How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site[15 Easy Ways]

I know, having a slow WordPress website can be frustrating. I also had to make every effort to come up with a solution.

In this w-easilearn article, I will share my pro tips on how to speed up your WordPress site in 15 easy ways. Sounds Interesting? Keep reading

When managing your WordPress website, there are many factors involved in speed optimization.

Best free methods on how to speed up your WordPress site

1)Keep Your Page Size Under 2MB

Your page gets heavier every time you add images because it loads CSS and javascript in the backend. Most likely, your website speed will depend on your hosting company server.

If you wonder why your website loads slow, I recommend running a quick check using tools like w-seotools to check your page speed. Once you know your page speed, make sure to check the size, and if the size is more than 2MB, consider checking every image on that page.

2)Get A Trustworthy Web Hosting

My Webhosting recommendation is based on real case studies, real numbers. This is why I built this blog. As you can see, my page speed is performing pretty well.

How did I do that? Before starting a website, the first crucial step is choosing trustworthy web hosting because some companies use old technologies to power their servers.

There are many reliable hosting companies on the internet, for example, digital ocean. You can test digital ocean for free using the coupon below.

3)Compress Your Images

Image optimization is a crucial factor in speeding up your WordPress website. This is the first mistake that newbies make when building a website.

To ensure your website loads fast, consider compressing your images. The ideal image size should be less than 100KB. If you have made all these optimizations but are getting the same results, you should consider changing the hosting company.

Use tools like tinypng to optimize your images. However, if your image format is PNG, think about converting it to JPEG as it is a much lighter format that will help your page load faster.

I use a combination of tinypng and resmush.it as a plugin to automatically optimize my images.

4)Less Is More

What do I mean by that?

Plugins play a significant role in websites speed. Aim to use a maximum of ten plugins. Keep in mind, the more plugins you add, the slower your website is. Keep only the necessary plugins.

Use these free plugins to optimize your WordPress website speed

5)Use A Caching Plugin

How Does A Caching Plugin Work?

The caching plugin’s role is to create static HTML pages of your website and store them on your server. When someone visits your website, your caching plugin will serve as a duplicate version of your website so that your server does not have to load the same page for every visitor.

I use w3 total cache on this website, and it helps minimize CSS and javascript, and also it allows implementing lazy load to help reduce strain on my server.

So consider installing a caching plugin to reduce heavy lifting on your server.

6)Minimize CSS and Javascript

Why do we need to reduce CSS and java?

Animations make websites stand out due to their impressive looking.

The main issue with these animations is that they increase the server request leading to slow load times.

In short, the more request your server will need to perform, the slower your website, so remember to avoid unnecessary flashy animations if you want your website to load faster.

7)Reduce Requests

What do I mean by requests?

When a user visits your website, WordPress sends an HTTP request to your server to get information about the content on your website, and it returns the files contained on that page to the user’s browser.

The less request your server has to make, the faster your website will load.

8)What generates HTTP requests?

Pro tip: Try to keep your requests under 80 for an optimal website speed

9)USE A CDN (Content Delivery Network)

What is a CDN and how does it work?

A CDN is a system (content delivery network) that allows you to store replicated versions of your website worldwide. If a user visits your site and this person is far from your server location, your website will load slower, while if you connect your site with CDN, which is available across the globe, a copy of your website will be stored in the CDN servers. If a user visits your website, a copy of your site data will be taken from the closest CDN server, resulting in a faster loading time with fewer server strains.

To be sincere, a CDN does not help much if you target a specific audience in your country. This service is more for websites targeting a worldwide audience, for example, big eCommerce sites or blogs.

10)Use A Light WordPress Theme

When selecting a theme, it is essential to pay particular attention to checking the theme speed and its specification because a poorly coded theme can significantly slow down your website because of its dynamic functions, sliders, widgets. Yes, I know they make your website look amazing, but would you prefer to have a fantastic website, but slow? or a fast blazing website that ranks fast on Google? Sometimes is challenging to decide, but I’m here to tell you that one solution to this problem is to use Google page speed optimized themes, like the one we use at w-easilearn.

11)Clear Your WordPress Database

Sometimes WordPress accumulates undesirable data such as spam comments, fake users, old drafts. All these files, with time, add up to your database resulting in your website slowing down. Also, when installing WordPress on your server, it comes with a variety of themes by default. You should only keep two themes, your active theme and another, in case your website crashes.

12)Use Excerpts on WordPress Posts

What do excerpts mean?

Excerpts in WordPress can display the full content of each article on your homepage. This means your homepage and archive pages will likely load slower.

Also, another disadvantage of showing full articles on these pages is that users don’t need to visit the full essay. Implementing this option can reduce your pageviews and the time users spend on your site.

If your theme has this built-in feature, you can take advantage and optimize the speed of your website for archive pages. You could set your site to show excerpts rather than the entire content.

Navigate to Settings >>Reading and select show: Excerpts instead of Full Text for each article in a feed.

13)Avoid To Upload Videos Directly To WordPress

Hosting videos and audio directly to your WordPress website can be costly. What do I mean by that?

This type of practice will drastically increase your website loading time and make it difficult to restore your WordPress backup files due to their large size.

Also, hosting companies may overcharge you for high bandwidth or, even worst, they may shut down your site.

Alternatively, you should use Youtube or Vimeo to store your videos and let them do the heavy lifting for you as they have high bandwidth availability. WordPress allows you to upload your videos and audio using the “embed feature.”

14)Shared Web Hosting

Most of the WordPress websites are on a shared hosting plan.

Internet is filled with many companies that offer shared hosting solutions for users who are on the budget. Some of these companies have been in the market for a long time. These include Bluehost, Siteground.

They usually utilize Plesk and Cpanel as a web hosting manager.

Anyone using these shared solutions will eventually experience a slow page load. Why? Because shared hosts tents always overcrowd their servers, which in the long term can affect your website performance.

You may also experience 500 errors as they have to maximize the server’s resources in order to maintain a stable ecosystem. Even though you may not know, your website shares the same IP address, the same CPU. All these resources are shared with hundreds of other websites. If you have wondered why shared hosting is so cheap, well, now you know. It is practically impossible for a hosting company to generate revenue selling high-performance resources in a shared plan. They make their revenue through other marketing strategies.

15)Use LightSpeed Servers

Our last tip is to use a lightspeed server, now there are many server software on the internet such as Nginx, Apache, and Lightspeed which is the fastest among the three, you can debate that, but light speed servers are generally considered the fastest server software on the internet.

To Sum Up

Every webmaster is obsessed with page speed. Fast websites play a huge role in ranking, conversion, and overall user experience because nobody likes to have a slow website. Your main objective, if you are a beginner, should be to get a reliable web hosting company. To get some experience, you can start with shared hosting and then, later on, upgrade to a cloud or VPS service.

Did I miss anything? I hope you enjoyed this small guide, and remember, if you have any questions or doubts, leave them in the comments below. Thank you for reading.

Originally published at https://w-easilearn.com on October 23, 2021.