Is your WordPress website running too slow? Here’s how to speed up WordPress without programming knowledge. Fast loading will increase the satisfaction of your visitors and help SEO.
Slow page loading is a big drawback for your website. Google and other search engines disadvantage slow websites in their search process. Therefore, SEO optimization itself is not enough to increase website traffic. You also need to optimize its speed.
In addition to the search engines themselves, slow loading of the website is also a downside in a different perspective. The attention of internet visitors falls down after seven seconds. If the website does not load within this timeframe, many of them leave. So, if you want to make them stay on the site and to be happy to come back to you, you need to optimize its speed.
Last but not least, one more reason: some search engines have already started to penalize slow pages by sliding them to lower search positions.
Table of Contents
Measure speed of website
To find out how fast your site is, it’s not enough to just measure the time it loads on your computer. The web you visit often loads faster on your PC. It is because of temporary memory of the browser in which it stores data while browsing. When you visit the website again, the data is retrieved from this memory, and the page is displayed faster. It also depends on the geographic location of the visitor.
Therefore, I recommend using special tools like Pingdom or Google Pagespeed to measure speed. If you measure a load time of less than 2 seconds, it’s “quite” alright. If not, I recommend increasing the speed. For more detailed information, use GTmetrix.
Identify the causes of slowdown
The website is slowed down due to several things. The most often include:
- improperly configured web hosting server,
- poorly encoded plugins or too many installed and unused plugins,
- size of website – in this case it is mainly about images that aren’t optimized for websites,
- external scripts such as fonts, ads, and like.
Use WordPress cache plugin
According to the official WordPress optimization guide,hosting and cache plugin are the two most important factors affecting speed.
Caching of WordPress can speed up your website up to 2 – 5 times. It works on the principle of saving a copy of the website to the server’s memory as soon as it is first loaded. This copy then serves each other visitor to the website. This reduces the load of the server and you get better website performance.
WordPress itself does not contain cache, so you will need another plugin. The best of them are WP rocket, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.
I noticed that in many Facebook polls, people consider WP rocket as the best one:
I have tested all 3 cache plugins mentioned. . I achieve best results with WP rocket. The differences between these plugins are in fractions of a second, but each millisecond helps to get higher in search results (Google SERP-e).
In addition, I liked the ease of setup and the features that go further than other plugins – for example, it can optimize the database, which WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache failed to 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 website. If you have a website as a hobby, use one of the free named caching plugins. Above all, make sure you use some! 😉 It’s probably the most influential thing to speed up the web.
Use quality hosting
It is well known that hosting performance has a major impact on website speed. Therefore, choose the right hosting. I believe the best web hosting for WordPress are: Bluehost or SiteGround or WP Engine. A possible solution is also the transition to your own virtual server.
Use the correct image formats
PNG is uncompressed (that is, larger file size) and is therefore best suited for simple images where there are not many different colours. JPEG is a compressed format (smaller file size), slightly reducing the quality of the image, but it is smaller and is used for pictures with lots of colours.
Reduce the size of your images
Images are important for website traffic. Research has shown that 80% of people read rather text that is not just black and white. Colours also promote perception. However, incorrectly 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 website, you need to optimize the size of your images. You don’t have to worry about changes in display quality. You can do this directly while editing an image – some graphics programs include a feature save for web.
For this purpose, you can also install a specialized plugin. I use plugin called Compress JPEG & PNG images from TinyPNG. I have reached the highest optimization of images in percentage with it.
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 reflecting their quality. In addition, they can also optimize the images you already have on the website.
Set up progressive image loading
You can also increase the speed of your WordPress website by setting up a load of images (so-called lazy load). When opening a page, only those that are visible are loaded. Others are loading gradually as the visitor moves the page down. This will speed up the page view.
This functionality can be provided by multiple plugins. For me, this is provided by the WP Rocket plugin which I mentioned earlier.
Shift to php 7
PHP 7 handles more than twice as many requests per second compared to older versions:
This means that php 7 is 2 to 3 times faster than php 5 on average. Thus, I definitely recommend activating it on hosting if you still don’t have it.
If you can’t see which version of php your website is running on, you can easily view it through the Display PHP Version plugin:
However, you need to be careful and test properly if your website supports it – for example, using the PHP Compatibility Checker plugin. Maybe you have some outdated plugins and they will pop up some error messages. In that case, I would consider getting rid of such plugins.
Remove unused plugins
You have installed multiple plugins to create and edit a website. However, unused (deactivated) plugins can also slow down your website.
Remove only those plugins you don’t use. The removal procedure is simple: Find Plugins 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. In this tool, test whether your hosting supports HTTP/2.
Set php cache on hosting
Set php cache on your hosting – opcache for php 5.4+ a php 7. xcache for php 5.3 and lower versions.
Update your plugins
In addition to removing unused plugins, you need to regularly update the ones you have left on the page. It will improve security, provide better options and will also affect the speed of WordPress.
Regularly update WordPress
It is also necessary to regularly update the core of WordPress itself.
Update the theme
Themes creators regularly update individual themes. It needs to be updated regularly for better functionality and optimization of your website. This will also increase its security. In addition, updates often include new features and the removal of minor bugs that have arisen in the theme.
Database optimization
WordPress also stores unnecessary data. To optimize the website’s speed, it is sometimes necessary to clear its database. I use WP Rocket for this purpose It clears deleted comments, updates, automatic article concepts, SPAM in comments, 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 your mobile by a lightning mark in Google’s search results:
You can already have AMP technology included in the theme or you can run it through the official plugin: AMP for WordPress.
Disable Emoji
Use the default emoji of the visitor’s browser instead of loading the emoji from WordPress.org to reduce the number of external requests to the server. This is also what WP Rocket ensures for me:
Optimization of theme
When selecting a WordPress theme, don’t look just at its appearance, price, and features. Use a simpler theme and increase its functionality with appropriate plugins.
You can also buy some of the premium themes that are optimized for speed. If you decide to change the theme, be sure to study carefully how to switch to a new theme without losing your data and settings.
Minification (compression) of CSS and JS files
Minify HTML, CSS, JS. Minification will increase the speed of WordPress pages. You can use the free Autoptimize plugin, or you can do it with WP Rocket too
Set up deferred JavaScript loading
Optimizing the speed of WordPress website also affects the loading of JavaScript. This is a common problem that slows the page view. If you place several external file libraries at the top of the page, the browser will start downloading and processing them. The rest of the page will load only after. You can also use WP rocket to set up deferred JavaScript loading:
Don’t save videos directly to WordPress
Full videos can also be stored on the WP website. However, I do not recommend this in order to optimize speed. They take up too much space. Instead of it, use a link to YouTube, Vimeo or VideoPress. Just copy the URL into your post to paste the video into it.
Use excerpts
You do not need to display entire posts on the main page and archives. Excerpt saves time and space. In addition, the website visitor will overlook multiple themes that might be of interest to him. He won’t read only one post. This setting depends on the selected theme, which means that the selected theme may not support it.
Split comments into several pages
You can also increase the speed of WordPress website by splitting comments. Older comments may not be visible as soon as the article is loaded. You can save them separately. To do this, go to Settings »Comments and tick the Split comments to pages option.
Use CDN
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a technology for spreading content across multiple servers, which are located in different places around the world.The location of the server also affects the speed of the WordPress website depending on the geographic distance of your hosting provider and visitor site. Server layout helps visitors to get faster to its content.
The following CDNs I consider the best: Cloudflare, KeyCDN, StackPath (MaxCDN) and Sucuri CDN. One of the most popular CDN that is free in the basic version is Cloudflare. If you haven’t heard about it yet, check it.
In my opinion, it is worthwhile to think about the CDN only with big websites with traffic from different parts of the world.
Use a quick slider
Use the appropriate slider plugin to speed up the WordPress website. Sliders improve website design, but often slow it down even if you have optimized images. This may be due to poor encoding of the plugin. The fastest WordPress slider plugin is Soliloquyi. It belongs to premium plugins. The well-known Revolution Slider didn’t do very well in speed tests.
In my opinion, in terms of speed, it is the best to avoid sliders completely, if possible.
Use a faster plugin for galleries
If you have a lot of images, photos and galleries on your website, a faster gallery plugin can also help you. Use one that is optimized for speed. I recommend the premium plugin Envira Gallery. You can create a photo and video gallery with it. In the case of fewer images, the basic gallery of theme is sufficient.
Split long posts into multiple pages
If you have posts on the page that focus more on individual topics and take up a lot of space, you are reducing the speed of load time of the website. To avoid unnecessary loading delays, split them into several parts. WordPress also offers a solution for such posting. The setting of split is possible with a tag
<!––nextpage––>
Place it in the text editor where you want to split the article. This will help increase the speed of the WordPress website.
Reduce loading of content from other websites
Many WordPress themes load content from other websites. These are images from external sources like Google, Facebook and so on. Lots 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 this content, it may slow down the website. And that’s a problem. It is necessary to reduce the loading of external http requests by merging them into a single file or disabling individual scripts.
Restrict saving of post revisions
You can also speed up the WordPress website by limiting the saving of post revisions that 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 allows you to save the last four edits. Older edits will be automatically deleted. I’m used to completely disable revisions – this can be done by inserting 0 instead of 4.
Set HTTP cache directly on the server
An effective solution for accelerating the WordPress website is to set up HTTP cache directly on the hosting server.
Turn off unused default functions
It is possible to disable some features to increase the speed of WordPress website. Not everyone needs, for example, Emoji or pingbacks. For instance, the WP Disable plugin will help. You can also limit commenting and XML-RPC support, for example, through the Disable XML-RPC plugin.
Disable linking and stealing of content (Hotlinking)
Each quality website is sooner or later threatened with content theft. This may also be the case that other sites show your images directly from their URL instead of uploading them to their own servers. This process slows down your website. You can prevent this by adding the following code to the .htaccess file
#disable hotlinking
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?wproom.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
How to speed up WordPress website – Summary
In my opinion, the most important criteria are quality hosting, good cache plugin, image optimization and selection of an appropriate theme.
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