Do you want to speed up your WordPress site? Faster loading pages improve user experience, increase your pageviews, and help with your WordPress SEO. In this article, we will share the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips to speed up your website and that will help to fix load speed issues of your website.
Load speed issues of WordPress websites
First things first – slow loading websites is a bad user experience. Poor performance causes frustration. And it leaves a bad first impression that you will never recover from.
- Poor WordPress performance can have a direct impact on your ability to rank in relevant search.
- Page size – mainly images that are not optimized for the web.
Here we will discuss the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips
Slow web host
Your WordPress hosting service plays a vital role in website performance. A good shared hosting provider like Bluehost or Siteground takes extra measures to optimize your website for performance.
What to do
In addition to helping you achieve faster page load speeds, some essentials for your performance web host include:
- Excellent WordPress security:
- Especially if you run an eCommerce business or are handling personal and financial transactions
- Responsive Customer Support: If your site crashes, you’ll want a way to get it up and running ASAP.
Automatic Backups: There are many WordPress backup plugins available in the market, but the web host’s internal backup system results in the fastest and easiest restores.
Heavy web traffic
Optimizing your online presence for the best user experience comes back to your web host and the specific plan you are working on. You have to make sure that your chosen web host can handle the ever-changing web traffic.
What to do
For backup plugins, you need to make sure that your WordPress backup plugin only runs during low traffic times on your website.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Using a content delivery network (CDN) can help speed up loading times for all of your visitors. A CDN is a network made up of servers around the world.
Each server will store the “static” files used to build your website. We recommend using Sucuri, Bunny CDN, or Cloudflare.
Keep Your WordPress Site Updated
.As a website owner, it is your responsibility to keep your WordPress site, themes and plugins updated to the latest versions. Failure to do so can make your site slow and unreliable, and leave you vulnerable to security threats.
Server Location
Your server location also plays a factor in why websites load slowly.
Think about it this way:
If your website is hosted in the US and your visitor is tuning in from Japan, your website data will have to travel halfway around the world to request access, then return to grant that access.
Unlike web hosts, CDNs do not host the content but rather cache the content to reduce hosting bandwidth.
Code Density
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Large (or dense) elements like WordPress plugins and themes can add up and affect page speed. Having too many plugins can slow down your site just as few plugins and a dense theme can.
What to do
Delete all the plugins you don’t use often. Getting caught with plugins that aren’t regularly used or updated can cause your site to crash or be a vulnerable point for site attacks..
Simply deactivating them is not enough. Removing themes and plugins you don’t use can help ease site maintenance and speed up your site.
You should also check which plugins slow down your site by selectively deactivating them and see how they affect your site. You can use a tool like GTmetrix or Pingdom to measure your website speed more accurately.
Identify HTTP requests
HTTP requests are generated for each of these files. In other words, the more files that need to be loaded, the more HTTP requests you’ll receive, and the longer it will take for the page to eventually render.
What to do:
Determine how many HTTP requests your site normally makes.
For this, right-click on the page you want to analyze. From there, click Inspect, then click the tab labeled Network.
Here you will see the name, file size and time required to load each file. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see the total number of requests taken in aggregate.
Use latest PHP version
WordPress is primarily written in the PHP programming language. It is a server side language, which means that it is installed and runs on your hosting server.
The new PHP 7 is up to two times faster than its predecessors. This is a huge performance boost that your website should take advantage of.
You can check which PHP version your site is using by installing and activating the Version Info plugin.
Upon activation, the plugin will show your PHP version in the footer area of your WordPress admin dashboard.
PHP Version in WordPress Admin Dashboard
If your website is using a version lower than PHP 7, ask your hosting provider to update it for you. If they are unable to do so, it is time to find a new WordPress hosting company.
Limit post revision
Post revisions also take space in your WordPress database. You can easily limit the number of revisions WordPress holds for each article. Just add this line of code to your wp-config.php file.
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4);
This code will limit WordPress to saving your last 4 revisions of each post or page, and will automatically discard the old revisions.
Go ahead and try these techniques. Don’t forget to test your website speed before and after implementing these best practices. You will be surprised how much these changes will boost your WordPress performance.