It is a hot topic these days to figure out how to make WordPress faster. The good news is that you can do it in several ways. Modern pages improve user experience, increase page views, and assist with WordPress SEO. In this article, we’ll share some of the best tips for speeding up your WordPress site and improving your WordPress performance.
Why do you need to speed up WordPress?
There are many reasons that you need to speed up WordPress?
- Google and other search engines have already started penalizing slower sites, pushing them down in search results, which means less traffic for slow sites.
- Search engines (such as Google) rank websites with faster loading times than slow-loading ones. So if you want to improve your position in the SERPs, improving your speed should be one of your priorities.
- The average bounce rate for a website with a loading speed greater than 2 seconds is about 47 percent. So, to keep about half of your visitors interested, you should speed up your WordPress.
How Can You Check Your WordPress Website Speed?
Beginners often think that their websites are okay because their computers don’t seem slow. They’re wrong.
Whenever you open your website, modern browsers like Chrome cache it and automatically prefetch it once you type the address. As a result, your website loads almost instantly.
Normal users may have a different experience when visiting your site for the first time.
A user in a different geographical location will experience a completely different experience.
Usually, the homepage of a website is used to determine the load time. Three tools are commonly used across the web to check a website’s speed:
Here are the Best Practices to speed up WordPress:
Choose a Better WordPress Hosting
In order for your website to perform well, you need a good WordPress hosting service. It is important that a shared hosting provider like Bluehost, Hostinger, or Siteground take extra steps to optimize the performance of your website.
However, on shared hosting, you share server resources with many other customers. This means that if the nearby site gets a lot of traffic, it can affect the overall performance of the server, which can slow down your site.
On the other hand, using a managed WordPress hosting service gives you the best server settings for running WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting companies also offer automatic backups, automatic WordPress updates, and more advanced security settings to protect your site.
Choose a lightweight WordPress theme
WordPress themes have lots of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons, and many more shiny elements appealing to the eye. But remember this: if they have too many elements and a high page size, then they will definitely cause your webserver to crash.
So, below I have a list of the fastest loading WordPress themes in 2022. All of these are lightweight WordPress themes that come with quality code to speed up your WordPress site.
Here is a list of the fastest-loading WordPress themes in 2022.
- GeneratePress a WordPress theme.
- Astra WordPress theme.
- Neve WordPress Theme.
- Schema WordPress theme.
- OceanWP WordPress theme.
Keep Your WordPress Site Updated
As a well-organized open source project, WordPress is updated frequently. Each update will not only provide new features but will also fix security issues and bugs. There may also be regular updates to your WordPress themes and plugins.
As a website owner, it is your responsibility to keep your WordPress site, themes, and plugins updated to the latest versions. Failure to do so can make your site slow and unreliable, and leave you vulnerable to security threats.
And you can put your theme and plugin in auto-update mode.
as shown in the image below
Use the Latest PHP Version
WordPress is specifically written in the PHP programming language. It is a server-side language, meaning it installs and runs on your hosting server.
All good WordPress hosting companies use the most stable version of PHP on their servers. However, your hosting company may be using an older version of PHP.
The new PHP 7 is twice as fast as its predecessor. This is a great performance boost that your site should definitely benefit from.
You can see which version of PHP your site is using, and install and activate the version information plugin.
Once the Version info plugin is enabled, it will display your PHP version at the bottom of the WordPress admin panel.
If your PHP version is small then you can upgrade it from your CPanel or hosting provider.
Optimize Image
Images are an important contributor to the size of a given webpage. The trick is to reduce the size of the images without compromising on quality.
If you manually improve your pictures using Chrome PageSpeed Insights Extension or Photoshop or another tool, this process will take a long time. Fortunately, there are plugins out there for just about everything you can think of, including image optimization.
If you run your website through the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, you may be notified about the size of your CSS and JS files. This means that by reducing the number of CSS and JS calls and the size of these files, you can improve the site loading speed.
Here is a list of the best image optimizer plugins
Minify JS and CSS files
Also, if you know your way around WordPress themes, you can read the guidelines provided by Google and do some manual fixing. If not, then there are plugins that will help you achieve this goal; The most popular are WPRocket, and Autoptimize, which can help improve the CSS, JS, and even HTML of your WordPress website.
Use a caching plugin
The WordPress caching plugin has been around for a long time, simplifying the complex task of adding caching rules to your site elements. Combining such plugins with advanced caching mechanisms such as Varnish can help you improve your site loading speed and ultimately speed up your WordPress significantly.
Here is a list of WordPress caching plugins.
- Rocket
- WP Super Cache
- W3 Total Cache
- Sucuri Firewall
- Litespeed Cache
- Hyper Cache
Use a CDN
Needless to say, the site loading speed is different if the people who visit your site are from different locations around the world and have visitors far from where your site is hosted. There are many content delivery CDNs. Networks) help to keep the site. Upload speed is minimal for visitors from different countries. CDN keeps a copy of your site in different data centers located in different locations. CDN’s main function is to provide the web page to visitors from the nearest possible location.
Cloudflare and MaxCDN are among the most popular CDN services. Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help to speed up loading times for all of your visitors.
Cleanup WordPress database
Removing unnecessary data from your database will minimize data usage. It also reduces the size of your backups. In addition, you need to delete spam comments, fake users, old drafts, and more. and may include unwanted plugins and themes. All of this will reduce the size of your database and web files and make your WordPress faster.
Deactivate or uninstall plugins
Placing unwanted plugins on your WordPress website adds a lot of junk to your web files. In addition, the size of the backup increases, which puts a heavy burden on the server resources when creating the backup file. It’s a good idea to remove unused plugins and look for alternative ways to automate or schedule tasks using third-party services, such as posting the latest posts on social media.
so delete the plugin you don’t use.
Conclusion
We hope this article helps you learn how to improve WordPress speed and performance.
Then try these techniques. Remember to test your website speed before and after implementing these best practices. You would be surprised how these changes improve the performance of WordPress.
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if you have any questions about WordPress comment below.
Frequently Asked Question
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Why do you need to speed up WordPress?
Faster sites are more appealing to both users and search engines.
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Why website speed is important for SEO?
because addressing loading times improve your rankings, your user experience, and your conversion rate too.
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What is included in the CDN cache content?
CDNs cache content like web pages, images, and video in proxy servers near your physical location.
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How do I change my PHP version in cPanel?
1. log in to cPanel.
2. Click the MultiPHP Manager link in the Software section of cPanel.
3. Check the box for the site or sites you wish to update.
4. Select the desired PHP Version from the drop-down menu.
5. Click the Apply button. -
What is image optimization?
a process of delivering high-quality images in the right format, dimension, size, and resolution while keeping the smallest possible size.
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What are the benefits of minifying CSS files?
Minifying those files will decrease your page load time, thereby providing a better user experience.
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What is the need for caching plugin?
A cache plugin is a must-have WordPress plugin to boost site performance and increase user satisfaction.
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How to choose a web host?
1. Figure out your website needs. What will you be doing with your website?
2. Consider your website-building and bundling options.
3. Do some research.
4. Compare key factors