A Beginners Guide on WordPress Speed Optimization

Do you want to speed up your WordPress website’s performance? Fast loading website generates more traffics than a slow loading website. It does not matter to have high contents. Every user always loves a fast loading website even with medium-quality contents. You can take WordPress speed optimization service after looking at our guideline.

In this article, we are going to let you know the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips. To make our beginners guide, let’s divide our contents into some parts.

WordPress Basic Speed Performance

Importance of a Fast Loading WordPress Website

A fast loading website with fewer contents is way better than a slow website with a lot of contents. Think of yourself as a visitor. Do you like a slow website? Your answer will be “NO.” To improve user experience, it is mandatory to have a fast loading WordPress website.

The statistic shows that every one person out of four leaves the website that takes more than 4 seconds to load. Everyone loves the fast website. If a website is loading slowly, the bounce rate will increase. Here, you can see that a 1-second delay can affect in 7% loss in conversion.
From the recent update of Google, they penalize the slower website in the SERP. Higher Speed = Higher Rank. Nowadays, Google considers page speed while ranking a WordPress website. So, it is very important to increase the loading times of WordPress websites.

Check your WordPress Website Speed

When you decide to increase your Website’s speed, you need to know its current speed. Some tools can help you to perform the WordPress website speed test. We recommend Pingdom speed test. It is a free tool to check your WordPress website speed.

If the speed of your WordPress site is more than 2 second, you need to optimize the site. 2 second is the standard loading time. You can also test your website speed with Gtmetrix and Google Pagespeed Tool. They are also free to test your website speed.

Reasons that Slow Down Your WordPress Website

Now, you have analyzed your WordPress website speed. To continue with the next steps, you must check your web speed test. Both Pingdom and Gtmetrix show you the reasons that slow down your website. Google Page Insights also show you some reasons to enhance the speed. You can choose any tools to perform a successful WordPress speed test.

However, most of the issues are technical. If you do not have prior knowledge on these issues, you cannot understand.

However improving website speed, you need to understand some basic reasons behind everything.

The primary reasons to slow down your website are:

Web Hosting– Web hosting is the virtual storage from where your website is running. If your web hosting server is not properly working, your website speed will slow down.

WordPress Configuration- WordPress configuration plays an important role to determine the page speed. A bad configuration can cause a lower speed of your website.

Page Size– A page with big size can make a slower website. If you do not have optimized images, your website will slow down.

Bad Plugins– Some WordPress plugins have large data that can slow down your website. A poorly coded plugin can also make a website slow.

External Scripts– Some external Scripts can make your website slow. Because they are not loading directly from your website.

Now that you know the basic reasons that slow down your website. Let’s move to the next chapter to know how to speed up your WordPress website.

Speed Up Your WordPress Website

Use WordPress Caching Plugins

Some free and premium caching plugins help you to increase page speed. An excellent caching plugin can perform WordPress cache clear and boost the performance. Among some of the Caching plugins, we recommend using Wp Fastest Cache or W3 Rocket.

You may be thinking why you need caching plugin for your WordPress website. A WordPress cache plugin can improve your website performance. It can also help you to improve the SEO and user experience. The caching plugin uses CDN to reduce the page size. It is a great way to speed up your WordPress website.

Do Image Optimization

In most cases, we are not aware of the uploaded images on our WordPress website. The image is a media file. As a media file, it takes more spaces than texts. If a page contains images, your page can become slow to run. That doesn’t mean we cannot use images on our WordPress website.

We can use optimized images that are smaller in size. We recommend you to use either JPG or PNG for images. There are a lot of online and offline tools to minimize the size of an image. We recommend using Tinypng to optimize images. If you are running windows, you can use Adobe Photoshop to reduce image size. If you feel difficulties to use the tools, you can use WpSmush – an award-winning WordPress plugin.
Bonus: With the use of Adobe Photoshop, you can also edit your images.

Advanced Speed Up Guidelines for Your WordPress Website

Choose Reliable Hosting

As said earlier, your hosting plays an important role to determine website speed. There are a lot of web hosting companies online. Make sure you choose the best one who has a robust server and up-time.

Among them, Bluehost is one of the best web hostings. As you are running WordPress, you can use their WordPress web hosting. There are some other reliable web hosting companies as well. Check the reviews of the web hostings and choose the best one for your site.

It is better to have VPS hosting for the maximum speed and uptime.

Bonus: If you choose a cloud hosting service, you will get the maximum speed. The Cloud Hosting Service is way better than any other hosting. Like as VPS, you can have automatic site backup and update.

Use Speed Optimized WordPress Theme

As you are running your website with WordPress, it is mandatory to choose a fast and optimized theme. The codes underlying on a theme play the vital factor to determine the page speed. There are a lot of WordPress themes available online.

To choose the best-optimized theme for your website, you must check the demo site with Pingdom. A lightweight framework like Genesis can help you to speed up your website. The way they code their theme is light and optimized.

Always update your WordPress website

WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System). To keep pace with modern technology, the developers continually update it. After every update, your site can be slower than in the past. Each update not only enhances user experience but also cleans the bugs.

As a website owner, you should keep your WordPress site to the latest version. Why do you need to update? The developers always try to improve the themes, plugins, and WordPress. That is why an update can help your site to run fast than the past.

Use Content Delivery Network on your WordPress website

Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an excellent solution for a slow website. It doesn’t matter how big your site is; you can use CDN for any size of the website.

What can a CDN do? A CDN takes all your files, and the visitor can visit the website from the nearest location. It doesn’t matter where your server is. CDN can show your files (Images, CSS and Javascript) geographically. There are some great CDN that you can use for your website. We recommend using MAXCDN to decrease the bounce rate of your site.

Leverage Browser Caching

This method is a little bit technical. However, in this way, you can Speed up WordPress sites. You need to add expire headers to your WordPress sites. As it is not a plugin, you need to edit your .htaccess file from the Cpanel. You can even use caching plugins to add this.

Expire header is useful to reduce external HTTP requests by the users. A user once visits a page the browser will save this page. And, from the next time, the page will appear from the browser’s cache. So, there is no need to send an HTTP request for this page till he doesn’t clear the cache.

Here is the sample code of reducing external HTTP requests:

# Enable expirations
ExpiresActive On
# Default directive
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
# My favicon
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
# Images
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
# CSS
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
# Javascript
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"

Lazy Load Your Media Files

Lazy load of your media files is another great way to reduce the loading time. It is a concept to show the contents when you are at the position of the contents. Such as, there is an image on the middle of the page. Lazy load stop showing the image until you are in the middle of the page. In this way, it can reduce the loading time.

You can lazy load your comments section as well. There are some great plugins that make your website fast enough. Some of the popular plugins are:

• • • Wp Rocket for images
    • Disqus Conditional Load for comments
    • BJ Lazy Load
    • Lazy Load for Videos

Optimize WordPress Database

For WordPress performance optimization, you need to optimize your database. After using your site for a long time, your database will have lots of data. You need to enter your Phpmyadmin and optimize your data.

Database optimization means the removal of unnecessary information from your database. It helps you to clean your storage a bit. In this way, your website will be faster than ever. If you are not familiar with manual cleaning, you can get help from any WordPress plugin.

WP-Sweep is a WordPress plugin that can help you to clean your database. With some simple mouse clicks, you can remove unwanted information from your database.

To Conclude
We hope this WordPress tutorial on speed optimization will you to speed up your site. We have tried our best to give you some useful methods.
Go ahead and try some of the speed optimization methods for your site. Let us know the before and after the condition of your site speed on the comment section.