15 ways to speed up your WordPress website effectively
According to Kinsta, WordPress is the most popular website creation and management tool in the world, accounting for 34% of all websites on the internet.
If you are reading this article, it means that you also own a WordPress website and want to optimize it, right?
Up to 40% of users leave a website because it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. How to keep 40% of these potential customers on your website? Read now the 15 Ways to Speed Up WordPress Effectively right here.
But before that, let's learn 5 common causes of slow WordPress website speed.
Causes of slow WordPress website
Big data, big picture
A person carrying bulky luggage will of course not be able to run as fast as those who know how to minimize their belongings.
In the articles on how to handle On-page SEO errors and technical SEO errors, I will all mention optimizing image size to speed up WordPress. The more large images it contains, the slower the website loads.
Installing too many Plugins
Too much of anything is not good, right?
Although the plugin provides many new features for the website in a simple way such as security, storage, optimization, etc., but there are too many plugins, your website has to run a lot of plugin tasks before displaying the content. necessary.
Besides, the old version plugins also affect the web loading speed because they are often heavy and the performance is not high, there are many errors.
Too many plugins, your website has to run a lot of tasks that slow down the loading speed
Using External Widgets
External widgets are non-default widgets on wordpress, they can slow down the website because it has to go through a 3rd party when operating.
High traffic at the same time
There are two reasons for the unusually high traffic.
Or a lot of customers visit because of “peak season” such as sale season, hot items, etc. If your WordPress website does not have enough CPU and RAM to handle the task from a high number of visitors, it can easily lead to slowness, lag, even “unreachable”. This is the most common WordPress loading error situation.
Or your website is being attacked by a DDos/Botnet opponent, causing sudden high traffic and causing web errors.
Haven't updated WordPress or optimized the theme yet
Yes, WordPress also needs to be updated regularly to ensure performance. Although the new version is not 100% perfect, the old version is always more buggy, heavier, affecting the user experience.
The theme is similar, optimizing the theme helps speed up WordPress significantly.
But how to speed up WordPress? Check out the tutorial below!
15 Ways to Optimize WordPress Loading Speed
Note to you in advance, these 15 ways are not sorted by importance or any other criteria, I just gathered everything I have learned about how to speed up WordPress page loading and listed them all here .
Choose a good server
- Get started with a standard theme or framework
- Use a caching plugin effectively
- Use a content delivery network (CDN)
- Optimize images automatically
- Improve the homepage
- Optimize Your WordPress Database
- Turn off hot links on your posts
- Add expired header to static source
- Gravatar Image Adjustment
- Add LazyLoad to your images
- Control the number of archived post revisions
- Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks
- Replace PHP with static HTML, when necessary
- Using CloudFlare
Let's start with the ways to optimize the website
Whether you apply all of these 15 ways or just temporarily try a few easy ways first, there are certain WordPress acceleration effects. Let's see!
1. Choose a good host
A good host is like a solid “foundation” for your website.
Quality servers will come with a slightly higher price tag, but it's totally worth it if the server keeps your website running smoothly, with minimal errors, and an easy-to-use back-end.
Moreover, choose the hosting service provider that puts the customer first, always ready to advise and support you when needed, especially with in-depth knowledge of WordPress. That way you won't have to worry about any problems.
2. Start with a standard theme or framework
A simple framework will simplify the tasks that the website has to run, speeding up the crawling process. However, be careful with overly minimalist themes, they will not meet many basic features and eventually you will have to change to a new theme.
In my experience, the fastest loading premium theme is Focus, which is easy to customize, suitable if you are new to WordPress.
Premium themes will of course cost money but not necessarily better than free themes. However, a paid theme is more secure for your website, stays compatible with each update, and can be customized with many other plugins.
A good theme will have an extremely solid framework that won't slow down the web with redundant plugins or custom tweaks. If you buy a premium theme, choose a theme with a framework or at least a large user base for support and constantly updated.
A simple framework will simplify the tasks that the website has to run
3. Use a caching plugin effectively
WordPress plugins are obviously quite useful, but the best plugins always fall under the caching category, as they dramatically improve page load times and best of all, they're all free and easy to use.
A cache is a collection of data that is temporarily stored for quick access when required.
WordPress is an online content management system. This means that every time a user visits a website, WordPress will fetch information from the database and then run some other steps before the web page is sent to the user's browser.
This makes the website load slower when multiple users access it at the same time. Caching allows your WordPress site to skip a lot of steps. Instead of doing the entire page generation process each time, your caching plugin makes a copy of the page after the first load and then makes that cached version available to every subsequent user. .
Have you seen the importance of caching plugin to speed up your website?
The 5 caching plugins I recommend are:
- WP Rocket
- Total Cache
- WP Super Cache
- Sucuri Firewall
- Built-in Cache Plugins from Hosting
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Basically, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all the static files you have on your site (like CSS, Javascript, images,..) and lets your visitors download them as quickly as possible. by serving files on the servers closest to them.
I personally use the StackPath Content Delivery Network on my WordPress sites, as I find them to be the most affordable and their control panel very simple to use (and comes with video tutorials). setup, it only takes a few minutes).
Stackpath content delivery network
There's a plugin called Free-CDN that promises to do the same thing, although I haven't tested it yet. You can find and check it out!
5. Images are optimized automatically
Yahoo! There is an image optimizer called Smush.it that will greatly reduce the file size of the image, without sacrificing quality.
However, if you work hard to reduce the size of every image, it will be quite difficult and extremely time consuming.
Luckily, there's a great, free plugin called WP-SmushIt that will do this process for all images automatically when you upload them. There's no reason not to install this at all. 😉 Works well with Mac users too!
6. Improve and optimize the homepage
This is not a thing but really a few simple things that you can do to ensure that your homepage loads quickly, this is possibly the most important part of your website as people will visit it. visit it most often.
Things you can do include:
Show excerpt instead of full post
Reduce the number of posts on the page (I like to display 5-7)
Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the homepage (only include them in posts)
Remove inactive plugins and extensions that you don't need
As little as possible. Readers are here for the content, not the 8,000 widgets on the homepage
7. Optimize Your WordPress Database
Optimization sounds a bit tedious, extremely boring, but…
You just need to use the WP-Optimize plugin to make WordPress database optimization easy.
This plugin allows you to do just one simple task: optimize all databases like spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc. to reduce the cost of optimizing them.
I would also recommend the WP-DB Manager plugin, which can schedule days for database optimization.
8. Turn off hot links on your posts
Hot link – Hot linking occurs when other websites link directly to the images on your site from their articles causing your server to load more and more.
This can increase as more and more people “steal” your posts or your website (and especially images) becomes more popular, which is a must if you regularly create custom images. customize your website.
Treatment? Put this code in the root .htaccess file:
Processing code to turn off hot links
Where websitecuaban is your web address, and websitehotlink is the web address where your data is obtained, otherwise your image will not appear correctly.
9. Add Expired Headers to Static Sources
The Expires header is a way to specify a time far enough in the future so that the client (browser) doesn't have to re-fetch any static content (such as css files, javascript, images, etc.).
This can significantly cut down on load times for your regular users.
You need to copy and paste the following code into your original .htaccess file:
Code added to title expired
The numbers above are set for one month (in seconds), you can change as you like.
10. Gravatar Image Adjustment
Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar.
Gravatar is used to display your profile picture on your blog posts or other blogs you comment on. This not only increases brand awareness but also improves page load by simplicity. You can do either of those things, just know that it will at least benefit your site speed if you set the default image (found in “Discussion”, under the settings tab in the dashboard). WordPress control) to empty space instead of the default image.
11. Add LazyLoad to your images
LazyLoad is the process of only having the images on the first load (i.e. only those showing up in the visitor's browser window), then, as the reader scrolls down, the other images start loading. , just before they appear.
Not only will this help you speed up page loading, but it can also save bandwidth by loading less data for users who don't scroll all the way through your pages.
To do this automatically, install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin.
12. Control how many post revisions are stored
I have saved this article for draft about 8 times.
WordPress, left to its own devices, will archive any of these drafts, indefinitely.
Now, when this post is finished and published, why do I need to archive all those drafts?
That's why I use the Revision Control plugin to make sure I keep post revisions to a minimum, set it to 2 or 3 so you have something to fall back on in case you error, but not so high that you clutter the backend with an unnecessary amount of drafted articles.
13. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks
By default, WordPress interacts with other blogs equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.
Every time another blog mentions you, it notifies your site, thereby updating the post data. Disabling this feature won't destroy backlinks to your site, just a setting that creates a lot of work for your site.
For more details, read this explanation of WordPress Pingbacks, Trackbacks, and Linkbacks.
14. Replace PHP with static HTML, when necessary
This one is a bit advanced, but can cut your load time significantly if you want to speed up page loads, so I've included it.
I would make this great post unfair if I didn't link to it for this topic, as it taught me how to easily do this myself, in minutes.
So go there and check it out, it's written in terms that are easier to understand than ever!
You should replace PHP with static HTML, when necessary
15. Using CloudFlare
This is similar to the section above on how to use a CDN, but I've grown so fond of CloudFlare since I discussed it in my best web analytics post so I decided to include it separately. come in.
To put it bluntly, CloudFlare, along with the W3 Total Cache plugin discussed above, is a really powerful combination (they integrate with each other) that will dramatically improve not only the speed but also the security of your website. your website.
Both are free!
Conclusion
The biggest advantage of reducing website load time is improving user experience. Like many aspects of running a WordPress website, speed optimization is something you need to do.
Now it's your turn. Get started right away with these 15 ways to speed up WordPress!
