Do you have a slow WordPress site? Instructions on how to speed up a WordPress website without programming knowledge. Fast loading will increase visitor satisfaction and help SEO.
A slow page load puts your site at a disadvantage. Slow pages put Google and other search engines at a disadvantage in the search process. Therefore, only SEO optimization is not enough to increase website traffic. You also need to optimize its speed.
In addition to the search engines themselves, a slow page load puts you at a disadvantage in another way. The attention of Internet visitors drops after seven seconds. If the page doesn’t load by then, many will leave. In order for them to stay on the site and come back to you, you need to optimize its speed.
And finally, one more reason: some search engines have already started penalizing slow pages by moving them to lower search positions .
Measure page speed
To find out how fast your site is, it’s not enough just to measure the time it takes to load on your computer . On your computer, a website that you visit frequently will load faster. This is thanks to the browser’s temporary memory, in which it stores data during browsing. When you visit the website repeatedly, the data is loaded from this memory and thanks to this the page is displayed faster. In addition , the geographical location of the site visitor also matters .
I therefore recommend using special Pingdom or Google Pagespeed tools to measure speed. If you measure the loading time under 2 seconds , then it is “quite” okay. If not, I recommend increasing its speed. If you need more detailed information, use the GTmetrix tool.
Identify the causes of the slowdown
There are several things slowing down the site. The most common are:
- incorrectly configured web hosting server,
- poorly coded plugins or too many installed and unused plugins,
- page size – in this case, it is mainly about images that are not optimized for websites,
- external scripts such as fonts, ads and the like.
Use the WordPress cache plugin
According to the official WordPress optimization guide, hosting and cache plugin are the two most important factors affecting speed.
WordPress caching can speed up your site up to 2-5 times . It works on the principle of saving a copy of the page in the server’s memory right after it is loaded for the first time. This copy is then served to every other visitor to the site. This reduces the load on the server and you get an improvement in site performance.
WordPress itself does not contain a cache, so you will need an additional plugin. Among the best are WP rocket , WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache .
I noticed that in many Facebook polls, people consider the best WP rocket :
I tested all 3 mentioned cache plugins. I get the best results with WP rocket . The differences between the mentioned plugins are in fractions of a second, but every millisecond helps to get higher in the search results (Google SERPs).
In addition, I liked the simplicity of the settings and the fact that it goes further with its functions than other plugins – for example, it can optimize the database, which WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache could not do at the time of testing.
That’s why I decided to invest and buy it. Since then, I only use this plugin to optimize my websites. If you have a website as a hobby, feel free to use one of the free named caching plugins. Especially use one! 😉 It is probably the most influential thing to speed up the web.
Use quality hosting
It is a well-known fact that hosting performance fundamentally affects website speed. Therefore, carefully choose the right hosting . I consider the following to be the best hosting for a WordPress website: WebSupport , Webglobe Yegon and Wedos . Switching to your own virtual server is also a possible solution.
As you can see in the image below, WebSupport measured the speed of their WordPress hosting against others on their blog and got these results:
This convinced me to buy this WP hosting for a trial and see why it is so fast. In WebSupport, I found their own modified version of WordPress already installed on the hosting. It consisted in the fact that plugins for caching and image optimization were installed and set (tuned) there (*valid at the time of my testing) . This, combined with tuned servers, contributed to these excellent results.
Since then, I have been using WebSupport ‘s web hosting for my projects, which also runs this blog.
Use the correct image formats
PNG is uncompressed (which means a larger file size) and is therefore best suited for simple images where there are not many different colors. JPEG is a compressed format (smaller file size), slightly reduces image quality, but is smaller and used for images with lots of colors .
Reduce the size of images
Images are important for website traffic. Research has shown that 80% of people prefer to read a text that is not just black and white. Colors also support perception. However, improperly optimized jpg and png files take up too much space. In addition, large files need more time to download .
To improve the performance of your site, it is necessary to optimize the size of images. You don’t have to worry about the display quality changing. You can do this directly while editing the image — some graphics programs have a save-for-web function.
You can also install a dedicated plugin for this purpose. I use the plugin Compress JPEG & PNG images from TinyPNG. With it, I achieved the largest percentage optimization of the image size.
I also have good experience with EWWW Image Optimizer (in the free version here ) or WP Smush.it (in the free version here ).
These plugins adjust the quality and size of images while uploading them to WordPress without affecting their quality. In addition, they can also optimize the images that you already have on the web.
Set up gradual loading of images
You can also increase the speed of the WordPress site by setting the gradual loading of images ( so-called lazy load ). Only those that are visible are loaded when the page is opened. Others are loaded gradually as the visitor scrolls down the page. It will make the page display faster.
Several plugins can provide you with this functionality. For me, the WP Rocket plugin, which I already mentioned, provides.
Go to php 7
PHP 7 processes more than twice as many requests per second compared to older versions:
This means in practice that php 7 is on average 2 to 3 times faster than php 5 . So I definitely recommend activating it on your hosting if you don’t have it yet.
If you can’t see what version of php your website is running on, you can easily view it via the Display PHP Version plugin:
You need to be careful and properly test whether your website supports it – for example via the PHP Compatibility Checker plugin. Maybe you have some outdated plugins and you get error messages. In that case, I would consider getting rid of such plugins.
Remove unused plugins
When creating and editing the page, you installed several plugins. However, unused (deactivated) plugins can also slow down the site. To speed up the website, it is necessary not only to turn them off, but also to delete them.
Remove only those plugins you don’t use. The removal procedure is simple: Find the Plugins item in the administration menu. Select the one you want to remove and turn it off . Then remove it.
Use HTTP/2
Most modern browsers already support HTTP/2. This protocol is significantly faster than the original HTTP/1.1. Test whether your hosting supports HTTP/2 in this tool .
Set up a php cache on your hosting
Set up a php cache on your hosting – for php 5.4+ and php 7 opcache. For php 5.3 and lower versions of xcache.
Update plugins
In addition to removing unused plugins, it is necessary to regularly update the ones you have left on the site. It will improve security, provide better options and will also positively affect the speed of the WordPress site.
Update WordPress regularly
It is also necessary to regularly update the WordPress core itself .
Update the template
Template creators regularly update individual templates. For better functionality and optimization of the speed of your site, it is necessary to update the site regularly. This will also increase its safety. In addition, updates often include new features and the elimination of minor errors that occurred during the development of the template.
Database optimization
WordPress also stores unnecessary data. In order to optimize the speed of the page, it is necessary to clean its database from time to time. I use WP Rocket for this purpose. It will clean up deleted comments, updates, automatic article drafts, comment SPAM and more. Suitable plugins for this purpose are also WP Optimize and WP Sweep .
Use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a Google project that makes mobile pages load faster. You can also easily recognize them on mobile by the lightning symbol in the Google search results:
You can have AMP technology already included in the template, or you can use it through the official AMP for WordPress plugin.
Disable emojis
Use the default emoji of the visitor’s browser instead of loading emoji from WordPress.org – this will reduce the number of external calls to the server. It is also provided by WP Rocket for me:
Template optimization
When choosing a WordPress template, do not be guided only by appearance, price and offered functions. Rather, use a simpler template and increase its functionality with appropriate plugins.
You can also purchase some of the premium templates that are optimized for speed . If you decide to change the template, do not forget to carefully study how to switch to the new template without losing data and settings.
Minification (compression) of CSS and JS files
Minify HTML, CSS, JS. Minification will increase the speed of your WordPress site. You can use the free Autoptimize plugin for this, or you can also do it with WP Rocket .
Set up lazy loading of JavaScript
The loading of JavaScript also affects the optimization of the speed of the WordPress site. It is a common problem that slows down the page display. If you place several libraries of external files at the top of the page, the browser will start downloading and processing them. It loads the rest of the page content only after that. You can also use WP rocket to set up deferred loading of JavaScript (also called JavaScript deferred):
Do not upload videos directly to WordPress
Full videos can also be saved on a WP page. However, I do not recommend it due to speed optimization. They take up too much space. Use a YouTube , Vimeo , or VideoPress link instead. Just copy the URL into your post to embed the video.
Use summaries
You don’t need to display entire posts on the main page and in the archives. The summary (excerpt in English) saves space and loading time. In addition, the site visitor will view several topics that may be of interest to him at once. He won’t read just one post. This setting depends on the selected theme, which means that the selected template may not support it.
Split the comments over several pages
You can also increase the speed of your WordPress site by splitting comments. Older comments may not be visible when the article is loaded. You can save them separately. You can set it up in Settings » Comments and check the Split comments into pages option.
Use CDN
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a technology for distributing content to multiple servers located in different locations around the world. The location of the server also affects the speed of the WordPress site, depending on the geographical distance between your hosting provider and the site visitor. The layout of the servers helps visitors get to its content faster.
I consider Cloudflare , KeyCDN , StackPath (MaxCDN) and Sucuri CDN to be the best CDN .
One of the most popular CDN , which is free in its basic version, is Cloudflare . If you haven’t heard about it yet, I recommend reading more information in this article .
In my opinion CDN is worth solving only for large websites with traffic from different parts of the world.
Use the quick slider
To speed up your WordPress site, use a suitable slider plugin. Sliders improve the design of a page, but they often slow it down , even if you have optimized images. This may be due to poor coding of the plugin. The fastest WordPress slider plugin is Soliloquy. It belongs to premium plugins. The well-known Revolution Slider did not fare well in speed tests.
In my opinion, the best from the point of view of speed is to avoid sliders completely if possible.
Use a faster gallery plugin
If you have a lot of images, photos and galleries on your site, a faster gallery plugin can help. Use one that is optimized for speed. I recommend the Envira Gallery premium plugin. You can use it to create photo and video galleries. In the case of a smaller number of images, the basic Templates gallery is enough for you.
Split long posts into multiple pages
If you have posts on the page that deal with individual topics in more depth and take up a lot of space, you reduce the page loading speed. To avoid unnecessary loading delays, split them into several parts. WordPress also offers a solution for displaying such posts. Setting the division is possible using the nextpage tag.
Place it in the text editor where you want to split the article. This will help increase the speed of your WordPress site.
Reduce loading of content from other sites
Many WordPress templates load content from other sites. These are images from external sources such as Google, Facebook and the like. Many of them load quickly, so it’s easier to load them from a third party than to place them directly on your site.
However, if your plugins use too much of such content, it can slow down the page. And that’s already a problem. It is necessary to reduce loading of external http requests by merging them into one file or disabling individual scripts.
Limit saving to post revisions
You can also speed up your WordPress site by limiting the storage of post revisions, which also take up space. This can be prevented by adding a simple code to the wp-config.php file:
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 );This code will save the last four edits. Older modifications will be automatically deleted. I tend to completely disable revisions – this can be done by inserting 0 instead of 4.
Set the HTTP cache directly on the server
An effective solution for speeding up a WordPress site is to set the cache directly on the server:
Turn off unused preset functions
Some features can be disabled to increase the speed of your WordPress site. Not everyone needs, for example, Emoji or pingbacks. For example, the WP Disable plugin will help with this. You can also limit commenting and XML-RPC support – for example via the Disable XML-RPC plugin.
Ban Hotlinking and Stealing Content
Every quality site is at risk of content theft sooner or later. It can also happen because other sites are showing your images directly from their URL instead of loading them on their own servers. This process slows down your site. Prevent this by adding the following code to your .htaccess file
#disable hotlinking
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?wp.sk [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]How to speed up your WordPress website – summary
I consider high-quality hosting , a good cache plugin , optimization of images and selection of a suitable template to be the most important criteria.
Did you like this tutorial? Give him a like. If you have any hints and tips and would like to share them with others, write them in the comments below.
