores entire HTML pages in memory or on disk, reducing the time needed to generate a page.
4. CDN caching: Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can cache your website’s resources on servers located around the world, reducing the number of requests made to your server.

There are several caching plugins available to Speed Up Your WordPress Website, such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and WP Super Cache, that make it easy to implement advanced caching techniques.

Additional, Choose an Optimized WordPress Theme

I strongly advise choosing an optimized WordPress theme to improve the loading speed of your website. A well-optimized theme can significantly affect your website’s performance, so it’s crucial to pick a theme that meets certain criteria.

Consider the following factors when choosing a fast WordPress theme:

1. Optimized code: The theme’s code should be optimized, following the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and WordPress standards to prevent performance or security issues. Use tools like HTML Markup Validation Service and the free plugin Theme Check to validate a theme’s code.
2. Lightweight: A lightweight theme should only contain essential features, minimal clutter in the code, and JavaScript and CSS file sizes under 100 KB. Default WordPress themes usually fall under this category.
3. Browser compatibility: Not all WordPress themes work well across different browsers. Choosing a cross-browser compatible theme ensures that your website functions correctly on all browsers.
4. Mobile responsiveness: Mobile-responsive themes adapt to mobile screens and don’t slow down the website’s loading time. With over half of all web traffic originating from mobile devices, it’s crucial to have a responsive theme to ensure accessibility and attract visitors.
5. AMP-ready: Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology allows WordPress sites to load faster on mobile devices. Choosing an AMP-ready theme can significantly improve your mobile site’s speed.

When selecting a WordPress theme, prioritize these criteria to ensure that you choose a well-optimized theme that enhances your website’s performance and provides a better user experience for your visitors.

Speed Up Your WordPress Website: Conclusion

A slow website can lead to poor user experience, high bounce rates, and negative effects on search engine rankings.

In this guide, we have discussed 12 steps to speed up WordPress, ranging from beginner-friendly tips to more advanced steps. These methods include optimizing images, minimizing HTTP requests, using a content delivery network, using advanced caching techniques, and choosing an optimized WordPress theme, among others.

By applying these methods, you can significantly improve your website’s loading speed and provide a better user experience for your visitors. It’s essential to keep your website optimized regularly and continuously monitor its performance to ensure that it remains fast and responsive.

We hope this guide has helped you improve your WordPress website’s performance and provide a better user experience for your visitors.
If you have any questions or need help with your WordPress speed optimizations, please just contact us directly.