Do you want to speed up your WordPress site? Fast loading pages improve user experience, increase your page views, and help with your WordPress SEO. In this article, we will share the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips to boost WordPress performance and speed up your website.
Unlike other “X best WordPress caching plugin” lists or generic “X tips to speeding up WordPress” tutorials, this article is a comprehensive guide to WordPress performance optimization.
We include everything from why speed is important, what slows down your WordPress site to actionable steps that you can take to improve your WordPress speed immediately.
To make it easy, we have created a table of contents to help you navigate through our ultimate guide to speeding up your WordPress site.
Why Speed is Important for Your WordPress Site?
Studies show that from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds.
What does this mean for you as a website owner?
You have very little time to show users your content and convince them to stay on your website.
A slow website means users will potentially leave your website before it even loads.
According to a StrangeLoop case study that involved Amazon, Google, and other larger sites, a 1 second delay in page load time can lead to 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
On top of that, Google and other search engines have already started penalizing slower websites by pushing them down in the search results which means lower traffic for slow websites.
To sum it all up, if you want more traffic, subscribers, and revenue from your website, then you must make your WordPress website FAST!
Following are some techniques to speed up your WordPress site.
How to Check Your WordPress Website Speed?
Often beginners think that their website is OK just because it doesn’t feel slow on their computer. That’s a HUGE mistake.
Since you frequently visit your own website, modern browsers like Chrome store your website in the cache and automatically prefetch it as soon as you start typing an address. This makes your website load almost instantly.
However, a normal user who is visiting your website for the first time may not have the same experience.
In fact, users in different geographical locations will have a completely different experience.
This is why we recommend that you test your website speed using a tool like Pingdom.
It is a free online tool that allows you to test your website’s speed from different locations.
After you run your website speed test, you might be wondering what’s a good website speed that I should aim for?
A good page load time is under 2 seconds.
However, the faster you can make it, the better it is. A few milliseconds of improvements here and there can add up to shaving off half or even a full second from your load time.
What Slows Down Your WordPress Website?
Your speed test report will likely have multiple recommendations for improvement. However, most of that is technical jargon which is hard for beginners to understand.
However understanding what slows down your website is key to improving performance and making smarter long-term decisions.
The primary causes for a slow WordPress website are:
Web Hosting – When your web hosting server is not properly configured it can hurt your website speed.
WordPress Configuration – If your WordPress site is not serving cached pages, then it will overload your server thus causing your website to be slow or crash entirely.
Page Size – Mainly images that aren’t optimized for the web.
Bad Plugins – If you’re using a poorly coded plugin, then it can significantly slow down your website.
External scripts – External scripts such as ads, front loaders, etc can also have a huge impact on your website performance.
Now that you know what slows down your WordPress website, let’s take a look at how to speed up your WordPress website.
Importance of Good WordPress Hosting
Your WordPress hosting service plays an important role in website performance. A good shared hosting provider like BlueHost or Siteground take the extra measures to optimize your website for performance.
However, on shared hosting, you share the server resources with many other customers. This means that if your neighboring site gets a lot of traffic, then it can impact the entire server performance which in turn will slow down your website.
On the other hand, using a managed WordPress hosting service give you the most optimized server configurations to run WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting companies also offer automatic backups, automatic WordPress updates, and more advanced security configurations to protect your website.
We recommend WPEngine as our preferred managed WordPress hosting provider. They’re also the most popular one in the industry. (See our special WPEngine coupon).
For enterprise WordPress hosting, we recommend using Pagely because they’re the best in business.
Speeding Up WordPress in Easy Steps (No Coding)
We know that making changes to your website configuration can be a terrifying thought for beginners, especially if you’re not a tech-geek.
But don’t worry, you’re not alone. We have helped thousands of WordPress users improve their WordPress performance.
We will show you how you can speed up your WordPress site with just a few clicks (no coding required).
If you can point-and-click, you can do this!
Install a WordPress Caching Plugin
WordPress pages are “dynamic.” This means they’re built on the fly every time someone visits a post or page on your website. To build your pages, WordPress has to run a process to find the required information, put it all together, and then display it to your user.
This process involves a lot of steps, and it can really slow down your website when you have multiple people visiting your site at once.
That’s why we recommend every WordPress site using a caching plugin. Caching can make your WordPress site anywhere from 2x to 5x faster.
Here’s how it works: Instead of going through the whole page generation process every time, your caching plugin makes a copy of the page after the first load, and then serves that cached version to every subsequent user.
As you can see in the graphics above when a user visits your WordPress site, which is built using PHP, your server retrieves information from a MySQL database and your PHP files, and then it’s all put together into an HTML content which is served to the user. It’s a long process, but you can skip a lot of it when you use caching instead.
There are a lot of caching plugins available for WordPress, but we recommend using the WP Super Cache plugin.
Optimize Images for Speed
Images bring life to your content and help boost engagement. Researchers have found that using colored visuals makes people 80% more likely to read your content.
But if your images aren’t optimized, they could be hurting more than helping. In fact, non-optimized images are one of the most common speed issues we see on beginner websites.
Before you upload a photo directly from your phone or camera, we recommend that you use photo editing software to optimize your images for web.
In their original formats, these photos can have huge file sizes. But based on the image file format and the compression you choose in your editing software, you can decrease your image size by up to 5x.
we only use two image formats: JPEG and PNG.
Now you might be wondering: what’s the difference?
Well, PNG image format is uncompressed. When you compress an image it loses some information, so an uncompressed image will be higher quality with more detail. The downside is that it’s a larger file size, so it takes longer to load.
JPEG, on the other hand, is a compressed file format which slightly reduces image quality, but it’s significantly smaller in size.
So how do we decide which image format to choose?
If our photo or image has a lot of different colors, then we use JPEG.
If it’s a simpler image or we need a transparent image, then we use PNG.
The majority of our images are JPEGs.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Remember how we mentioned above that users in different geographical locations may experience different loading times on your site?
That’s because the location of your web hosting servers can have an impact on your site speed. For example, let’s say your web hosting company has its servers in the United States. A visitor who’s also in the United States will generally see faster loading times than a visitor in India.
Using a CDN, or Content Delivery Network can help to speed up loading times for all of your visitors.
A CDN is a network made up of servers all around the world. Each server will store “static” files used to make up your website. Static files are unchanging files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript, unlike your WordPress pages which are “dynamic” as explained above.
When you use a CDN, every time a user visits your website they are served those static files from whichever server is closest to them. Your own web hosting server will also be faster since the CDN is doing a lot of the work.
we recommend MaxCDN Plugin. It works well with WordPress websites and complements your existing WordPress caching plugins for even faster loading times. See our guide on how to install and setup WordPress CDN solution MaxCDN to get started.
don't upload videos
You can directly upload videos to your WordPress site, and it will automatically display them in an HTML5 player…
But you should NEVER do that!
Hosting videos will cost you bandwidth. You could be charged overage fees by your web hosting company, or they may even shut down your site altogether, even if your plan includes “unlimited” bandwidth.
Hosting videos also increase your backup sizes tremendously and makes it difficult for you to restore WordPress from backup.
Instead, you should use a video hosting service like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc., and let them take care of the hard work. They have the bandwidth for it!
WordPress has a built-in video embed feature so you can copy and paste your video’s URL directly into your post and it will embed automatically.
.
Use a Faster Slider Plugin
Sliders are another common web design elements that can make your website slow.
Even if your images are all optimized as described above, a poorly coded slider plugin will mean all your work is wasted.
We compared the best WordPress slider plugins for performance and features, and Soliloquy was the fastest by far.
Use a Faster Gallery Plugin
If you have a photography website or a portfolio, then you’ll probably want to use an image gallery plugin to display your photos.
It’s really important that you use a WordPress gallery plugin that is optimized for speed.
We recommend using Envira Gallery, which is the best WordPress gallery plugin in the market. It allows you to create beautiful image galleries that are lightning fast to load.
We tested its speed compared to a couple of other popular gallery plugins, and found that Envira Galley is almost twice as fast:
Optimize WordPress Database
After using WordPress for a while, your database will have lots of information that you probably don’t need anymore. For improved performance, you can optimize your database to get rid of all that unnecessary information.
This can be easily managed with the WP-Sweep plugin. It allows you to clean your WordPress database by deleting things like trashed posts, revisions, unused tags, etc. It will also optimize your database’s structure with just a click.
Limit Post Revisions
Post revisions take up space in your WordPress database. Some users believe that revisions can also affect some database queries run by plugins. If the plugin doesn’t specifically exclude post revisions, it might slow down your site by searching through them unnecessarily.
You can easily limit the number of revisions WordPress keeps for each article. Simply add this line of code to your wp-config.php file.
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 );
This code will limit WordPress to only save your last 4 revisions of each post or page and discard older revisions automatically.
The easiest thing you can do to keep your site secure is installing a plugin such as iThemes Security. Security plugins such as iThemes Security can take care of a lot of the practical matters, and save you a lot of headaches.
4 Best Security Practices
1. Keep It Current
One of the biggest security vulnerabilities in WordPress is old software. WordPress is updated fairly often and whenever there’s a new security issue they roll out an update immediately. But that doesn’t do you any good if you’re not keeping your installation up to date. You also need to keep your themes and plugins up to date—they can have security issues as well. Sometimes people put off updates for fear of breaking their site, but you’d rather break your site with an update than risk a break-in. Also, just because a plugin is deactivated doesn’t mean it’s not a threat. You need to delete the plugin entirely.
2. Strong Passwords
Your security is only as good as your password. If you’ve got a simple password, you’ve got a simple site to hack. You need to use strong passwords. Your password should have numbers, capitals, special characters (@, #, *, etc.) and be long and unique. Your WordPress password can even include spaces and be a passphrase. Don’t use the same password in multiple places. Yes, remembering different passwords for different sites is tough, but a hacked site is worse.
3. Manage Users
Your own strong password is useless if another admin has a weak one. You need to manage your users. Not everybody needs admin access. The more people with admin access, the more chances to hack your site. Make sure you’re only giving admin access to the people who truly need it. And make sure those few admins are following good security practices. Remember to update or remove users when you have staff transitions.
4. Back It Up
If anything ever goes wrong with your site, you want to be able to get it back up quickly. That means you need a backup plan. In order for backup to work, it needs to be complete and automatic. Backing up your database isn’t enough. That will save your content, but you’ll still have to rebuild your entire site, including theme tweaks and plugin settings. And if your backup isn’t automatic, you’ll forget about it.
We are sure this article helped you learn some useful tricks to speed up WordPress and boost performance.
Unlike other “X best WordPress caching plugin” lists or generic “X tips to speeding up WordPress” tutorials, this article is a comprehensive guide to WordPress performance optimization.
We include everything from why speed is important, what slows down your WordPress site to actionable steps that you can take to improve your WordPress speed immediately.
To make it easy, we have created a table of contents to help you navigate through our ultimate guide to speeding up your WordPress site.
Why Speed is Important for Your WordPress Site?
Studies show that from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds.
What does this mean for you as a website owner?
You have very little time to show users your content and convince them to stay on your website.
A slow website means users will potentially leave your website before it even loads.
According to a StrangeLoop case study that involved Amazon, Google, and other larger sites, a 1 second delay in page load time can lead to 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
On top of that, Google and other search engines have already started penalizing slower websites by pushing them down in the search results which means lower traffic for slow websites.
To sum it all up, if you want more traffic, subscribers, and revenue from your website, then you must make your WordPress website FAST!
Following are some techniques to speed up your WordPress site.
How to Check Your WordPress Website Speed?
Often beginners think that their website is OK just because it doesn’t feel slow on their computer. That’s a HUGE mistake.
Since you frequently visit your own website, modern browsers like Chrome store your website in the cache and automatically prefetch it as soon as you start typing an address. This makes your website load almost instantly.
However, a normal user who is visiting your website for the first time may not have the same experience.
In fact, users in different geographical locations will have a completely different experience.
This is why we recommend that you test your website speed using a tool like Pingdom.
It is a free online tool that allows you to test your website’s speed from different locations.
After you run your website speed test, you might be wondering what’s a good website speed that I should aim for?
A good page load time is under 2 seconds.
However, the faster you can make it, the better it is. A few milliseconds of improvements here and there can add up to shaving off half or even a full second from your load time.
What Slows Down Your WordPress Website?
Your speed test report will likely have multiple recommendations for improvement. However, most of that is technical jargon which is hard for beginners to understand.
However understanding what slows down your website is key to improving performance and making smarter long-term decisions.
The primary causes for a slow WordPress website are:
Web Hosting – When your web hosting server is not properly configured it can hurt your website speed.
WordPress Configuration – If your WordPress site is not serving cached pages, then it will overload your server thus causing your website to be slow or crash entirely.
Page Size – Mainly images that aren’t optimized for the web.
Bad Plugins – If you’re using a poorly coded plugin, then it can significantly slow down your website.
External scripts – External scripts such as ads, front loaders, etc can also have a huge impact on your website performance.
Now that you know what slows down your WordPress website, let’s take a look at how to speed up your WordPress website.
Importance of Good WordPress Hosting
Your WordPress hosting service plays an important role in website performance. A good shared hosting provider like BlueHost or Siteground take the extra measures to optimize your website for performance.
However, on shared hosting, you share the server resources with many other customers. This means that if your neighboring site gets a lot of traffic, then it can impact the entire server performance which in turn will slow down your website.
On the other hand, using a managed WordPress hosting service give you the most optimized server configurations to run WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting companies also offer automatic backups, automatic WordPress updates, and more advanced security configurations to protect your website.
We recommend WPEngine as our preferred managed WordPress hosting provider. They’re also the most popular one in the industry. (See our special WPEngine coupon).
For enterprise WordPress hosting, we recommend using Pagely because they’re the best in business.
Speeding Up WordPress in Easy Steps (No Coding)
We know that making changes to your website configuration can be a terrifying thought for beginners, especially if you’re not a tech-geek.
But don’t worry, you’re not alone. We have helped thousands of WordPress users improve their WordPress performance.
We will show you how you can speed up your WordPress site with just a few clicks (no coding required).
If you can point-and-click, you can do this!
Install a WordPress Caching Plugin
WordPress pages are “dynamic.” This means they’re built on the fly every time someone visits a post or page on your website. To build your pages, WordPress has to run a process to find the required information, put it all together, and then display it to your user.
This process involves a lot of steps, and it can really slow down your website when you have multiple people visiting your site at once.
That’s why we recommend every WordPress site using a caching plugin. Caching can make your WordPress site anywhere from 2x to 5x faster.
Here’s how it works: Instead of going through the whole page generation process every time, your caching plugin makes a copy of the page after the first load, and then serves that cached version to every subsequent user.
As you can see in the graphics above when a user visits your WordPress site, which is built using PHP, your server retrieves information from a MySQL database and your PHP files, and then it’s all put together into an HTML content which is served to the user. It’s a long process, but you can skip a lot of it when you use caching instead.
There are a lot of caching plugins available for WordPress, but we recommend using the WP Super Cache plugin.
Optimize Images for Speed
Images bring life to your content and help boost engagement. Researchers have found that using colored visuals makes people 80% more likely to read your content.
But if your images aren’t optimized, they could be hurting more than helping. In fact, non-optimized images are one of the most common speed issues we see on beginner websites.
Before you upload a photo directly from your phone or camera, we recommend that you use photo editing software to optimize your images for web.
In their original formats, these photos can have huge file sizes. But based on the image file format and the compression you choose in your editing software, you can decrease your image size by up to 5x.
we only use two image formats: JPEG and PNG.
Now you might be wondering: what’s the difference?
Well, PNG image format is uncompressed. When you compress an image it loses some information, so an uncompressed image will be higher quality with more detail. The downside is that it’s a larger file size, so it takes longer to load.
JPEG, on the other hand, is a compressed file format which slightly reduces image quality, but it’s significantly smaller in size.
So how do we decide which image format to choose?
If our photo or image has a lot of different colors, then we use JPEG.
If it’s a simpler image or we need a transparent image, then we use PNG.
The majority of our images are JPEGs.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Remember how we mentioned above that users in different geographical locations may experience different loading times on your site?
That’s because the location of your web hosting servers can have an impact on your site speed. For example, let’s say your web hosting company has its servers in the United States. A visitor who’s also in the United States will generally see faster loading times than a visitor in India.
Using a CDN, or Content Delivery Network can help to speed up loading times for all of your visitors.
A CDN is a network made up of servers all around the world. Each server will store “static” files used to make up your website. Static files are unchanging files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript, unlike your WordPress pages which are “dynamic” as explained above.
When you use a CDN, every time a user visits your website they are served those static files from whichever server is closest to them. Your own web hosting server will also be faster since the CDN is doing a lot of the work.
we recommend MaxCDN Plugin. It works well with WordPress websites and complements your existing WordPress caching plugins for even faster loading times. See our guide on how to install and setup WordPress CDN solution MaxCDN to get started.
don't upload videos
You can directly upload videos to your WordPress site, and it will automatically display them in an HTML5 player…
But you should NEVER do that!
Hosting videos will cost you bandwidth. You could be charged overage fees by your web hosting company, or they may even shut down your site altogether, even if your plan includes “unlimited” bandwidth.
Hosting videos also increase your backup sizes tremendously and makes it difficult for you to restore WordPress from backup.
Instead, you should use a video hosting service like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc., and let them take care of the hard work. They have the bandwidth for it!
WordPress has a built-in video embed feature so you can copy and paste your video’s URL directly into your post and it will embed automatically.
.
Use a Faster Slider Plugin
Sliders are another common web design elements that can make your website slow.
Even if your images are all optimized as described above, a poorly coded slider plugin will mean all your work is wasted.
We compared the best WordPress slider plugins for performance and features, and Soliloquy was the fastest by far.
Use a Faster Gallery Plugin
If you have a photography website or a portfolio, then you’ll probably want to use an image gallery plugin to display your photos.
It’s really important that you use a WordPress gallery plugin that is optimized for speed.
We recommend using Envira Gallery, which is the best WordPress gallery plugin in the market. It allows you to create beautiful image galleries that are lightning fast to load.
We tested its speed compared to a couple of other popular gallery plugins, and found that Envira Galley is almost twice as fast:
Optimize WordPress Database
After using WordPress for a while, your database will have lots of information that you probably don’t need anymore. For improved performance, you can optimize your database to get rid of all that unnecessary information.
This can be easily managed with the WP-Sweep plugin. It allows you to clean your WordPress database by deleting things like trashed posts, revisions, unused tags, etc. It will also optimize your database’s structure with just a click.
Limit Post Revisions
Post revisions take up space in your WordPress database. Some users believe that revisions can also affect some database queries run by plugins. If the plugin doesn’t specifically exclude post revisions, it might slow down your site by searching through them unnecessarily.
You can easily limit the number of revisions WordPress keeps for each article. Simply add this line of code to your wp-config.php file.
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 );
This code will limit WordPress to only save your last 4 revisions of each post or page and discard older revisions automatically.
The easiest thing you can do to keep your site secure is installing a plugin such as iThemes Security. Security plugins such as iThemes Security can take care of a lot of the practical matters, and save you a lot of headaches.
4 Best Security Practices
1. Keep It Current
One of the biggest security vulnerabilities in WordPress is old software. WordPress is updated fairly often and whenever there’s a new security issue they roll out an update immediately. But that doesn’t do you any good if you’re not keeping your installation up to date. You also need to keep your themes and plugins up to date—they can have security issues as well. Sometimes people put off updates for fear of breaking their site, but you’d rather break your site with an update than risk a break-in. Also, just because a plugin is deactivated doesn’t mean it’s not a threat. You need to delete the plugin entirely.
2. Strong Passwords
Your security is only as good as your password. If you’ve got a simple password, you’ve got a simple site to hack. You need to use strong passwords. Your password should have numbers, capitals, special characters (@, #, *, etc.) and be long and unique. Your WordPress password can even include spaces and be a passphrase. Don’t use the same password in multiple places. Yes, remembering different passwords for different sites is tough, but a hacked site is worse.
3. Manage Users
Your own strong password is useless if another admin has a weak one. You need to manage your users. Not everybody needs admin access. The more people with admin access, the more chances to hack your site. Make sure you’re only giving admin access to the people who truly need it. And make sure those few admins are following good security practices. Remember to update or remove users when you have staff transitions.
4. Back It Up
If anything ever goes wrong with your site, you want to be able to get it back up quickly. That means you need a backup plan. In order for backup to work, it needs to be complete and automatic. Backing up your database isn’t enough. That will save your content, but you’ll still have to rebuild your entire site, including theme tweaks and plugin settings. And if your backup isn’t automatic, you’ll forget about it.
We are sure this article helped you learn some useful tricks to speed up WordPress and boost performance.
1 Comments
Thanks for the detailed guide!
ReplyDeleteThat was very informative
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