It’s said Speed thrills but it kills. When it comes to a website, speed matters. Do you want to speed up your WordPress site performance? Fast loading pages improve user experience, increase your page views, and above all Search engines like Google prefers fast websites for ranking.
In this article, I will share 10 Incredibly Easy Ways To Speed Up WordPress Site Performance. The ultimate tips to boost WordPress performance and speed up your website.
Page Contents
Why should you speed up a WordPress site?
Did you know that if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load, around 45% to 47% of the visitors will leave without waiting?
I am saying.. 2 seconds. Yes, 2 seconds ..is it really enough to do anything at all?
Even reaching out for that cup of hot coffee on your desk will take longer. If you ask me as a site owner, I am really scared even to think about the number of visitors I will lose, if my website is slow to load.
On top of it, these days many people use and search the net on the go (when traveling), which means most people browse and search on their smartphones and tablets.
And if you will agree with me, these smartphones and tablet users are always in a hurry. They can’t even wait for the first few paragraphs to load before they skip to go to the next search result.
But wait, there’s more bad news for slow WordPress site owners.
1: Search engines (like Google) rank websites according to the loading speed of websites. So, if you want to improve your position in the SERPs, improving speed should be one of your priorities.
2: Studies have shown that site-loading speed of more than 2 seconds usually results in about 45 to 47 percent of visitors bouncing off the website. Google now admits that site speed is an important ranking factor.
3: Online buyers are the most impatient lot, they expect the page to load within a second. So, if you are running an e-commerce store on WordPress or an Affiliate site, then its more important for you to speed up WordPress site and improve your business.
How To Test the loading time (speed) of your WordPress Site?
Before you proceed to optimize your website, you need to analyze the current load time for your website. Keep in mind that the load time(speed) will differ from page to page, as it depends on factors, like:
The size of that particular page you are testing.
How many HTTP requests the page generates (links).
Whether the page cached or not with a cache plugin.
Generally, the homepage of a website is usually used as a benchmark to test the load time. You can use the following online tools to check the speed of a website and note down the parameters so that you can compare later.
10 Easy Ways To Speed Up WordPress Site Performance
My intent here is to list the most important and doable ways to speed up WordPress site performance. Which you can implement in a couple of minutes, and see the result immediately.
These are easy fixes, which will not take much time. The things that you can do on your WordPress site to improve loading time significantly.
You don’t need any technical skills or coding to do this.
It will cut down your website loading time by more than half.
You will see the results right away.
It’s all Free..you don’t need to invest any money.
Do you know why WordPress is one of the most popular and the best CMS? It’s because of these thousands of plugins available, which makes designing a WordPress site so easy.
WordPress plugins are like a drug. Because it’s hard to resist to install the next one after you install one plugin. As every plugin makes it much easier for you to make your website look and feel better. But at the cost of speed.
It’s worth keeping in mind, though, that each plugin you install is going to contribute to your site’s overall loading time. In other words, the more plugins you have, the slower your site gets.
How to fix it? Go through your installed plugins and simply remove everything that is non-crucial. Remove everything that your site can live without. This step alone can cut your loading time in half. More on this, please read on.
The proof? On one of my sites, I had 18! yes eighteen plugins installed and running.No wonder it was slow. I had to deactivate all non-essential plugins down to 6 only. Within minutes my website load time was improved by more than 50%.
2: Install and Use a Caching Plugin:
Installing a caching plugin on your website is one of the best ways to ensure your website loads faster.
What a caching plugin does is, it generates static HTML pages of your website and saves it on your server.
So, each time a user tries to access your website, your caching plugin serves up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the comparatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts. This allows the caching plugin to tremendously speed up the WordPress site.
Although there are quite a few WordPress caching plugin some free and some paid. To say which is the best is debatable. But there is two most popular and most downloaded WordPress caching plugin which you must install on your word press site.
One is W3 Total Cache a very popular cache plugin, but not easy to configure for a beginner ! and the second one is WP Super cache
3: Don’t Keep your Plugins Activated all the time:
Now you might be thinking why install a plugin at all, if not to be kept activated? In a way you are right. But not all plugins need to be kept activated all the time.
The best thing with WordPress CMS is the plugins. But plugins are known to slow down your site if/ when they’re active. For example some of them, only need to stay active for a couple of minutes every week – so they can do their job – and then you can deactivate them again. Re-activate only when you require them.
So the trick is, that not all plugins need to be active all the time. Such plugins are:
WP-Optimize Plugin, required for optimizing your database. This plugin only needs to be activated once a month or so. Manually optimize your database, and then just turn it off.
Broken link checker plugin – if you modify any old post, delete some article which may have internal links. In such a scenario, you can activate the broken link plugin to find any broken links inside your website. Fix those broken links and then de-activate it.
4: Use a Lightweight Fast Loading WordPress Theme.
WordPress is not only known for its Plugins but also, thousands of both free and paid themes. Most free WordPress themes are very good and eye-catching.
You will find a lot of WordPress themes with a lot of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons, and many more shiny elements that are immensely appealing to the eye.
But remember this, if a theme has too many elements the page size increases, this will definitely cause your web site to load slow. Do you want to speed up a WordPress site? use a light and fast loading theme.
5: Optimize Images that you upload to your Website:
It is said, “A Picture speaks louder than words”. It’s true and you do need to have images related to the article that you write.
But remember images are the major contributors to the size increment of a given web-page. The trick is to reduce the size of the images without compromising on the quality.
Secondly, you can use a tool called RIOT ( am not saying Riot ) . It stands for Radical Image Optimization Tool. It’s a free tool, I have a detail post here on how to use this tool and also download link.
Fortunately, there are plugins available for image optimization also. The ones worth mentioning are WP Smush, EWWW Image optimizer.
6: Optimize your WordPress Database:
Optimize your WordPress Database ! this may sound a bit technical and intimidating right? but they’re not. At least not in this case. What I mean here is you can speed up WordPress site by optimizing its database with a plugin.
As I said earlier there is a plugin for anything you can think of in WordPress. This plugin is called WP-Optimize.
Install and Activate it normally, and then let it optimize your database on autopilot – just follow the on-screen instructions. You may want to optimize your WordPress database once or at the most twice a month.
After optimizing the WordPress database you can deactivate the plugin, to reduce load on your WordPress site.
7: Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks:
Pingbacks and trackbacks are two core WordPress components that alert you whenever your blog or website receives a link.
It might sound useful, but then you have Google Webmaster Tools and other services to check the links for you. Keeping pingbacks and trackbacks on can put an undesirable amount of strain on your server resources.
Why because whenever anyone tries to link up to your site, it generates requests from WordPress back and forth. This functionality is also widely abused when targeting a website with DDoS attacks.
You can turn off pingbacks and trackbacks in WP-Admin dashboard. Go to Settings / Discussion. Just deselect “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles.” This will further help to speed up WordPress site performance.
For details see how to disable trackbacks and pings on existing WordPress posts as well on your already published posts.
8: Use advanced caching (varnish) mechanisms with a caching plugin:
In addition to cache plugin (see tip no. 2). Combining cache plug-ins with advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish could help you better the loading speed of your website and ultimately speed up WordPress site considerably.
You will see this option in cPanel under the Web Accelerator menu. On clicking that you will get the option to enable varnish for your site.
The varnish is a program that can increase the speed of a Web site while simultaneously reducing the load on the Web server. “Varnish is a “Web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy” – according to Varnish’s official website.
You will have to enable Varnish cache on your host server (cPanel). If you are unsure, ask your host service provider to do it for your WordPress site.
After enabling Varnish cache, check your site, site loading speed. You can disable it , if you see no benefit.
9: Update to the Latest Version of PHP:
You can almost double the speed of your WordPress site by updating to the latest version of PHP. If you ask Do I need to update my PHP? The answer is YES ! you won’t have a choice anyway, since PHP 5.6 has become the minimum requirement for WordPress in April 2019, to be replaced by PHP 7.0 as early as December 2019.
To update you will need to log in to your cPanel. Under the Software section in cPanel, you will see a menu called PHP Settings, PHP Version Manager, Select PHP version, or something similar.
From here, you can check which PHP version your site(s) are using and also update your site’s PHP version.
My blog site is hosted with Hostgator India, for the last more than 6 years. Frankly speaking, I just have no complaints about their hosting service to date. Their response and services are quite prompt and very helpful too.
I could easily activate Varnish cache and also update my site’s PHP version to 7.2
But again, if you have any doubt or hesitant please contact your host provider. Almost all hosting service providers have 24×7 helpline and also live chat. I prefer to live chat.
If you are interested you can check out on Hostgator hosting, they offer various plans at a very reasonable rate.
10: Don’t forget to update your sites WordPress version:
WordPress CMS is frequently updated. As and when there is an update, it will be clearly displayed on your WP-admin dashboard, so you can’t miss it.
Before updating WordPress don’t forget to backup your database first. If you are thinking about how to back up the database? don’t worry, you guessed it right. There is a very good plugin for that too. The plugin is called WP-DBManager, download install and backup.
Conclusion:
Those were the 10 easy ways to speed up WordPress site performance. It won’t take you a whole day. Implement these and I am sure you will see the changes almost immediately, and you won’t regret it.
The biggest advantage to speed up a WordPress site is that it will help tremendously in improving the experience of your visitors. The improvement is speed remains the same whether they are using mobile devices or PCs. Furthermore, it will also improve your rankings in the SERPs.
Don’t have a blog yet? Planning to start a website? see this guide: How to start a website for free. It’s a great resource that offers step-by-step tutorials on building a personal or professional blog.
Hello! I am Ben Jamir, Founder, and Author of this blog Tipsnfreeware. I blog about computer tips & tricks, share tested free Software’s, Networking, WordPress tips, SEO tips. If you like my post /Tips then please like and share it with your friends.
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