How To Increase WordPress Speed And Performance

In fact, according to Google Webmaster, the acceptable threshold for a website’s loading time is just 2 seconds. Because no one has time to wait for their website to load anymore while other websites load in seconds.

Now the question is:

How long does your website take to load?

Are you a slow website owner hoping to lose money on your business?

It is clear!

How to improve WordPress site speed?

No problem! You’ve found the right blog (and professionals) that will provide solutions to all the reasons your WordPress site slows down.

Why do you need to speed up your WordPress site?

Well, speed is one of the main areas a website owner should be concerned about. Reasons? Here are some of them:

Get better SERP ranking: Search engines are the best medium to get traffic to your website. And if you want to grab those first-page SERP spots, you must speed up your website. Because Google and other popular search engines consider speed as a crucial factor when ranking web pages.
Reduce Bounce Rate: Getting traffic to your website is of no value if they don’t stay on your website for a considerable period and come to your product/service. And a slow site will undoubtedly result in customers leaving your site.
Better User Experience: A better user experience is important to keep your audience engaged and increase conversion rate. Having a website with good loan ding speed can result in a better user experience.

Now you can get an idea about the importance of increasing WordPress speed and performance.

How to test your website speed?

If you’re looking for a free tool, my suggestion would be Google PageSpeed Insight. Using this tool, you can test your website speed separately for desktop and mobile.

This tool is really easy to use. Simply provide the URL of your webpage, choose the device you want to test speed on, and click Analyze.

Here you will get a performance score of 100. Ideally, you should aim to get 90 out of 100 for your website performance. Another great thing about this free tool is that it also gives you different opportunities to optimize your website to improve your website speed.

Tips on how to increase WordPress speed and performance

Disappointed with your website speed test result? Nothing to worry about, you can continually optimize the speed to get your desired performance result.

But how to improve WordPress site speed?

1 – Choose a faster server:

By fastest server I mean preferably a dedicated server. In the beginning, it is widespread for people to opt for shared hosting as it is cheap. However, over time, once you become popular and get a good amount of traffic to your website, it’s always a better idea to switch to dedicated hosting.

Since shared hosting and all the resources are being shared between multiple websites, this has an inevitable negative effect on your website’s performance. Especially most shared hosting does not provide 99% uptime and at peak hours the website loading speed is not satisfactory.

So I would suggest that if you can afford it, switch to a dedicated server for your WordPress hosting that gets a good amount of traffic every month.

Note: Also, make sure you choose a server located close to where you receive the most website visitors from. Because your server location also plays a significant role in your website speed due to many factors like network latency, TTFB (time to first byte), etc.

2 – Take advantage of a caching plugin

The caching plugin makes a website fast by skipping many steps when loading a webpage. It does this by making a copy of the page after the first time a page is generated and then using that copy to serve all subsequent users who visit your WordPress site.

As the WordPress CMS is dynamic, if you don’t use a caching plugin, every time someone tries to access your website, it will repeat all the processes and fetch all the data from the WordPress database, which will overload your server a lot. and therefore make the site super slow.

So, use a caching plugin on your website to boost WordPress speed. You can also combine advanced caching engines like Varnish with a caching plugin to see a noticeable improvement in your site’s loading speed.

3 – Minimize HTML, CSS, and Javascript

Although you need HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build and run your WordPress site, if not optimized it can slow down your site a bit. And that’s why experts always recommend minimizing your HTML, CSS, and javascript codes.

Code shortening does not affect how your website works, it just removes unused code and replaces variable and function names with a shorter name. So if your site is not using minified codes then minify the code quickly to improve WordPress speed.

4 – Remove render-blocking JavaScript and CSS

Removing Render Blocking Javascript and CSS, as the name suggests, blocks your web page from loading before these scripts are loaded. This is an area of improvement that Google Pagespeed Insights frequently suggests for improvement.

This can result in slow loading for your website. You can remove these render-blocking codes for loading later so that they don’t affect the actual loading speed of your website. This is an effective way to improve WordPress site speed

5 – Choose a light and fast theme

However, too much animation and additional functions make your site slow, so it’s useless.

Suggested Reading: WordPress Nulled: Why You Should Avoid It

6 – Optimize the image, media, and database of your WordPress site

Over time your site becomes a repository of unused images, and media that can increase the size of your site and thus affect your site’s loading speed. The same goes for databases as well. If unoptimized database stores unnecessary information then it results in bad WordPress website speed.

So, make sure your website is full of redundant images and media files or not. And if so, clean them. A reduced media size like an optimized image and database size will also slow down your site.

7 – Use a CDN (content delivery network)

Although it is a good idea to have a server located close to your frequent visitor’s location. That’s not enough to serve all the people that come to your site.

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) maintains a copy of the website in different data centers located in different parts of the world. That way, you can be sure your site loads at a certain speed no matter where someone tries to access your site.

8 – Disable pingbacks and trackbacks

Pingbacks and Trackbacks are great for finding out when one of your blogs or webpages is linked. While they are great, you need to know that these links can overload your server.

Also, if you enable these two features, you are always at risk of receiving DDoS attacks. So, to optimize WordPress speed and protect your site from DDoS attacks, make sure to disable pingbacks and trackbacks. You can easily disable them from the WordPress admin panel.

9 – Uninstall unused plugins and themes

If you are not using plugins or themes, it is unnecessary to keep these files on your server. Therefore, uninstall any WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that you do not use.

In addition to uninstalling, you also need to keep an eye on whether your themes and plugins have updates available or not. If so, make sure you update them.

10 – Use the latest version of PHP and increase the speed and performance of WordPress

One thing you can’t leave off your checklist on how to improve website speed is the PHP version of your website. It is recommended to use the latest PHP version to maintain your website speed.

However, don’t start using the latest PHP version because your WordPress, theme and other plugins also need to be compatible with the PHP version you use on your website. So first make sure the themes and plugins are compatible with the latest PHP version and then upgrade to that one.

11 – Reduce the number of subsequent revisions

I know, you probably didn’t think you’d find an option in the “tips on how to improve WordPress site speed” list. this option for Multiple post revisions can affect your website speed.

These additional versions saved on your site can slow down your site.

But you only need one version, the latest and most optimized one. You can set a minimum number of revisions using a plugin or do it manually by adding “define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 );” in your wp-config.php file.

Conclusion on WordPress speed and performance:

Now you know how to improve WordPress speed and performance to fix your slow website and make it super fast, but don’t forget, we are WordPress experts, and optimizing WordPress is our specialty.

Among the tips I’ve shared to improve WordPress speed can include things you already use. If so, then you are already on the right track, but try the other tips mentioned that you are not practicing on your site.

If you follow the steps, you will likely see great results in your website loading speed and WordPress performance.

A good loading site means a great user experience and a better user experience can help you earn more revenue. So, never underestimate the importance of your website speed.