How to Speed Up WordPress Website this is the most asked question in the world of blogging. As we all know WordPress is a great CMS (Content Management System) platform for blogging but the only issue with WordPress is its speed. Many things in WordPress decrease your site speed also there are many techniques to Speed Up WordPress websites. In this post, we can share our personal tricks or techniques that we can use for WordPress speed optimization.
Why Should You Speed Up WordPress Website?
In blogging everything is about your search engine ranking because if your website is not ranked top 3 positions of search engines then you will not get traffic on your website. If we talk about Google or any other search engine they look up your site speed. Website speed is not the only thing that ranks you on any search engine but your website speed plays a very important role in ranking your website on SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
If you are running any website no matter if it’s a blog or e-commerce website I will tell you why every website needs to load in less than 3 seconds.
Research is done about website speed and in that research, experts found that if your website takes more than 3 sec to load then 45% of visitors back out from your website. Also, research is held by Amazon, and according to their research if their website is talking just one second more to load than the usual time it can lose approx $1.6 billion per year. So I think now you understand why website speed is very important.
How To Do WordPress Site Speed Test?
One thing that you should keep in your mind is this speed varies from page to page because it depends on different factors like,
- Size of that page
- What type of content on that page (Static/Dynamic)
- No. of request
- Whether it is cached or not
Usually, the homepage of the website is used as a benchmark to test the load time. To check your website load time you can use their two websites,
Before going forward to the 9 ways to speed up your WordPress website I have something for you if you directly landed on this page and want to learn more about blogging check out the blog section we already wrote about a lot of articles that help you to become a successful blogger.
Now let’s start the main part of this post ( How to speed up WordPress website)
1. Choose High Performace Web Hosting
Web Hosting plays a very important role to speed up your WordPress website. If you can’t choose good hosting then there is no chance to rank on Google or any other search engines. So choosing high-performance web hosting is very important I want to clear the term high performance here web hosting that provides the fastest server speed is high-performance hosting this is not the only thing that matters in hosting there are a lot of other terms that matter but right now we are talking about speed then this term is matters a lot.
Choosing to host is a bit difficult now because there is a lot of web hosting providers in the market right now and not everyone provides good service so we checked many web hosting providers in the last few years and shortlisted some really good web hosting providers that provide the best web hosting at the best price.
- Cemicloud (Fast and Reliable Hosting)
- Hostinger (For Beginners)
- WPX Hosting (For Heavy Uses)
- Liquid Web (Cloud Hosting)
- Inmotion (One of the best hosting)
- Nexcess (Fast WordPress hosting)
- Rocket.net (Get it now for just $1)
2. Choose a Fast and Light Weight Theme
After hosting the second important thing that affects your website speed is a theme. There is thousands of theme available In the market some of them are paid some of them are free. But I never recommend you to use free themes because those themes are easily hackable and anyone easily accesses your data just because of a free theme. So investing in a theme is a good decision.
Now time to choose a theme to speed up your WordPress Website but the question is there are too much-paid themes available which one is best from these themes you need to choose a fast and lightweight theme. So we shortlisted 2 themes that we can use personally on our websites. Both themes are the fastest, most Lightweight, and most Popular.
- Astra
- GeneratePress (Theme I used personally on my blogs)
3. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDN helps you to increase your website speed in different regions. I will suggest you go with a CDN called cloud flare it is free for one site and also provides a free SSL certificate for your domain so if you can use cloud flare then no need to spend money on an SSL certificate.
4. Compress Images Of Your Website
This is the most common mistake that every blogger do in their initial days. What do newbies do? They can upload images as it is if they click some pictures from their phone/camera or take any screenshots they upload those images directly. This is not good for your website speed because images that are captured from phones, and cameras are too heavy and they take time to load on your website.
The solution for this is very simple but a lot of people don’t know about this. Most bloggers tell you to use plugins to do this task but I will tell you one bonus that helps me to speed up my websites.
So what you need to do is choose the image that you want to upload on your website and after that go to a website called tiny png and upload that image on this website. This website compresses your image by approximately 50-60% and uploads this compressed image to your website.
After that you need to install a plugin called Smush – Compress, Optimize and Lazy Load Images this plugin again compresses your image and you will get better results in your website speed. Also, this affects your WordPress speed optimization on a big scale.
5. Minify JS and CSS Files
JS (JavaScript) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) these scripts are used by theme developers to create WordPress themes.
You need to minify these scripts because when developers create any theme they leave space between codes and those spaces to help developers when they do any update to the theme. But if you don’t minify these scripts because of the space between codes theme becomes larger and takes more time to load.
You can’t do it manually for this work you need to install a plugin called autoptimize this plugin minifies all your JS and CSS files automatically and reduce the load time of your website.
6. Use Cache Macnigism
When you did any task on your site WordPress stores a cache and due to these caches, your website load speed will increase. So you need to clear these caches and you can do it using W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin.
7. Use GZIP Compression
GZIP is a compression same as ZIP or RAR compression in the computer system. GZIP compression compresses large files on your website due to this your bandwidth use will decrease and your site load time will also decrease.
You can use these plugins like Enable Gzip Compression or Page Speed Ninja or you can also add the following code to the .htaccess file.
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plainAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/htmlAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xmlAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/cssAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xmlAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xmlAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xmlAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascriptAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
8. Speed Up WordPress Website on Mobile
According to a survey, four billion people are using the internet on mobile word wide so because of this many peoples want to know how to increase WordPress website speed on mobile also it is very important because if you want to rank on SERP on mobile you need to increase WordPress website speed in mobile.
To increase your WordPress website speed on mobile you can use the AMP plugin this plugin helps you with WordPress speed optimization on mobile.
9. Choose the necessary plugins
This is the last and bonus tip for you to delete all unnecessary plugins, Images, Videos, or any other files these things also affect your website speed. These unwanted plugins create a lot of junk files on your server and these files put an unnecessary load on your server.
There is a lot of reducing page load time WordPress plugin available that said that they are speeding up WordPress site plugins but you need to know that using too many plugins also makes your website slow. So avoid using plugins as you can.
Bonus Trick – Special Trick For Our Special Users
In this article, I share some WordPress themes and plugins to use on your website to speed up your WordPress website. But if you want to try them on a demo site first then here is the trick to do that.
No need to signup, no need to pay a single penny and you can taste the WordPress themes and plugins in just a few minutes.
Let’s see how to do that.
You just need to replace “WordPress” with “taste wp” in the URL it spins up a demo site with that plugin already installed. E.g. this is the URL of the Smush it plugin “https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/” Just change it to “https://tastewp.org/plugins/wp-smushit”.
That is it. Once you replace the “WordPress” with “tastewp’ you will be redirected to a demo site with that plugin already installed.
This is how you can try any WordPress plugin and theme on a demo website for free.
FAQ – Speed Up WordPress Website
Why WordPress site is slow?
There is a lot of reason behind a slow WordPress website but 2 major reason that affects your website’s Speed or page load time are Web Hosting and Uncompressed images to solve these reason and speed up the WordPress Website read the first and the fourth point of this post.
How can I speed up my WordPress site without plugins?
A lot of people want to know how to increase WordPress website speed without plugins but I want to tell you you can’t do 100% WordPress speed optimization because there are a lot of things that are not possible to do manually. So if you want to speed up the WordPress website 100% then you must need to use some plugins.
How do I fix a slow website?
First, you need to check why your website is slow after that read our post We write about the nine best ways to Speed up a WordPress website after reading this post you can do WordPress speed optimization.
Do plugins slow down WordPress?
Yes if you are using a bunch of plugins they slow down your WordPress website but you need to use a plugin to do many tasks in WordPress so the first thing is to install plugins that are useful for you to avoid using a large no. of plugins also some WordPress speed optimization plugin available that help you to Speed up WordPress speed use them and reduce the page load time of WordPress.
Conclusion
Improving the load time of your website will increase your visitor’s interest in your website and also helps you to improve your ranking in Search engines. So this is our complete guide on How to Speed Up WordPress websites.
If you haven’t started a blog yet check out our complete guide on How To Start A Blog in just 30 minutes and start earning online.
Now it’s your turn to share this post on your social media and spread this useful content around the world. Also if you have any other tips and tricks on How to Speed Up the WordPress website let us know in the comment section.
Hey Akash Singh ,
Great post with effective tips to speed up the wordpress site. It is my first time commenting on
your blog post and i must say that you have done a fantastic work and suggested great tips to improve the speed of wordpress site.
WordPress is an amazing platform that allows the users for writing blog posts and doing several
task.Speed of a website really matters a lot and it is really important to focus on loading speed of a
website. A website with slow loading speed consume much time and can be annoying sometimes, whereas users never like to visit the site with slow loading speed.
It is really essential to choose the web hosting that provides high performance. It is also important
to keep only the necessary plugins for wordpress site. Compressing the image of website and selecting the fast & light weight theme also works well. Your each of the suggested tips are crucial to speed up the wordpress site and adopting these tips will be helpful for several user and will definitely speed up the wordpress site.
Truly helpful post and thanks for sharing.
Hey Aadarsh,
I glad you find it helpful and thanks for writing such a long comment.
Hello. I’m already in Facebook group when you created it. Thanks for sharing the plugins.
I want to ask after I’ve installed smush and autotomize to do the magic, after they are done can I delete while it’s working?
Something like insert footer and header”, I can install and add the codes and delete but the codes will still be there.
Is it possible for these plugins?
Thanks for the help. will download the plugin.