WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world. The CMS has over a quarter of a billion users, and it powers almost 30% of websites online. It’s easy to see why WordPress is so popular: it’s free, open source, and highly customizable. With its popularity comes issues though – there are many things that can cause your WordPress site to slow down and even worse – some plugins can even take your site offline entirely if not configured correctly!
In this post, we’ll cover 9 things you can do today that will help speed up your site dramatically without sacrificing any functionality or usability at all.
1. Choose a Reliable WordPress Web Hosting Provider
Choosing a reliable WordPress web hosting provider is very important. If your site’s performance is slow, it will frustrate and eventually lose visitors—and that’s not good for business! The best way to ensure that your website loads quickly is to choose a web host that has good customer support, fast servers with lots of bandwidth, and plenty of resources available.
If you choose a web hosting company with poor uptime or slow servers, it may be hard to recover from their shortcomings when they affect the speed of your site.
2. Remove Unnecessary WordPress Plugins
Removing plugins you no longer need can improve your site’s speed. Sometimes, you might have uninstalled a plugin but forgotten about it. In such cases, the plugin will still be active in your WordPress database and may slow down your website significantly.
To check if there are any unnecessary plugins on your site, go to Plugins > Installed Plugins from WordPress admin dashboard. Then click on the “Plugin” tab below it and choose “Scan for Issues.” If a warning appears saying that some of the installed plugins may cause compatibility issues with other WordPress installations or cause server-side errors (such as 500 Internal Server Errors), then you should remove those problematic plugins immediately.
It is also important to note that some people prefer creating their own custom themes rather than using standard themes provided by most web hosts because they feel more comfortable working with their own code than someone else’s code.
3. Compress Images
Compressing your images is one of the most effective ways to speed up your site. However, it’s important to understand that not all image compression is created equal.
We highly suggest Lossless compression. When you save an image as a JPEG or PNG and compress it further, there is some loss of quality in the image—but this can be made up for by increasing its size slightly. If you resize your image after compressing it with lossless compression (for example, when using WP Smush.it), then no additional time is needed for loading because both steps happen at once.
For example, if you have an 800×600 pixel photo and reduce its resolution by 50% before uploading it to WordPress using lossless compression, then your website will load faster than if I didn’t compress my images at all! This results from having more “real estate” on screen at one time instead of having smaller versions displayed next to each other which takes longer because there’s less room available on screen.”
4. Use a WordPress Caching Plugin
One of the easiest ways to speed up your WordPress site is no other than having a caching plugin. A caching plugin works by storing a copy of the data that normally gets sent to the user. This means that instead of sending all of the information to them for every single page load, you can just send them a link and tell them where it’s stored. This dramatically reduces traffic on your server, which will then make it easier for you to scale out and keep things fast as you grow!
There are many different caching plugins available; here are some popular examples:
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Super Cache
- WP-Optimize
- WP Rocket
- WP Fastest Cache
- LiteSpeed Cache
- Hummingbird
5. Optimize Your Database and CSS and JavaScript File Sizes
The first step to optimizing your database is to optimize the size of your files. This means compressing images, using compressed graphics formats and reducing the number of CSS and JavaScript files.
A minifier is a tool that will shrink the file size of your CSS or JavaScript files. Minifying your CSS and JavaScript files will reduce the load time of your page, which will make it faster for users to access your site. You can use online tools like CSS Minifier or ScriptMin to do this manually, or you can purchase a plugin that does this automatically for you on every save.
6. Use a Lightweight WordPress Theme
Lightweight themes are better for your site’s performance. If you’re on a shared server, you may already be aware that the number of scripts running at any given time can affect how fast or slow your website loads. Since WordPress uses PHP to generate websites, it has its own script that runs alongside other scripts (such as JavaScript) which generate content pages and posts in WordPress.
A lightweight theme will help speed up your site because it doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as some other themes do; it won’t take up unnecessary processing power when loading on your site either (this is especially helpful if you have an older computer).
7. Enable GZIP Compression
GZIP compression is a way to reduce the size of files, such as web pages and images, by using a special algorithm to compress the data in the file. When you enable GZIP compression on WordPress, it can help speed up your site and save bandwidth.
To enable GZIP compression on WordPress, you need to modify some .htaccess files in your website’s root directory. To do this in cPanel:
- From within cPanel, click File Manager
- On the left side of the page select Home Directory (public_html)
- Click on Open Root Directory
8. Minimize HTTP Requests
When you have a slow website, every second counts. One of the best ways to speed up your WordPress site is by minimizing HTTP requests.
When someone visits your site, they’re downloading information from multiple places on the internet and loading it into their browser. Each time your browser asks for information—even if it’s just one file—it creates an HTTP request that takes time for the server to process before sending back the file. If there are too many files required for each page load, then this adds up quickly and leaves users waiting at their desktops impatiently hitting F5 over and over again.
9. Simplify Your Web Design
Simplify your web design by removing unnecessary elements, including too many videos, images, tables and widgets. The more clutter you can get rid of, the faster your site will load.
Again, even if you don’t actually design your website from scratch. Try to use a light WordPress theme that doesn’t have too many features or functions to slow down your website’s performance, such as Genesis Framework or Elegant Themes Blur Pro Theme which are optimized for speed by default (no additional plugins needed).
Conclusion
Now you know 9 different ways on how to speed up your WordPress site. We hope this article helped you understand what needs to be done and why.
If you have any questions or need a professional team to design your WordPress website, please contact us!
