More than 40% of websites across the web is built on WordPress, so it is really important that you must find ways to speed your WordPress site at all. Because you see, time is very important for everyone and they don’t want to waste waiting to load a website. That is an important factor for people and for Google and other search engines to rank your site higher than other websites. If I have to put it in full details, there are more than 35 ways and methods that can be used to speed your WordPress websites. For this article I am only mentioning some of them but the other important factor I will be explaining them with everything that has to be done.
Before applying any of the following methods into your website, you need to run some test on Google page insight to get an estimate number regarding the speed of your website on PC and on smartphone devices. There are also other websites which can be helpful for checking the speed of your website, but I am recommending Google page insight.
- You need to choose a very fast and reliable hosting
- Update everything on your website from themes, plugins etc
- Make sure that you run the latest version of PHP on your WordPress website, it can be done from the C panel of your website
- Delete unwanted and unused plugin on your website
- Use plugins that frequently get updates
- A lightweight theme such as generate press, Astra theme are recommended
- Lazy let your content using plugins
- Don’t ever host videos on your WordPress website, for that there is YouTube
- You must reduce the CSS and JavaScript file sizes
- A cache plugin is highly recommended to install on your WordPress site
- Don’t design your pages with heavy stuff just make it simple and clean
- Make sure to limit or delete the post revisions of your website
- Remove non essential data from your database
- Try to don’t use it redirection
- From the settings you have to turn off the pingbacks
- If your site has a lot of images and traffic perhaps you should use CDN
- Compress your files using Gzip on the server side
- Don’t use a lot of Adsense code on your side
- Paginate long posts and comments
Important Ways to Speed your WordPress Site
1. Purchase a Reliable Host
For everything the base is really important, for a WordPress website hosting is the base of it. If the host is reliable, it is fast, you won’t even perform many of the methods that I mentioned above. So, before purchasing any hosting unit to do a lot of research across the web regarding the big hosting companies. E-mail them, check their support system and their response time to their customers and most of all you must ask if they use the Google mod_pagespeed. This feature is easily configuring your server for speed.
Please keep in mind, for starters other hostings will do the job, but if you are an IT expert and you know how to configure the security, hosting and everything then perhaps I think it is a good idea to use the AWS server, Google clouds or digital ocean servers to host your WordPress website on them.
2. Compress Images
Another factor of the speed of your WordPress site is images. You must not upload images more than 50 KB into your website. Even up to 100 KB, you can give a try once a while but not for every images. Also you need to use the next generation of images into your website, since it is not losing the quality of the image but it is reducing the size of the image 100%. If you create those images into your computer and then upload it that will also do the job or you can simply use plugins to automatically convert the JPEG and PNG and other formats into the webp images right away.
3. lazy Load, Cache, Post Revisions and Tidy your Database
In these sections I am going to cover lazy Lord, cash, post revisions and tidy your database. Apparently all of these stuff are one of the reasons that can affect directly the speed of your website.
- Lazy Lord is simply loading the images and medias as you scroll through your articles.
- Cache is really clear if you visit that website, next time it will load that article or website through the cache that it has saved rather than accessing it directly from the server once again.
- You can say post revisions are the draft version of your published articles and each time you edit or update the post, it will be saved. It can increase overtime and it will stay untouched into your database which makes your database heavy. You need to clear all of them.
You need to configure such settings that it should include all of these important stuff. Well, apparently the good news is that there are tons of powerful plugins in WordPress that can be used to simply fix such issues. There are two main plugins that I use mainly on my on my websites, WP Rocket and WP optimize.
Even though these plugins are powerful enough but still you need to install a cache plugin tool on your website.
4. Content Delivery Network
Content delivery network or CDN is not recommended for everyone unless your website is too big to handle. You see content delivery network is a separate server which only loads the media into your site and at the same time it is loading the scripts, and text into your website from the main hosting that you purchased. A good example is Facebook, which is using Akamai’s CDN. Other businesses and content delivery websites such as CNET and other sites mostly consider using CloudFlare.
Note: For a basic user you may think that Cloudflare is providing you a content delivery network, I have used it in the past but it is not really helpful. So, avoid it right away unless you purchase it.
Conclusion:
If you want to get more traffic from Search Engines then you must speed your WordPress site right away. As I mentioned many of the methods in this article you must configure them each to gain a good speed.