Speed up your WordPress Site in 2022

WordPress websites seem easy to build(comparatively), but not many people know how to build them without compromising the structure & performance.

I recently developed a website for clients, and their topmost requirement was “Speed” So, I did a lot of research & crafted a plan to make the website load FAST! Achieved GTMetrix

Grade A Performance: 94%

Structure: 93%

Largest Contentful Paint: 1.2s

Total Blocking Time: 9ms Rules

I’m listing a few points below, that I used to make the website load in milliseconds:

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Don’t use a pre-built theme if possible

If you can find a theme that completely matches your website requirements and you just have to replace the content, then use it. Otherwise, Install the ‘Hello Elementor’ theme, it’s an empty theme with no content, pages or widgets, etc & the best option is to create a website from scratch.

Minimize the number of plugins you use for website

Make sure you keep only those plugins that are extremely important for the website’s functioning & delete the rest of them.

Serve the images from a different host

The website’s speed gets hugely impacted by the images load on the server. If you have high-quality images to be served, you’ll have to compromise the speed. Now, here’s a solution. Rules

Create an S3 Bucket on AWS & connect it with your media library through a plugin. It will allow you to host all your media on Amazon S3 Bucket & disconnect the server from media load. (Amazon S3 offers a free tier which is enough for new websites, you may check their pricing for details)

Use the web hosting that offers Litespeed Servers, not NGINX

Recommend Hosting: Hostinger, Bluehost

LiteSpeed servers technology is way faster than Nginx & it makes a difference in the website’s loading speed. Activate Lite Speed Caching by contacting your hosting provider(or directly with a plugin) PS: Hostinger, Bluehost, Namecheap, HosterPk, etc do not offer LiteSpeed servers, so choose some other. ✓

Use a Caching Plugin

To make any website faster, caching is important & you need the best plugin for this. My recommendation is the SWIS Performance plugin. WP Rocket(paid version) is also good. Rules

Choosing the Page Builder

As I said above, you should create a website from scratch, without any theme. And, to create pages, I recommend Elementor against any other page builder. Elementor offers you way more options & widgets than any other page builder.

You can also design your headers & footers in Elementor(even unique for each page or post type). Also, Elementor works perfectly with Advanced Custom Fields Plugin, which helps in creating custom post types.

Content Structure:

While creating a website, most people add space widgets where they want to increase the distance between two sections, which is not something I’d recommend. Rather, increase and decrease the spacing with margin & padding properties.

Also, usually, they add a separate section for each new row of elements. Increasing the number of sections on the website generates a larger HTML code in the backend which takes more time to render.

Hence, keep the number of Rules sections minimum as possible. These are just a few things that you can practice to make your websites load faster. But WordPress isn’t just that. There’s a lot more to learn in it & it’s hard for someone to say that they’ve fully mastered it.

I’ve learned this all by working on 50+ WordPress Websites (a lot of them are large-scale sites with complex functionality & huge traffic).

Feel free to ask if you have any WordPress queries.