How to optimize site speed on WordPress

It is well known that the Google search engine gives priority to sites that load quickly and also ranks them more positively. To help you improve your website speed, I’m sharing tips to optimize website speed that anyone can implement without any technical knowledge.

What is site speed

Site load speed, is the time it takes for a web page and multimedia content to be downloaded from the hosting servers and displayed in the browser. It’s measured in seconds, with faster being better. A speedy website takes less than 3 seconds to load.

What factors affect website speed

There are many factors that can affect website speed, including:

• Image size: Large images can slow down your website significantly.
• Number of plugins: Too many plugins can bog down your website.
• Theme: Some themes are simply coded better than others and will load faster.
• Hosting provider: Your hosting provider can have a big impact on your website speed.

Why is website speed important

Website speed is crucial for several reasons:

• User experience: Slow websites are annoying and can lead to people bouncing off your site before they even see what you have to offer.
• SEO: Google and other search engines consider website speed when ranking websites. A faster website is more likely to rank higher in search results.
• Conversions: If your website takes too long to load, people are less likely to make a purchase or take any other desired action.
• Brand perception: A slow website can make your business look unprofessional and unreliable.
• Server Load: Slow sites put increased strain on your server, potentially leading to crashes and downtime.

Customers expect your website to load in at least two seconds, and 40% of internet visitors will leave your site if it takes more than three seconds to complete.

Samir Somal (Blue Ocean Global Technology)

Nothing makes me hit the back button like a slow web page. Website performance has a strong impact on user experience and largely determines how visitors judge the quality of an online business.

Google found that the probability of a user bouncing off increases by 32 percent as page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds. A high-quality website that loads in a couple of seconds has a better chance of attracting and retaining visitors.

Determine the speed of your WP site

How to understand that your website has an optimal page load speed or, on the contrary, is running too slow? There are many tools you can use to measure your website speed, such as:

• Google PageSpeed Insights: This is a free tool from Google that will give you a score for your website speed and give you suggestions for improvement.
• GTmetrix: This is another popular tool that provides detailed reports on your website speed.
• Pingdom: Pingdom is a great tool for testing your website speed from different locations around the world.

Test the loading speed of your website. If the site loads slowly, you’ll have to work on it. It’s not a difficult thing to do. Here are the simple steps I recommend you take.

Use fast web hosting

The loading speed of your website will vary depending on which hosting service you use. Even on different tariffs of the same provider, the site may work differently.

The number of processors and their speed, the amount of RAM, the disk system (SSD or HDD) – all this also affects. The more powerful the hardware, the faster everything works.

If possible, choose hosting with a data center as close to your audience as possible.

Install a lightweight theme

The loading speed of your pages also depends on the theme you use. It should be well coded, compliant with WordPress standards, and optimized for performance. It is important that it is lightweight, including only the features you need, offering to activate or deactivate settings of your choice.

Optimize your images

Long site load times are often caused by images that are too large.

The easiest way to optimize website speed is to compress all your images.
On WordPress, this is quite simple using various free plugins and online services.
You can even use desktop software and save images for the web to optimize and compress images.

Select the correct image format. This directly affects its loading time. I recommend that Jpeg and WebP are best.

Optimizing your site’s images is the surest way to reduce load times and speed up WordPress.

Minification of JS, HTML, and CSS

These files need to be sent from your web server to the web browser every time a visitor loads a page. Therefore, the more you can reduce the size of these files without affecting the look and feel of your site, the faster your pages will load.

Set up caching

By using caching, you can significantly reduce the load on the server and, as a result, speed up the loading of your WordPress site. There are two types of caching: browser and server-based.

Browser caching. When you visit your site for the first time, a copy of the entire page or parts of it are saved in the visitor’s browser. When you visit again, the saved content is loaded not from the server, but from the cache. This saves traffic on hosting and reduces page load time.

Server-side caching. The cache is stored on the server side, which saves resources spent on page building and PHP scripts execution. This method of caching is more complex, but also more efficient.

If you have shared hosting – install the plugin to enable browser-side caching, and if you have a dedicated server or VPS – configure server-side caching.

Leverage Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

A CDN is a network of servers around the world that you connect your website to, and then some of the content is cached on each of the servers. This helps your site load faster for those who live far away from the server where it is stored.

The data will travel a shorter distance, which is what speeds up the WordPress site.

Connect your site to a CDN so that it is stored on company servers around the world and loaded from the nearest server for people from different parts of the world.

Enable GZIP compression

What is GZIP compression? This is a compression (70 to 90%) of your site’s elements (JS, CSS, HTML, etc.) that decompresses the browser of your page visitor.
The browser receives a compressed stream of data which it decompresses.
This allows your site to load and render the first render much faster.
GZIP compression works with all browsers, and you can enable it on your WordPress site using various plugins.

Optimize your database

The database stores all the content of your site – articles, pages, comments, site settings, plugin settings, files. Over time, old, unused files have accumulated there. Changes you make to your WordPress site create MySQL tables in your database that become useless. For example, article versions, drafts, or remnants of deleted plugins. To ensure pages load quickly, clean your site’s database regularly.

Before changing the database, it is highly recommended that you make a backup copy.

Minimize external scripts

There are many third-party technologies available today (e.g., online chat, personalization, customer reviews, etc.). So it’s easy to just keep adding new features and functionality to your site without thinking about how these technologies will affect your site’s performance.

Use only what is absolutely necessary.

Disable pingbacks and trackbacks

Pingbacks and trackbacks are WordPress technologies that alert external websites when you link to them in your site content. They also work the other way around: if someone links to your site, you can get a notification. They use up server resources and slow down the site. I recommend that you disable pingbacks and trackbacks in your WordPress settings.

Use the latest PHP version

PHP is the server-side programming language used by WordPress. The language is regularly updated and maintained by the PHP Foundation to improve the performance, security, and functionality of the language.

Activate the latest version of PHP on your hosting. A WordPress site can load twice as fast with the latest version of PHP.

Update your versions of WordPress, plugins and themes regularly

WordPress core, themes and plugins should be updated regularly to keep your site running as efficiently as possible. Always use the latest versions to optimize performance, secure your site, fix bugs, and ensure every feature and tool works properly.

Remove unnecessary plugins and themes

It is advisable for the site administrator to check which extensions are necessary and which are unnecessary. Disable and remove any themes and plugins you don’t use.

Also, make sure that you are not using multiple extensions to perform the same task. For example, if you have installed a plugin to create an XML sitemap of your website and use Yoast to manage the SEO of your articles, be aware that the latter also allows you to create a sitemap of your website.

You can try to find extensions that perform the functions of several at once to reduce the number of active plugins on your site.

Limit the number of WordPress revisions

Revisions are versions of posts. They appear every time you save, publish or update an article. The functionality is useful, but each revision is essentially a copy of the article, which takes up space in the database. A single article can have dozens of revisions. If your blog has a lot of articles, the database will contain hundreds or even thousands of such additional lines. It is better to limit the number of editions to at least five.

To limit the number of post edits, open your site’s wp-config.php file. It is located in the root folder of the site. Add the following code to the end of the file:

"define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5 );

This code limits the number of saved revisions of each message to five.

Or you can use special WordPress database optimization plugins.

Divide many comments into pages

You can split long comments into multiple pages and save loading time. You can do this in the WordPress settings.

Divide long posts into pages

Long posts with lots of images and dynamic information will always take longer to process – instead, consider breaking them up into multiple pages.

Disable hotlinks

Hotlinking is when another website distributes your images not by hosting them on their server, but directly from your website’s URL. It uses your hosting bandwidth and you get no traffic in return.

Use lazy loading

Deferred loading is when a website does not pre-load all the images on a page, but only what is visible on the screen. Then, as users scroll down the page, it loads new images as they appear in the window. This can significantly reduce loading time

In new versions of WordPress this functionality is enabled by default.

Reduce the number of redirects

Redirection requires additional processing time and will waste time loading the page. Keep redirects to a minimum.

Upload your videos to special services

You should always avoid posting videos on your website as it consumes a lot of resources. So prefer to use a video hosting service like Youtube, Dailymotion or Vimeo and integrate the video to your website. To do this, simply copy and paste the video link into the WordPress editor, which will automatically take care of the integration.

Remove unnecessary widgets, scripts, images, files

Another way to speed up WordPress is to remove images, scripts, widgets, and videos that you deem unnecessary. These elements increase the time it takes for a site to load. Therefore, you can remove them, significantly increasing the speed of your website.

This tip applies to any website: if you want to reduce load times, give browsers less content. In other words, simplify your designs.

Implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is a technology developed by Google that keeps your website looking simple and showing only the information you need.

AMP-supported pages are stored on search engine servers and load with virtually no delay.

Test your site’s loading speed regularly

After doing the above steps, you should again check the loading speed of your WordPress site. If everything is done correctly, your site should speed up noticeably. Don’t forget to periodically test your website for loading speed.

By following these tips, you can give your website a speed boost and create a better experience for your visitors.

If you’ve tried all of the tips above and your website is still slow, you may need to hire a web developer to help you troubleshoot the problem.

Conclusion

In conclusion, website speed is not just a technical detail; it’s a critical factor that shapes your online presence and impacts your bottom line. A speedy website delivers a smooth user experience, fuels SEO rankings, and drives conversions. Conversely, a sluggish site frustrates visitors, plummets your search visibility, and ultimately, hinders your business success.

Additional questions