Is your WordPress site dragging its feet, making visitors wait? A slow website can frustrate users and hurt your search rankings. But don’t worry—speeding up your site is easier than you think! In this blog post, we’ll share 10 simple and effective ways to boost your site’s speed. From optimizing images to using the right plugins, these tips will help your site load faster and keep your visitors happy.
Ready to turn your sluggish site into a speedy success? Let’s dive in and make your WordPress site faster than ever!
Why Should You Speed Up Your WordPress Site?
A study shows that sites loading in 1-second convert 3 times more than those loading in 5 seconds. Every second of delay costs you traffic, customers, and profits.
Visitors won’t wait for a slow website; they’ll leave and might never return.
Consider these stats:
- Unbounce found that 70% of people are more likely to buy if a site loads fast.
- Google found that the chance of a user leaving increases by 32% as page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds.
Don’t miss out on speed. Even a simple website works fine if it’s fast, but a slow website means slow business!
Here Are The Top 10 Easy Ways to Speed up Your WordPress Site
1. Choose Fast WordPress Hosting
Quality web hosting is essential for a fast WordPress site. Choose a hosting provider and plan that matches your bandwidth and performance needs. Most WordPress hosts offer various types of hosting: shared hosting, dedicated hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting, and managed WordPress hosting plans.
When choosing a WordPress hosting plan, you usually get what you pay for. Shared hosting is often the cheapest option. This is great for new WordPress users who want to start online without spending much money. and Managed WordPress hosting offers optimized performance and dedicated support, making it a better choice for growing websites.
2. Use The Latest Version Of PHP
PHP is the coding language used to run all WordPress websites. It works on the server that hosts your site, meaning the server processes PHP files to display your website. Just like themes and plugins, PHP gets updated to work better and make your website load faster.
The latest version is PHP 8.3.10, released on November 23, 2023, and it performs much better than previous versions. You should use PHP 8.3.10 for your website.
3. Delete Unused Plugins And Themes
To keep your site running quickly, you should not only keep your plugins and themes up to date but also remove any that you don’t use. Unused plugins and themes can be security risks and can slow down your WordPress site.
To delete an unused WordPress plugin, first deactivate it. Then go to the list of inactive plugins and remove the ones you don’t need.
To remove an old WordPress theme, go to Appearance > Themes and delete the ones you don’t need anymore.
4. Clean Up Your Database
If you don’t regularly clean up your WordPress database, it can get cluttered and slow down your site. For example, old drafts of your posts can take up a lot of extra space. If you have a post that’s 100KB and it has five drafts, that’s an extra 500KB being used unnecessarily.
You can clean up your database manually using phpMyAdmin, but this can be risky if you’re not familiar with it. A safer option is to use a plugin like WP-Sweep or Advanced Database Cleaner, which can help remove old drafts, spam comments, and other clutter from your database.
5. Choose A Fast, Lightweight Theme
When visitors browse your WordPress site, their browsers download the web pages and proceed to render the content. This is often uncompressed, and if your WordPress pages are gargantuan in size due to the necessary and rich elements that they include, it will necessarily and unfortunately increase the page’s loading time.
There is a handy way around this: by enabling intelligent Gzip compression, you can diminish the size of the transferred responses from the server to the client’s browsers. This will markedly decrease the requisite seconds to download the resources, minimize data usage, and enhance the rendering speed of your beautiful WordPress site within your client’s browser.
Using Gzip compression, your page’s total size can be reduced by an astonishing 50% to 70% for your client, which, unsurprisingly, will serve to ramp up the speed of your WordPress blog. Of course, when Gzip isn’t enabled, Google’s PageSpeed Insight tool will note this and warn you to enable compression.
6. Improving Page Speed And Image Optimization With Lazy Loading
To improve your site’s loading speed, ensure your images are optimized by following three essential tips. First, reduce the file size of your images through compression. Second, resize them to match the actual dimensions needed on your pages, rather than relying on WordPress to adjust them automatically.
This approach prevents inefficiencies and ensures better performance. Third, consider using lazy loading, especially for long pages or one-page sites.
Lazy loading delays the loading of images until visitors scroll down, which helps your site load faster initially. A popular plugin for implementing lazy loading is Lazy Load by WP Rocket.
7. Reduce CSS And JavaScript File Sizes
CSS and JavaScript are important for making your site look and work better than just plain HTML. However, these files need to be sent from your server to your browser every time someone visits a page. To make your pages load faster, try to make these files as small as possible without changing how your site looks or works.
You can use a free WordPress plugin like Autoptimize to help with this. It checks your CSS and JavaScript files, removes unnecessary code like extra spaces and comments, and makes the files smaller so they load faster.
8. Reduce Or Turn Off Post Revisions
Each time you save a WordPress post, it automatically makes a copy of the post and saves it in your database, so you can go back to previous versions if needed. While this feature is useful, too many revisions can slow down your site. By default, WordPress keeps an unlimited number of these revisions.
However, you can adjust this setting to save fewer revisions or turn them off completely. To limit the number of saved revisions, open your site’s wp-config.php file (found in the main folder of your site) and add the following code at the bottom of the file:
define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 );
9. Use A CDN
If you want to speed up your WordPress site, using a content delivery network (CDN) is a great idea. A CDN is a group of servers around the world that store your website’s files. It delivers these files from the server closest to each visitor, so your site loads faster. CDNs also help keep your site running smoothly because if one server fails, another can take over.
Some hosting providers offer free CDN services, like AccuWeb Hosting. Check if your hosting provider includes this feature to take advantage of faster site loading.
10. Compress files with GZIP
GZIP is a way to compress files to make them smaller for faster internet transfer. It can cut file sizes by up to 70% and works faster than other methods. When you use GZIP compression on your website, your files will be sent to users more quickly and use less bandwidth.
Many plugins can turn on GZIP compression for you, often with just a simple checkbox. If your site is hosted on an Apache server (which it likely is), you can also enable GZIP compression manually by adding a specific code to your .htaccess file.
Conclusion
In conclusion, optimizing your WordPress site for speed is essential for providing a seamless user experience and improving your site’s overall performance. A fast WordPress site not only improves user satisfaction but also positively impacts your search engine rankings, helping you attract more traffic. Take action today to transform your WordPress site into a lightning-fast platform that delivers results!
One of the weakness that most of the websites suffers from is it can be quite slow. A slow website is not only a hassle for repeat visitors but will cause to lose subscribers and customers. What you provided in this post are interesting tips to speed up the website loading. What I consider most important tips are Optimizing images, minimize css/java scrips and good web hosting provider. Anyway thanks for sharing.
This post is very important for all wordpress user. You already posted important suggestion. I have also some suggestion, Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content, you can Use CloudFlare, Optimize your WordPress database. So, you can try it and your wordpress will be speed up.
Finally, I found some tricks to speed up my lazy load’s site. After applying all of these tricks, i notice the significant change on loading speed on my site.now its load time 90-95%. Thanks #Rahul_Vaghasia for this detailed article.
Excellent reseach based post ! These are definitive techniques ensuring the results.
Some of the images still shows unoptimized.can you suggest any solution for that?
Josh, thanks for your comment. If you have already tried various tools to optimize images mentioned in this blog, you can consider another solution to optimize your images:
Check your site in Google PageSpeed Insights. You will see an option “Download optimized image, JavaScript, and CSS resources for this page”. Once downloaded, upload these optimized images for your site/blog. Feel free to revert back in case of any more trouble.
Hey Rahul, this seems a real practically tested analysis. I was able to bring site speed from 75% to 96%. Thanks a bunch! Wanted to ask, if I do not want to install any plugin for database optimization and still optimize it how can I do that? I have phpMyAdmin installed to manage MySQL databases. Thanks again!
Hello Hendricks, Fortunately, making this optimization is quite easy when using the phpMyAdmin tool. To perform the optimization, log in to your phpMyAdmin and select the database whose tables you wish to optimize. A list of all the database’s tables will appear. Tick the tables you wish to optimize, or simply click [Check All] to select all tables. From the [With selected:] drop-down menu choose Optimize table. This will execute the OPTIMIZE TABLE SQL query on the selected tables and they will be updated and optimized.
Hey Rahul, Nice article. I do have a question. What if i don’t want to use W3 cache plugin. Do you suppose CloudFlare free CDN service will perform better and how can i activate Cloudflare from cPanel.
When you use WordPress script, caching is almost essential. Whether you utilize server side caching like Xvarnish, Unixy, etc. or a browser side caching like WordPress plugins. CloudFlare is more likely a CDN service with caching ability, but not a replacement of caching plugins. You can certainly use it to speedy delivery of the static content. To activate CloudFlare from cPanel, Refer to our KB … https://manage.accuwebhosting.com/knowledgebase/2625/How-to-activate-CloudFlare-in-cPanel.html
I liked the way you utilized Google Page Insights for optimizing images and CSS and JS. I have been using this tool since long, but never realized they also offer downloadable optimized assets along with the suggestions. Great finding.
Hi Rahul,
You did a great job here, I like the way you how you represented this article. A well-written article and it will be very helpful.
Hey Rahul,
Great stuff!! Great strategy you have discussed. Well described each point. I test my speed on Google page speed insight and found score 62%. There are caching and image optimization issue. I will resolve those asap. Thanks for your great useful post. Many users like me will be helpful if they read your entire post.
You are most welcome and glad to know our post helped you out.
In my opinion having a full site cache is the best way to speed up your site. If your page loads are more than 1 second with a full site cache and combined/minified files then you should switch to a different host.
Great ways for speeding up WordPress websites.
One of the big problem that cause wordpress sites to load slowly is that too many plugins. For the novice, the sheer abundance of available plugins for the WordPress platform allows webmasters to overload their site with too many plugins. The expert will only use the minimum number of plugins required to ensure the site’s full intended functionality.