11 Ways To Speed ​​Up Your WordPress Website

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In this guide, We will discuss 11 ways to speed up your WordPress website. We all know that the time required to load a WordPress website is incredibly valuable.


Many researchers have stated that most of the users leave the website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.


Problems such as Bad themes, too many plugins, images that are not optimized, lots of widgets, and other issues create a high impact on the loading speed of the WordPress site.


Most of the users do not like to stay on a website whose time of response is quite dull. Slow response time can cause loss of revenue. What users want is fast loading with a smooth user experience.


Slow loading speed also hurt the SEO of your website. No one likes to end up with a slow website. So if you are looking to speed up your WordPress site then, You are at the right place. Here are the 11 ways to speed up your WordPress site.


Related Article: How to secure WordPress website


11 ways to speed up your WordPress site

If your blog is slow, you will probably lose a lot of visitors. Google itself includes the load speed of websites and blogs in ranking on its search engines.

This shows that speeding up WordPress performance affects the SEO of a website. If your website is slow, you will not only lose site visitors. You also lose your position in search engines.

So, let's speed up our WordPress site that you have been working on for a long time. We recommend testing your WordPress site speed before and after implementing these techniques to see the changes.

You can use GTmetrix, Pingdom, or Google PageSpeed ​​Insights to perform a loading speed test of the website. Here are the 11 ways to speed up your WordPress website.

1. Use only necessary plugins

There are a lot of plugins out there that guarantee to do something astonishing for your website, don't choose plugins that you don't know about their benefits.

Use a plugin that can control every function and feature on your website to the best.

The more plugins, the more problems will arise. The more plugins you have, the more work your website has to do while it's load.

And some plugins may have code that is not compatible with your WordPress version because it is out of date.

Avoid using plugins that perform the same function, plugins that are no longer activated, and which haven't received updates from the developer for more than 2 years.

2. Image Optimization

The higher the image size and resolution, the longer it will take to load. The more images you have, the slower your website will be.

There is a solution to this problem. So you don't need to be afraid to use images on your blog.

Try to resize your image in Photoshop before uploading it to the blog. Use the .webp format instead of using .Jpg, or .Png.

Use an image optimizer plugin like Smush to optimize your image.

You can also install the Lazy Load plugin. Lazy load plugin prevents all the images from loading. Users will only see the pictures that come into view of them.

3. Choose a good hosting service

Pick the best hosting provider to host your WordPress site. Because of different rates, hosting has several features in it.

The hosting plays a significant role in the performance of your website in the search results. Don't ever go for cheap hosting. In cheap hosting, you might face several problems such as the website is down or the slow loading speed. These things can result in the downranking of your website in search engines.

We recommend you using Bluehost hosting, Which is recommended by WordPress itself.

4. Use a theme with a good Pagespeed

A great WordPress theme is well coded and optimized. WordPress themes have a significant factor in improving the performance of WordPress itself.

Read the reviews on various sites about WordPress themes to get the most suitable theme for your WordPress site.


5. Don't Install unnecessary widgets

In most cases, the homepage is the first page a visitor sees. You may have designed it and featured everything you like on your homepage.

The sidebar is full of widgets that don't seem too important to visitors, but you put them in place to impress visitors.

The more widgets you have on the front page of your site, the longer your site will load.

You should know that a clean design is equally impressive to blog visitors. Just use one or two widgets on your blog for the endings of your blog posts, where they will have benefits for your blog visitors.

You can also speed up loading WordPress by setting the fewer number of posts that appear on the front page.

6. Disable hotlinks

Hotlinks are a form of bandwidth theft. This happens when other sites redirect links to images on your site. Which may create a high load on the server.

This can add up quickly if lots of people make posts on your website that are viral.

7. Use a Caching Plugin

This WordPress plugin is quite useful. This plugin can drastically increase page load times, and best of all, everything at wordpress.org is free and easy to use.

You can try W3 Total Cache or Super Cache. Both are the most popular and can speed up WordPress blogs.

Some of the features and settings might be a little confusing. So be careful what you have to enable. There are lots of tutorials available on setting up the best caching plugins, so check them out.

8. Optimize the WordPress Database

This can be done manually, but it is very tedious.  There is another way you can use it, namely using plugins. You just need to use the WP-Optimize plugin.

Although there are no new updates yet, this plugin still works without any problems or conflicts with other plugins. You can also try WO-Sweep for alternative plugins.

This plugin does one simple task: optimize the database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.).

9. Minimize CSS and JS

JavaScript and CSS files contain extra spaces and comments. To remove those unused spaces and comments, it's a good idea to turn on minify instead of editing each file at once.

If you initiate the cache plugin or CDN (Cloudflare), there should be an option to activate CSS and JS minify.

10. Add expired headers to static resources

Header Expiration is a way to determine a sufficiently distant future so that the client (browser) does not have to retrieve any static content (such as CSS files, javascript, images, etc.).

This method can significantly increase your load times for regular users.

You will need to copy and paste the following code in your root .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image / gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image / png A2592000
ExpiresByType image / jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image / jpeg A2592000

The figures above are set for one month (in seconds). Change as you wish.

11. Enable HTML Compression

HTML Compression helps reduce every size on the website. It reduces file size by shortening URLs safely, removing all standard comments, and unkempt white-space from HTML document files.

Typically in WordPress, every post is formatted in an HTML. Through HTML Compression, you get the best chance of saving bandwidth and ensuring almost direct content delivery to the readers that results in increasing google rankings.

If you active multiple cache plugins, they should have settings to enable HTML Compression.


Conclusion

Hopefully, these tips can help you to speed up your WordPress site. The methods we have mentioned range from basic to moderate improvements that you can apply to optimize your WordPress blog.

These combinations of tools and plugins will help you to build a faster website without spending money.

Another thing you should know, too many plugins don't always slow down your site as long as they are quality plugins.

Now it's up to you. If something is missing, please leave a comment below.

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