How to speed up WordPress site is a very popular question. Every beginner blogger come through this question when the speed of their WordPress site decreases.
There are many benefits of a fast loading website. Fast loading website increases your website traffic, improve user experience, and helps you in ranking higher on search engines.
According to Google core vital web update, your WordPress site can lose the ranking if the speed and user experience of your site are not good.
So if you want to drive organic traffic from Google then make sure that the speed of your website is good because it is very essential to speed up WordPress site.
In this article, I will share the most useful tips that will boost your WordPress performance and speed of your website.
Table of Contents
1. Why Speed is Important for your website?
Let’s talk about some facts that will show you how to speed affect the performance of your website.
One second delay on a website speed
- Reduce 7% chances of conversion
- 11% fever page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 48% of consumers expect a website to load in 2s or less
Now you can imagine how much traffic on your website will reduce only because of your website speed.
You have very less time to show users your content.
If the speed of your website is not good then visitors leave your website without reading your content.
Then it will not matter how nice is your content, what information are you providing, how well is your homepage is optimized and any other things.
Because the visitors are not actually landing on your website due to your low website speed.
Search engines like Google also penalize the slower website by pushing them down on search engine result pages (SERPs).
So if you want to rank higher on search engines then you must make your WordPress website FAST.
2. How to Check Your Website Speed?
There are many tools available on the internet to check the speed of a website.
Here I will talk about some of the popular tools that give the exact speed of your website.
GTmetrix: By using this you can see how your site performs, reveal why it’s slow and discover optimization opportunity.
Just put your website URL and this tool will show the speed of your website.
This tool also suggests why your website is slow and what are the factors that affect your website speed.
Just follow the procedure given by the tool and you will see a rapid increase in your website speed.
Google page speed: Google page speed is a tool provided by Google itself.
This tool shows the speed of the website for desktop and mobile separately. So if you want to check website speed for mobile devices also then this tool is very helpful for you.
You can also check the speed for AMP version of your website.
In this tool, you will also get suggestions on how you can speed up WordPress site. So, follow those instructions carefully to get an improvement in the speed of your WordPress site.
Think with Google: If you want to check the website speed for mobile devices on a 3G or 4G connection, use this tool.
This tool will show the speed of a website for mobile devices only.
As you know, the usage of mobiles has increased very much nowadays. So the speed of your website for mobile matters a lot.
There are now officially more mobile devices than people in the world.
3. Mistake done by beginners in checking their website speed
Every beginner thinks that their website speed is GOOD by just opening it on their desktop or mobile device.
When they do so their website open very fast on their own devices.
This is happening because when you open your site again and again modern browsers save the cache of your website.
And they start to show the cached version of your website.
But when a new user opens your website, they open the actual website and the actual website takes time to load.
So don’t do this mistake, check your website speed with the help of tools that I have mentioned above.
4. Choose a Good Hosting Service
There are many types of hosting available on the server that you can use on your WordPress website.
Hosting plays an important role in your website performance.
Website speed also depends on your hosting type, If you have a good hosting it helps to boost your website speed.
A good hosting provider gives you features like super cache, image optimization and anti-spam.
You will find many hosting providers that provide different types of hosting.
But go with the best ones like Bluehost, A2Hosting, Godaddy and Namecheap.
If you want to buy a low cost hosting with a good configuration then purchase it from Namecheap.
They provide good and low budget hosting and domains.
Many bloggers use shared hosting because they are cheap but they didn’t provide good features.
Shared hosting is like a cyber cafe where you use a computer for rent but many customers are using different computers.
If someone is downloading anything it will impact your computer speed.
Same happened to your website also, If your neighbouring site gets a lot of traffic then it can impact the entire server due to which your website speed will also slow down.
On the other hand, if you are using a cloud hosting or dedicated hosting the whole server is yours you can optimize your hosting as you want.
So if you want to increase the website speed with the help of hosting then purchase a cloud or dedicated hosting.
5.Optimize Your Images
Images make your content more attractive. People are more likely to read your content if you are using images.
But images affect the speed of your website. if you are not using well-optimized images they increase the load on your website.
The size of the page increases due to the use of more images and a large size page takes much more time to load.
So use a well-compressed image in your articles.
Use some image editing software to optimize your images before uploading it to your website.
People majorly use JPEG and PNG format of images.
Wondering, what’s the difference?
PNG images are usually uncompressed and large-sized images, they take a longer time to load. The quality of this type of images is good and they don’t lose any type of details.
Whereas, JPEG images are found in the compressed format they are smaller in size and loads quickly.
I will suggest you use JPEG format images they are smaller in size and loads quickly.
JPEG images are smaller in size as compared to PNG images and a smaller size image can speed up WordPress site by consuming less space.
If you are not using Photoshop or any other software to optimize your images.
Then you can use a plugin called Short Pixel, this plugin is very useful it automatically compress the size of your images.
I am also using this plugin in and it saves my lot of time that I was spending compressing my images using different software.
You can optimize up to 100 images per month in its a free plan and if you want to optimize more then go for the paid plans that are actually very cheap. By just spending $10 you can optimize 10,000 images.
6.Use Plugins that Speed Up WordPress Site
(a).AMP: Accelerated mobile page(AMP) is a plugin that speed up WordPress site for a mobile device.
As we know the usage of mobiles has increased nowadays. so it is very important to boost up your website speed for mobiles.
This plugin creates a different version of a website for mobile devices and when any user open the website in mobile they eventually land on AMP version of your website.
After the installation of this plugin, you will see a rapid increase in your website speed.
(b).W3 Total Cache: This plugin increases the speed of your website by creating a cached version of your website.
To build your pages WordPress goes through a lot of processes, and it can really slow down your website when you have multiple people visiting at once.
When anyone opens your website instead of going through a whole process every time, this plugin creates a copy of the page after the first load and then serves that cached version to every subsequent user.
Many hosting providers already give this feature with the hosting plan.
You can check it in your control panel.
Read this detailed guide on how to setup W3 Total Cache Plugin.
(c).Jetpack: This plugin is an ultimate plugin, it improves your website performance in many ways
- Speed up image load time
- Speed up static file load time
- Enable lazy loading for images
- Generate XML sitemap
- Protect your site from spam attacks
- Ultimately speed up WordPress site
If you are using these plugin you will don’t need to use different plugins, this plugin will do maximum work for you.
Like you will not have to use social sharing plugin, Lazy load plugin, XML generator plugin and many more.
This will reduce the load on your website due to which you will see an increase in your website speed.
7.Use a Simple and Responsive Theme
The theme is the face of your WordPress website and plays an important role in how user, as well as a search engine, perceive it.
There are thousands of free and paid option available for themes in WordPress.
Choose a theme according to your need if you are starting a blog about politics make sure that users feel easy to read that article (like NEVE theme).
If you want to build an E-commerce website use a theme that provides a feature of using too many images or you can go with OceanWP theme
Every theme looks better than other but most of the theme is not well optimized.
When using a free theme that provides different colours and flashy animations are heavy themes. These themes take time to load.
So use a simple and fast theme and user feel easy to navigate your website.
Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.
∼Leonardo da Vinci
While choosing a theme keep in mind that the theme is simple and easy to load.
Also, check that the theme you are using is responsive or not.
Because responsiveness is now not an option, Your theme should be responsive on both Desktop and Mobile.
So check that the theme you are using makes your website Mobile Friendly or not, you can read this article on 10 Easy Steps to Make Mobile Friendly Website to make your website Mobile Friendly.
8. Keep Your Plugins and WordPress Updated
This is a very common thing but keeping your plugins and WordPress version up to date is very important.
Whenever a new version of WordPress launch it comes with a lot of security changes and with every update the security of your website increases.
When you don’t update for the new version you will see a gradually decrement in the performance of your WordPress Website.
The same thing happened to plugins also when you don’t use an updated plugin their performance decreases.
Every update of plugin introduces a new feature but if you are not updating them you won’t be able to use those upcoming features.
So check for the updates regularly or enable the feature of Auto Update and receive an email when there is an update on your Website.
You will automatically receive an email when the update is available on your website.
9.Optimize Your Homepage to Speed Up WordPress Site
The homepage is the most important page of your website. Anybody who wants to see all the content of your website will definitely visit your Homepage.
By default, WordPress website show full content of your every article on the homepage that means your homepage and categories will load slower.
If your website is also showing the full content of your articles on the homepage, you are definitely losing your page views.
Because when the full content shows on homepage visitors don’t feel the need to visit the actual article.
So it is better to set your site to display excerpts instead of the full content. By doing so your website will load faster.
10. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDN is a network made up of servers all around the world which work together to provide fast delivery of internet content.
CDN allows a quick transfer of files like HTML pages, javascript files, images and videos which makes loading time of our website faster.
The main goal of CDN is to deliver content as quickly and securely as possible.
CDN makes different data centres across the globe which reduce the distance between users and website resources.
Instead of connecting to the website origin server, CDN helps the user connect to a closer data centre due to which user have to travel less to connect your website’s server.
CDN also reduces the amount of data transferred by reducing file sizes. Smaller file sizes mean quicker load time.
Benefits of using CDN
- Improves website load time.
- Improves website security.
- CDN can handle more traffic and withstand hardware failure better than many origin servers.
- CDN delivers content to users as quickly as possible.
I am using a CDN network called Cloudflare and it really helps me in increasing the load time of my website. Cloudflare also protects my site from different malicious attacks.
So I will suggest you use this CDN network and this will definitely improve the speed and performance of your website.
11. Don’t Upload Audio/Video Files
Don’t upload video or audio files directly to your website because they take too much time to load.
This mistake will definitely increase the loading time of your website.
Some video files increase the load on your hosting server which reduce the performance of your website or it may be shut down by your hosting provider.
Because the bandwidth of website hosting is less and they are not capable of uploading large bandwidth files like videos.
If you find that video files important for your content then take the help of YouTube. You can put a link to that YouTube video in your article.
YouTube has a large bandwidth because their primary work is to provide information in the form of videos.
12. Use Lazy Loading
If you are using too many images and photo gallery in your blog post then you should use lazy loading.
When you enable lazy loading on your website, Instead of loading all the images it only loads the images that visible on the user’s screen.
When the user scrolls down, It loads other images that now visible to users.
So Lazy loading speed up your website by just loading the image that is visible to users.
Jetpack plugin provides the feature of lazy loading, so you can use the Jetpack plugin instead of using any other new plugins.
13.Monitor Mobile Page Speed
As we all know the usage of mobiles has increased nowadays. There are now officially more mobile devices than people in the world.
A Google survey found that –
- 74% of visitors were more likely to return to a mobile-friendly website.
- 61% will leave if the site is not mobile-friendly.
- 61% will more likely to buy at a mobile-friendly website.
Now you can imagine how much it is important to have a good website speed on mobile devices.
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) is a plugin that increases the website speed for mobiles. I have already mentioned the performance of this plugin above in this article.
14.Monitor Your Website Speed Over Time
Check your website speed at regular interval of time.
By doing so you will be able to maintain the performance of your website.
Different type of issues occurs on your website when you activate new plugins or themes.
Many times when you update your WordPress software or plugins they produce some cache files in your website.
Which can affect the speed of your website so monitoring the website speed in an interval of time may be beneficial for you?
Use the speed checker tools, They provide you with information about what’s going wrong with your website.
Customize your website by following the given guidelines.
Wrapping Up On How to Speed Up WordPress Site
Now you know the different ways of increasing the speed of your WordPress site.
Use cache plugin and small CDN to speed up WordPress site and also focus on the size of images because a large size image can really hurt your website speed.
I hope this will help you in increasing the speed of your WordPress site.
If you have questions and problems, feel free to ask me in the comment section or you can also contact me here.
Hey Friend!
I am Ankur Gohite, the founder of Huppdigital. A blog that provides authentic information regarding blogging, SEO, affiliate marketing, and how to make money online.
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