WordPress, as a platform, is extremely well. However, some people mess their WordPress installations up by installing tons of buggy plugins, choosing a slow web host, and filling their site with heaps of garbage.
Even if you don’t do something like mentioned above with your site, there’s still a lot of ways to improve your website when it comes to speeding up. We optimize around 8-10 WordPress sites in an average month, and there are a few techniques we always leverage to optimize and speed up WordPress sites.
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, so your website gets stored in the cache and automatically prefetch it as soon as you start typing an address. This makes your website load almost instantly. but when someone else opens your website they see some time lag in opening the site because there is no cache for them.
Before applying these techniques to your website, I encourage you to check the speed of your website using a free performance service such as GTMetrix, YSlow, Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights. These services will inform you of your page loading time and the overall file size of your page. They also offer tips to fix the resulting issues.
FIX #1. Choose the Right Hosting Plan
The initial phase in upgrading your site effectively is to pick the right hosting plan. You are battling a losing fight if your server is taking ages to process HTTP requests and MySQL commands.
Performance services, for example, GTMetrix will educate you with respect to the correct loading time of your server. I suggest testing the loading time of your own site against comparative sites. For instance, on the off chance that you run a photography blog, perceive how your server loading time analyses to other photography write inside your specialty.
Hosting companies are not generally the cause. You might be with incredible Hosting companies however observe poor loading times in light of the fact that your picked Hosting plan is underpowered. Clients utilizing shared hosting plans, for instance, will probably confront moderate loading times as several sites are running on a similar server.
Be that as it may, any kind of hosting plan will experience the ill effects of inadequate RAM and CPU throttling. In this manner, you have to focus on what your site needs to run easily. Try not to be a penny pincher and go for the least expensive alternative. Pick a hosting plan that can deal with the activity of your users.
FIX #2. Use a Fast WordPress Theme Framework
WordPress has the largest theme and plugins directory available. There are many themes and plugins available across many marketplaces on the internet. Some of the themes are very good in features and some are moderate. You should know what are your requirements for your website.
If you are a good coder then you should go for the best running frameworks available in the market. Because if you are a good in coding then you can create a good animation or features, it will keep the theme small in size and fast in loading… but on the other hand if you go for a theme with a lot inbuilt features can delay the loading of you website as most of the time you can’t use all the features a good big theme gives you. So the features which are useless will cause the issues in your website optimization.
Choose a design that has been optimized for desktops, tablets and mobile and other devices. Big search engines favor responsive designs as they ensure all pages have the same URL, however responsive designs that were created specifically for mobile phones can improve a mobile user’s experience considerably.
FIX #3. Monitor Your Plugins
Plugins, these are the most important part of the WordPress site. Today, we have plugins for almost every feature we need in our website you just say the name.
Like themes plugins, some plugins also has a lot of features. So look for the feature you want and search for that only feature providing a plugin.
There are many users who install 20- 30 plugins on their website to get most of the features, the main reason they give is… we want a lot of features so we install this much. But what our take is
If you want to have a lof of features on your website, then go for a good developer or create it on a Framework.
Installing a lot of plugins slow down your website and the slow website is neither liked by search engines nor by your users.
Slow websites looses 3 out of 5 customers. Hence your loss which will be more than the money you save by making website on WordPress instead of a frameworks.
Only install plugins which are needed. Disable the plugins which are not needed. You can use is P3 Profiler developed by GoDaddy, the plugin will show you exactly how much load time your plugins are adding.
FIX #4. Keep Your WordPress Site Updated
As a well maintained open source project, WordPress is updated frequently. Each update will not only offer new features but also fix previous security issues and bugs.
As a website owner, it’s your responsibility to keep your WordPress site, theme, and plugins updated to the latest versions. Not doing so may make your site slow and unreliable, and make you vulnerable to security threats.
FIX #5. Reduce Post Revisions, Drafts, Spam, Pingbacks and Trackbacks
It is not just trash that can increase the size of your database. All post types populate table rows with data. Therefore, it is important to regularly delete spam comments and unwanted pingbacks and trackbacks.
You should also be wary of the number of drafts and post revisions your website has stored. The WordPress revision system allows you to go back to older versions of articles, view them and restore them.
By default, WordPress saves an unlimited number of revisions, however, this is not needed at all. It is better to reduce this limit to something more practical such as three to five. You can do this by adding the following code to your wp-config.php file:
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5 );
To disable the revisions completely you can use
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );
A best way of cleaning your WordPress database is to use WP Optimize. The plugin can automatically remove auto-drafts, spam comments, trackbacks and more.
FIX #6. Use Excerpts on Homepage and Archives
By default, WordPress displays the full content of each article on your homepage and archives. This means your home, categories, tags, and other archive pages will all load full content and hence slower.
In order to speed up your loading times for archive pages, you can set your site to display excerpts instead of the full content.
You can navigate to Settings » Reading and select For each article in a feed, show: “Summary” instead of “Full Text.”
FIX #7. Optimize Your Images for the Web
Images can help break up long pieces of text and can help your articles be shared more frequently on social media services; however, they also take up a lot of storage. Therefore, pages that contain many images can take a long time to load.
A good plugin to optimize images that have already been uploaded is WP Smush.it. It utilizes the Smush.it API to optimize images. This plugin will optimize the images and your images will be of small size and nearly without any loss in the quality.
If you do not want to sacrifice image quality, check out Lazy Load. The plugin ensures that images are only loaded when the area becomes visible to the user. This will greatly reduce page loading times.
FIX #8. Add Caching Plugin
Caching is a techineque which help you load your website fast. Caching your pages is one of the most effective ways of improving your page loading times, with many plugins promising an improvement of at least ten times. Popular caching plugins include WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache and WP Fastest Cache. All three plugins are available free. These plugins provide almost all of the features needed to increase the speed of the site like browser cache, Object Cache, minify CSS, Js and HTML, Database Cache etc.
FIX #9. Use a Content Delivery Network
Your website is hosted in a data center somewhere in the world. The further a visitor is from the location of your data center, the longer it takes for your web pages to load.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) address this issue by creating dozens of data centers around the world. They take the heavy work away from your hosting company by hosting your images, CSS and Javascript files, and serving these files to visitors from the closest location to them.
Popular content delivery networks include MaxCDN, Amazon CloudFront and CloudFlare. The cost of these services varies according to how much bandwidth your website uses. You can try CloudFlare as they provide forever free plans as well.
FIX #10. Disable Hotlinking and Leaching of Your Content
Hotlinking is a process where some other website takes your content and images directly from your hosting and added to there without adding any images to their server. This helps them to load their site fast because there host is not loading any images instead your host is loading your images for them.
Simply add this code to your .htaccess file to block hotlinking of images from your WordPress site.
#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
Note: Don’t forget to change yourdomain.com with your own domain.
That’s it! We hope this article helped you learn some useful methods to speed up WordPress and boost performance.
Go ahead and try out these techniques. Be sure to test your site’s speed before and after, and let us know your results in the comments or request free consultation
