Some points which help you to Speed Up WordPress Website?
Table of Contents
Why WordPress website speed is important?
Is speed a ranking factor on Google, yahoo and Bing?
Why, Your WordPress website is Slow?
How To Measure WordPress Site Speed ?
Which Points to be considered to speed up WordPress website?
Basics of WordPress Performance factors depends on:
- Choose a quality web hosting plan
- Make Use of a Fast Theme
- Use Latest PHP Version
- Cleanup WordPress database (Optimize Your Databases)
- Delete Unused Themes and Plugins
- Deactivate or uninstall plugins
- Use image optimization to reduce the media files size.
- Reduce the size of your JS and CSS files.
- Switch on Gzip compression.
- Make use of a content distribution network (CDN)
- Leverage Browser Caching
- Pingbacks and trackbacks should be disabled.
- Hotlinking and leeching of the content should be disabled.
- You Shouldn’t Host Videos on Your Own web hosting
Want to speed up your WordPress website?
Increasing the speed of the WordPress website is a hot topic these days. Quick loading pages improve client experience will increase your page views and it will also increase your search engine ranking. When a visitor lands on your website for the first time you have a couple of seconds to convert the visitor, if your website is slower then users will not visit your website again and this will affect your traffic.
As we know, traffic means a fast bounce rate to conversions, conversions ultimately give you profits, so fast-loading websites help you to reach your goal.
In this post, we’ll go through a number of WordPress speed optimization strategies that will help you improve the performance of your website and speed it up. Follow the technique and you can make your WordPress site faster.
Is speed a ranking factor on Google, yahoo and Bing?
Google, Yahoo, and Bing are some examples of popular search engines. The search engine’s goal is to provide you the best possible search results when users have a slow experience, they are significantly less prone to discover what they are looking for. A slow-loading website frustrates the users, so search engine does not want to give ranking to the slower website.
Now it’s officially declared by Google, speed of a website is now used as a ranking factor for mobile searches and speed is now a landing page factor for Ads.
Users want to find answers to their inquiries rapidly and information shows that a person truly cares about how rapidly their pages load. If your page load time is more than 3 seconds for mobile page and 6 seconds for desktop or laptop then half of the visitors will leave your website. Previously it was announced by Google and another search engine that speed would be a ranking signal for laptop and desktop searches and from July 2018 page speed is a ranking factor for mobile searches too.
Some of the statistics of user behavior.
- You can boost your conversion rate by 8% if you improve your website load time by 0.1s.
- 40% of people undoubtedly spend more than planned when they recognize the shopping experience to be exceptionally customized and better on a fast-loading website.
- 77% of smartphone shoppers buy from companies whose apps or mobile sites permit them to make buys rapidly.
Why, Your WordPress Site is Slow?
Slow WordPress website depends on two factors, one is your backend (MySQL) and another one is a frontend of your WordPress site. You can improve your website performance by optimizing both the backend and frontend.
Backend – In short terms of how much time a server takes to deliver your files. This performance is completely depending on your hosting provider, running your WordPress site on a poor hosting configuration ruins your backend performance. You can better your performance by choosing a good hosting company, the latest version of PHP, page caching plugin, the latest version of WordPress, and optimizing database, etc.
Frontend – The performance of your website depends on your design like; unused plugins, themes, unoptimized images, gzip compression, unoptimized CSS and JavaScript, etc.
How To Measure WordPress Site Speed?
There are many tools available on the internet to check your WordPress website performance online, you can easily evaluate the performance in detail.
The below are some of the best online website speed testing tools:
Google PageSpeed Insights – this is an online tool that analyses the data of the web page which shows some suggestion and help you to improve your website speed.
Lighthouse – Lighthouse is a free, open-source automated platform that makes recommendations to help you boost the content of your website. It will look at things like performance, usability, web apps, and SEO, among other things.
GTmetrix – This is a webpage speed test tool from where you can easily test the performance of your WordPress site, this is developed by Carbon60. GTmetrix gives you suggestions on whether the website has a server issue or a frontend issue.
Uptrends – You can test your website every 5 minutes, it is very easy to start with an automated webpage speed test, this will help you to maintain your site performance.
Dotcom-Monitor’s – Test your website speed instantly, you will get webpage load speed from 25 global locations and you can test in a real browser. Analyzing your website speed test is important on regular basis.
Dareboost – It is an easy, effective and automatic tool to audit your website quality which gives you better performances, Dareboost analyzes your website to detect quality and loading time issues.
KeyCDN tools – This website analyzes your web pages, network issue, and CDN issue for quick resolutions. this speed test tool is used to evaluate the performance of your web pages to check where you can make the improvements.
Pingdom – You can analyze the performance and uptime of your website; it is cost-effective and reliable. you will get webpage load speed from 70 global locations in a real browser test.
WebPageTest – Provides a realistic experience of global position and testing on the most recent browser, as well as advanced website measurements such as DNS, TCP, TLS, and more.
Which Points to be considered to speed up WordPress website?
1. Choose a Quality Hosting Plan
Selecting a correct hosting plan is one of the most important things to start a blog or website. Web hosting is a service that allows any individual or organization to publish the website on the internet, web hosting company allocates some space on the web server for a website to store all the files required to run the website on the internet globally.
It fully depends on the web-server that how quickly your data is passed to the browser for users. Your website speed, performance, and traffic depend on the hosting platform, if you have chosen poor hosting it affects your traffic and ranking in search engines. You must select a good hosting company if you want to customize your WordPress website for speed.
The hosting company offers different hosting plans according to the needs of different clients, whether you want to host your blog, website, or eCommerce site. There are many plans hosting services the company offers like shared hosting, VPS hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting, we suggest you start from shared hosting plans when your traffic will grow you can upgrade your plans.
Shared hosting means you share the resources like; disk space, bandwidth, RAM, CPU’s of the server with many other users in that particular server that means, if the other website hosted in the same server gets a lot of traffic, then it will impact the server performance and also it will turn your website slow. During traffic, hours shared hosting fails to deliver a good loading time, Due to this impact, it’s a little bit hard to speed up your WordPress website, the only solution to this is to choose a good hosting company.
If you want to speed up your WordPress website and have visitors of more than 20k then we suggest you WordPress hosting services, WordPress hosting is optimized for WordPress sites, hosting company offers dedicated resources and also many features like WordPress auto-update, backups, pre-installed plugins, and security to protect your website, you can easily upload all your files, images, and videos, etc. and upgrade your plan if required in future without a second of downtime.
If your traffic is increasing day by day and search for more, then little knowledge about cloud hosting can give you a better solution, cloud hosting offers you dedicated resources, as per your requirement you can choose the cloud hosting plan.
If your website visitors are more than 60k, you are in the internet industry for a couple of years, you want to balance your website for speed and performance choose Virtual Private Server (VPS), this would be the best option for your website on a reasonable cost.
Again, if you are not satisfied with VPS performance then go for Dedicated server hosting, Dedicated server is costly comes with dedicated resources, user will get full access to the server to configure all the required software’s, you can host as many, websites as you want and you can choose managed dedicated hosting to get all your query solved by a dedicated support team.
2. Make Your Media Files Smaller by Image Optimization
What is Image Optimization?
Image optimization is a must to speed up your WordPress website as large images slow down your website, it has a huge impact to speed up your website. Optimizing images is the process to reduce your present image to a smaller image without losing the quality of the image by using plugins or scripts, you can reduce the image size up to 80%. It will enhance your website load time and make you rate higher in search engines. You must use this technique on all your post or web pages.
Note: Always try to use a JPEG image over a PNG image, as JPEG images are smaller in size as compared to PNG images, JPEG file compression works better for photos.
Benefits of Image Optimization
- Enhance your website speed
- Improves ranking on search engines
- It reduces your disk space and bandwidth
- Easy to download and upload images
- Easy to take website backup
- Increase your sales
There is one more option to reduce your image size that is resized dimensions, you can resize your dimensions according to your easily editable use.
Changing WordPress default photo sizes is always recommended, follow the instruction-
- Login to your WordPress admin dashboard
- Select settings then select media
- In media settings, edit the height and width values
- Click Save Changes
WordPress Image Optimization Plugins for Compression
Here are some recommended plugins of WordPress for compressing images to enhance speed and performance.
- ShortPixel – It’s a freemium plugin, easy to use, stable, and compresses images hassle-free. ShortPixel compresses all your old images and PDF files with a single click. Newly uploaded images are resized and optimized automatically in the background.
- TinyPNG – One of the free, best, and simple to use tools for image compression, this plugin automatically optimizes your images. Easy to optimize your existing media library by choosing bulk optimization.
- EWWW – EWWW plugin can optimize all your existing images and automatically optimizes your new images. It has features like; smooth handling, high torque, and adaptive steering, etc.
- Optimole – One-stop solution for all your image optimization, easy to clean up heavy images. It has a cloud-based system to optimize your images in real-time to speed up your WordPress website.
3. Use an optimized theme for speed
When picking a theme for your WordPress website, it’s important to pay close attention to the speed of your website. Some themes that seem to be glamorous and spectacular are often incorrectly coded and will cause your site to load slowly. It’s normally preferable to go for a simplified theme rather than one that’s bloated with complicated templates, fancy graphics, and other superfluous functions. You can add all those features by using WordPress plugins later. You should still incorporate certain things in the future.
Everybody loves a funky template. When it comes to performance, any feature in a theme affects the overall speed of the website. And, unfortunately, there are both good and bad themes in the thousands of themes available.
WordPress themes are essential for pace and performance; choose the best one from the beginning. Themes that come with Google Fonts, Font Awesome icons, galleries, sliders, video and parallax scripts, widgets, etc. If all these are not required for your design, you can disable all this to boost your WordPress website because it increases your page size.
Note: When selecting a theme, use a tool like Pingdom to check the page speed of the theme’s preview to see how fast it runs with nothing attached to it. You can understand how well the code is written.
4. Update your PHP, to boost up WordPress
PHP is the core programming language of WordPress, WordPress runs on a PHP platform so always use the latest version of PHP, the latest version will enhance your security, performance and speed of your WordPress website. Just like WordPress and other CMS, the programming languages are constantly under development to increase the speed and performance enhancements and also vulnerability fixes. The speed of your WordPress website would be significantly improved if you use the most recent edition of PHP.
PHP is officially supported for two years from the date of release, and during that period, all vulnerabilities and security problems are addressed. PHP versions older than 7.2 do not have security support, so you must update your PHP to 7.3, 7,4, or 8.0 to avoid lazy load and unpatched vulnerabilities.
Here’s how to upgrade the PHP version in cPanel.
- Go to your cPanel account and log in.
- Go to the cPanel’s Software section. Select Multiple PHP Manager.
- Select your domain
- Next, Click Apply after selecting the PHP version.
Your PHP version will be changed
Note: After changing to the latest version of PHP be sure to check your website for compatibility.
5. Cleanup WordPress database (Optimize Your Databases)
Deleting unnecessary data from the servers reduces its size and also helps to reduce the size of your backups. It is also important to remove spam comments, trashed posts, pages and comments, you can also delete pingbacks and trackbacks and perhaps unwanted plugins and themes. All of which would reduce the size of your database and online web files, which allows you to speed up your WordPress website.
As a result of using an optimized database, the WordPress performance and speed would increase. We suggest you always optimize your database every month for faster loading of the WordPress website.
Post revisions, for example, will use a significant amount of unneeded capacity. If you have a post of 100KB of data and 10 revisions, the overall space reduction is approximately 1MB.
You can manually clean the database with phpMyAdmin, but if you don’t know what you’re doing it can be troubling and harmful. Installing a plugin to achieve this mission is the better option if you are not a technological whiz.
To optimize your WordPress database, use WordPress plugins that are specific to your needs, such as:
WP-Optimize – this plugin allows you to optimize and clean your database, compress your images, and cache your page for faster loading.
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – This WordPress plugin is a website optimizer and one-click database cleaner. You can delete spammed comments, trashed posts, pages and comments, you can also delete pingbacks and trackbacks.
WP-Sweep – this plugin allows you to clean up like; Auto drafts, Revisions, delete comments, unapproved comments, spammed comments, duplicate posts, and many more.
WP-DB Manager – this plugin will optimize your database, delete the backup database, repair the database, restore the database, back up the database, and support backup scheduling.
Advanced Database Cleaner – you can optimize and clean up your database and this plugin helps you to delete orphaned items like; old revision and spam comments.
6. Delete Unused unwanted Plugins and Themes
Every theme and plugins currently installed in WordPress increase the extra code of your website, leave the default theme, and using plugins. Uninstall all the extra themes and plugins from your WordPress, it will not affect your website. Removing extra WordPress themes and plugins enhances your performance, security and speed up your WordPress Website.
Everyone forget easily about old unused themes and plugins that are not in use. When you delete all the extra themes and plugins from WordPress, you are reducing the space of your WordPress site.
In addition to security, it will save time, save disk space and also increase your website speed and performance.
Before removing any plugins or themes, you can make a copy of your WordPress website just in case something goes wrong. This means that if anything goes wrong during the cleaning process, you can still restore the backed-up version.
7. Deactivating and Uninstalling WordPress plugins
Another easy way to speed up your WordPress website is to check to see if the new plugins are functioning properly. Everyone uses various plugins and tools for various needs and chances are there that you have installed a group of plugins that you are not using over the years. They will also cause a delay in the loading of your website.
Keeping needless plugins to your WordPress website adds a significant amount of garbage to your blog. Furthermore, if more backup files are created, the size of your backup can grow larger, placing an undue strain on your server’s capacity. It is preferable to exclude all plugins that you do not need and to search for alternative ways to access third-party resources. You should give it a shot to see how quickly they perform.
You will use a plugin to see which plugins are causing the site to slow down.
P3 Profiler is a fantastic plugin; it is one of my favorites because it tells me the plugins, I need to delete from my WordPress panel.
WordPress pages often take a long time to load due to improperly installed plugins. Using this wordpress plugin, you to easily determine which plugins are slowing down the site.
8. Minify JS and CSS files to Speed up WordPress
You will want to reduce the size of your CSS and JS files by running your website for Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom.This allows you to maximise the loading of your WordPress platform by reducing the number of CSS and JS calls, and the file size to boost the time and space for the server response.
By lowering them, you will see that the web loads much quicker than before. This will potentially assist you in reducing your bandwidth consumption.
CSS optimization strategies: Minify CSS code to reduce the file size by removing whitespace and unnecessary characters.
To minimize HTTP demands, combine different CSS files. In general, one big HTTP request is more effective than several small HTTP requests.
JS optimization strategies: You should try to merge and minify the JavaScript as much as possible. To prevent problems, you will need to delete those JavaScript files from combination to avoid issues.
JavaScript’s primary purpose is to execute an operation on a web page, such as a popup or rotating pictures in the slider. You would not need to load these activities until your site has fully loaded its content and types.
There are a few plugins available that will assist you in deferring this JavaScript and CSS like; Autoptimize or WP Rocket
9. Enable Gzip Compression
It is important to keep your WordPress website running at high speed. It significantly boosts your visitor’s experience and increases the professionalism and dependability of your platform. Gzip compression is a common tool for speeding up a WordPress website, enabling GZIP compression can help minimize the size of the webpage content by up to 70%, because of the drop in bandwidth, a website that has been compressed loads faster which can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to download the resource and decrease data consumption for the clients.
Here are some of the plugins for Gzip compression
Enable Gzip Compression
WP Fastest Cache plugin
Cache Enabler
Autoptimize
PageSpeed Ninja
10. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
Another effective choice for speeding up the WordPress website is to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network). The biggest benefit of a WordPress CDN is faster loading times for your website, regardless of any kind of website you run.
A network for content distribution (CDN) is a global proxy network deployed worldwide.Each server features a replica of your website, so that your content can be more conveniently distributed to people around the world. This would increase both the online speed and the performance and safety of the website.
Furthermore, since a load of file transfers is spread through many sites, using a set of proxy servers will make the site more crash-resistant. This, in particular, would help keep the website from falling due to heavy traffic, as well as protect against simple DoS attacks.
Setting up a CDN would only take you a few minutes, but it will have a significant effect on the speed of your WordPress website if done correctly. By using a content delivery network (CDN) you can improve your website loading time by 20% and a drop of bandwidth by 50%
Here are a few of the most well-known Content Delivery Networks (CDN).:
- CloudFare – It is a free content distribution platform that is used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers and eCommerce website owners. It also improves the site’s security. Your websites and apps would be safer and faster as a result. Cloudflare data centres are located in over 200 cities around the world.
- Amazon CloudFront – Amazon is a web service to allow customers such as.html,.css,.js and picture files to receive static and dynamic Web content more rapidly. CloudFront distributes the content through a global data centre network called edge locations.
- MaxCDN – MaxCDN is a major Content Delivery Network operator. They speed up the web and reduce server load. The MaxCDN service improves cache access. With high-capacity SSDs and advanced caching strategies, you get industry-leading cache depth, allowing you to have more content open at the edge for longer.
- Site Accelerator (Formerly Photon) – Jetpack’s Site Accelerator accelerates website load times by allowing Jetpack to optimize images and static files (such as CSS and JavaScript) from Jetpack’s global network of servers. It just filters the content and does not alter the database.
- Google Cloud CDN – Cloud CDN provides access to more users worldwide, with edge caches peering with almost every big end-user ISP globally. Cloud CDN, as a supplement to Google Cloud’s high-performance private network, follows new protocols built at Google.
- KeyCDN – KeyCDN is a high-performance content delivery network designed for the future. It just takes a few minutes to start providing content at a fast speed to the customers. Reduce average image size and use next-generation formats to improve image accuracy.
- BunnyCDN – Experience results that you’ve never seen before. A single click will get you lightning-fast content distribution. Never compromise efficiency again, and have a seamless experience regardless of the location of the customers.
11. Leverage Browser Caching
What is Caching and Why Cache Is So Important?
Caching was and still is one of the most effective and simple methods for speeding up WordPress.
In brief, any website accessed by visitors requires a request to the server. The final result submitted from the server to the browser of the user would then be processed. The effect is your website with all the files and items that make it look like it.
You might have a banner, photos, menu, and blog, for example. Because all these requests must be handled by the server, it takes time to provide the whole website to the visitors especially for badly designed or heavier websites.
The caching commands the server, depending upon the setup, to save any file to disk or RAM. Therefore, the same information you served in the past can be remembered and duplicated. In essence, the effort needed to produce a page view is reduced. This allows the WordPress websites to load faster from cache directly and speed up your WordPress website.
There are three main types:
Browser caching: A browser cache is a type of cache on the client-side, which also means that it is a type of site cache. It’s a browser-installed cache system that works exactly the same way. The saved files and content are saved on your server and grouped with all browser-related files. All the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images are used.
Site cache: When a Web page first is viewed, it is momentarily preserving details including web pages, photographs and associated media materials in a database cache, also known as an HTTP or page cache. The next time someone visit the web page, the content will be remembered and loaded.
Server caching: A server cache is a form of cache similar to site caching, except that it is saved on a server site instead of storing content temporarily on the client-side. Server caching is often entirely controlled and managed on the server, with little involvement from the end-user or browser.
Server caching types include: Object caching, CDN caching, and Opcode caching.
12. Pingbacks and Trackbacks Should Be Disabled
Pingbacks and trackbacks are a way to warn your account blogs. The distinction between them is as follows:
Pingbacks: A pingback is a form of a comment made when you connect to another blog post that allows pingbacks. As remote remarks the best way to learn of pingbacks.
Trackbacks: This must be produced manually, and an excerpt of the content must be sent. Trackbacks are a way for legacy blog structures to be notified that you’ve connected to them. You will be immediately alerted by pingbacks to a WordPress site, without further actions taken.
Leaving pingbacks and trackbacks enabled can also place an undue burden on your server’s resources and have a negative impact on speed up your WordPress. That’s because every time anyone attempts to connect to your website, WordPress requests back and forth are made. This feature is often used extensively when a website with DDoS attacks is targeted.
When you disable pingbacks, you obtain improved WordPress efficiency as well as reduced spam.
Follow the simple steps below to disable pingbacks.
- In your dashboard, navigate to Settings > Discussion.
- Uncheck the box next to “Allow updates from other websites” in the “Default article settings” area.
- Press Save Changes at the bottom of a page.
13. Avoid Hosting Videos on Your Website
Where are you hosting your website because you have agreed to add video material? This is the most critical concern from the point of view of the user of a website.
In this article, we can discuss why hosting videos is not a good idea.
The self-hosting of your video content requires not just producing the content of your video but also handling the resources for storing the videos, uploading them to the internet, and promoting them to your target audience.
Hosting your videos takes a huge time, money, and experience to ensure that all video content is stored extensively and that videos are prevented from being unlawfully accessible.
If your video is stored on a single site, all requests are sent to the same location for your videos. There are therefore 15 individual queries submitted to one server if you have 15 users attempting to view the same video. This causes a burden on the bandwidth of your server which means a slow-loading of your website.
Why we should not host videos on the server?
First and foremost, it consumes bandwidth, which is particularly necessary if you have a small hosting account. Second, it would significantly increase the size of your WordPress account, making backups more difficult. Third, it would slow down your website for which you cannot speed up your WordPress website and affect the ranking factor in search engines.
Server Bandwidth – Your web hosting service allows a certain amount of bandwidth and other services to each server on their network depending on typical traffic volumes that do not require delivering massive media files to hundreds of people at once. A huge number of requests for a single large file would soon overwhelm the web server on which your site is stored, bringing your site and all the pages that are live on the same server are stopped.
File Size Limits and Storage Space – Most web hosting companies restrict the size of uploaded files to 100 MB or less, so you won’t be able to upload video files that are longer than a few minutes. If you’re using shared hosting where you have limited disk space if you upload more than 5 videos then you won’t be able to upload any more files, and you won’t be able to take back up your website.
14. Disable hotlinking and leeching of your images
If you create high-quality images for your WordPress website, it would almost certainly be hacked sooner or later.
When one website uses the services of another, this is referred to as hotlinking. When someone copies an image from your blog, for example, your website loads the image from your page before the image from your website has been loaded. This indicates that it is using your images hosted in your server and utilizing your bandwidth and services.
Hotlinking can cause a significant drain on the target server’s resources (bandwidth). Consider the case where you’re using shared hosting or shared WordPress host and other websites are linking to your images. On your website, you could go from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand queries every hour and this will drain your bandwidth. Your hosting account could be suspended as a result of this. This is why you can not only use a high-performance host but also allow hotlink security to prevent this from happening.
To avoid hotlinking, you just need to add the following codes in your .htaccess file
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?troubleshootbox.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.( gif|jpg|jpeg|png|bmp|zip|rar|mp3|flv|swf|pdf)$ – [NC,F,L]
Note: Don’t forget to replace troubleshootbox.com with your actual domain name
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