How to speed up WordPress surely is a hot topic these days. Fortunately, there are numerous techniques that you can employ to get the job done. So, our intent here is to list every trick we know of that can make your WordPress site a lot faster.
But first…
Why should you speed up WordPress?
1. Slow Speed Leads to Lost Visitors.
2. Speed is a Ranking Factor on Google/Bing/Yahoo.
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 then you better get ready to make major improvements so your business can be more profitable.
How to test the loading time of your website?
First things first, you need to analyze the current load time for your website. Keep in mind that this speed may differ from page to page, as it depends on various factors, namely:
- the size of that particular page,
- how many requests it generates,
- whether it is cached or not
The homepage of a website is usually used as a benchmark to test the load time. In order to check the speed of a website, the following three tools are used extensively across the web:
Here are the some ways to speed up WordPress:
1. Get Faster WordPress Hosting
The major factor that influences the speed of a website is the hosting of your WordPress website. It might seem like a good idea to host your new website on a shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, emails, domains and more.
Shared hosting tends to deliver a poorer performance because you are sharing the same server space with countless other websites, and there is no telling how much resources others are using. And, you don’t know exactly how well the servers are optimized.
2. Start with a lightweight WordPress theme / framework
WordPress themes with a lot of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons and many more shiny elements are immensely appealing to the eye. But remember this: if they have too many elements and higher page sizes, then they will definitely cause your web server to take a thumping.
The best option here is to use lightweight themes, like WordPress’ default themes.The new Twenty Fifteen theme is always a good way to start off a blog.
3. Optimize/Reduce image sizes
Images are the major contributors to size increment of a given webpage. The trick is to reduce the size of the images without compromising on the quality.
Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them.
4. Minify JS and CSS files
If you run your website through Google PageSpeed Insights tool, you will probably be notified about minimizing the size of your CSS and JS files. What this means is that by reducing the number of CSS and JS calls and the size of those files, you can improve the site-loading speed.
I hope this plugin that will help you achieve this goal; the most popular being the Autoptimize that can help in optimizing CSS, JS and even HTML of your WordPress website.
5. Optimize your WordPress database
I’m certainly getting a lot of use out of the word “optimize” in this post!
You can simply use the WP-Optimize plugin, which I run on all of my sites. This plugin lets you do just one simple task: optimize the your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead.
I would also recommend the WP-DB Manager plugin, which can schedule dates for database optimization.
6. Use caching mechanisms with a caching plugin
WordPress plugins are obviously useful, but some of the caching category, as they improve page loads time, and best of all, all of them on WordPress.org are free and easy. W3 Total Cache, I wouldn’t recommend or use any other caching plugin, it has all of the features you need and is extremely easy to install and use.
7. Deactivate or uninstall plugins
Keeping unwanted plugins on your WordPress websites will add a non-usable amount of junk to your web files. Moreover, it will also increase the size of your backup and put an bulky amount of load on your server resources while backup files are being generated.