Wordpress Speed Optimization, As a frequent internet user, I'm going to assume that you favor quick websites over slow ones. I'm also going to assume that you're presently attempting to place yourself in the first group if your internet business is based on WordPress.

It is true that speeding up your WordPress website can benefit it in a variety of ways. Your users, search engines, and most importantly your bottom line will all be happier as a result. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn't always make it simple to provide visitors with blazingly fast pages. The good news is that you can put many of them into practice right immediately to improve the performance of your WordPress website. Just a little bit of your effort goes a long way.

Why It Is Necessary To Speed Up Wordpress

Nothing prompts me to click the "back" button more quickly while browsing new websites than a slow website. Site performance has a significant impact on the user experience and significantly affects how customers perceive the caliber of an online business, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.

The margin for error is slim when it comes to page speed and patience. Your website should load in two seconds or less, according to Google. Visitors begin to lose interest after too much time. Google and other search engines utilize page performance as a ranking factor. Your chances of obtaining a desired position at the top of the SERP increase with the speed of your website.

Now, WordPress isn't exactly designed from the ground up to be fast. This is largely because of how WordPress functions: WordPress pulls information from multiple sources, including your WordPress database and theme files, when someone visits a page on your site.

It then combines that data into an HTML file and sends it to the visitor's browser. This method of "on the fly" page creation isn't always the best for performance. Furthermore, even when not in use on your site, WordPress themes and plugins all use up valuable server resources. Too many processes operating concurrently on your web server will exhaust its resources, bog down your pages, and discourage conversions.

As we'll see in a moment, many methods for speeding up WordPress are quite non-technical, while others require downloading a plugin or even making some changes to the code yourself (if you know what you're doing, of course). After carrying out even a couple of these actions, you might even start to notice improvements.

Test Your Websites Performance Regularly

Let's start by determining the performance level of your website. Since performance varies depending on each visitor's geographic location, the speed of their internet connection, and whether or not your site is cached by their browser, there is no all-inclusive metric that sums this up.

Depending on the quantity and nature of the material on each page of your website, page speed will also change. The homepages of websites are frequently used to gauge load times, but you should also test any other pages that receive a lot of traffic.

Test your website with a free performance monitoring tool like Website Grader to get the most accurate tangible estimate. Just paste your website's home page URL in to see how it does. This tool, along with a lot of others, also offers speed recommendations that you can use before trying.

Remove Unused Plugins

When it comes to WordPress plugins, quality prevails over number. Considering that each plugin functions as a tiny piece of software on your website, having too many active at once can slow down load times. Even if you're not using a certain plugin, there's a potential that it's taking resources and performing pointless tasks in the background.

Perhaps it's time to make some cuts. Any plugins that you are confident you won't ever use again should be turned off first. After each deactivation, check your website to make sure everything is still functional before deleting these plugins. Then, deactivate each plugin individually to observe which ones affect speed. Look at finding smaller plugins to replace them.

Use The latest Version Of PHP

The scripting language used by all WordPress websites is PHP. It is a server-side language, which means that your website's web server executes and stores its files. Similar to themes and plugins, PHP also occasionally releases updates to run more effectively, which in turn speeds up the loading of your pages.

PHP 7 was released in 2015 and is the most recent stable version. There is basically no reason not to run your website on PHP 7, which is a significant performance boost over PHP 6. To check your site's PHP version and manually update it, see our guide to PHP 7 in WordPress. To find out what version of PHP you're using, you may also read the documentation on your hosting site or get in touch with support.

Use Reliable Web Hosting Services

A quick WordPress site is built on top-notch web hosting. It's crucial that you pick a hosting company and a plan that satisfy your needs for bandwidth and performance. The majority of WordPress providers provide a variety of hosting services, including managed WordPress hosting plans, dedicated hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting, and shared hosting.

Generally speaking, when selecting a WordPress hosting package, you get what you paid for. Shared hosting is the extreme end of the range. Your website can be hosted on the same server as a number of other websites with the help of these plans. Since shared hosting is the most affordable choice, beginning WordPress users may choose it to build their online presence before upgrading. However, if another site on your server receives a lot of traffic, your performance will suffer, we recommend A2 Hosting.

Use A Premium Optimized Wordpress Theme

Similar to plugins, your active WordPress theme can be taxing your web server excessively. High-quality image and effect-packed themes may appear interesting, but they are expensive. Many themes are programmed inefficiently and fancy effects can demand a lot of code, which increases file sizes and decreases the speed of your page.

Choose a straightforward theme with exactly the features your sites actually need. If you'd like, you can always add more effects in the future using plugins or unique CSS. You can start your search by looking through our list of suggested WordPress themes.

Use High Quality Plugins

Make sure the plugins you do keep around are of excellent quality after taking care of the number issue by deleting your unnecessary plugins. The finest WordPress plugins are programmed to use just the server resources they require, when they are required.

These plugins are updated frequently to stay up with WordPress core upgrades, are low in code and won't take up much space on your server. The easiest method to ensure that your plugins are performance-friendly is to check recommendation lists, which typically take into account how well each plugin is created and maintained (we have lots of those; start here if you're interested).

Reduce CSS File Sizes

Your website depends on CSS and JavaScript because they take your pages beyond the confines of simple HTML. However, each time a visitor opens a page, these data must be transmitted from your web server to a web browser.

Therefore, the more compact you can make these files without compromising the appearance and usability of your website, the quicker your pages will load. Use a free WordPress plugin called Auto optimize to accomplish this. It will check your CSS and JavaScript files, remove any extraneous code (such whitespace and comments), and reduce the size of the files so they load quickly.

Utilize Caching

The way WordPress builds web pages on the server is frequently to blame for performance difficulties, The PHP on your WordPress server must pull all pertinent data from your WordPress database, combine it into an HTML file, and deliver that file to the client each time a visitor requests a web page from a non-cached site.

This approach has benefits, such as preserving server space and enabling dynamic website content. It does, however, require more time and effort than emailing a pre-written web page. Using a caching plugin makes everything easier. PHP is used to create each HTML page on your website, after which the complete HTML pages are saved and provided to visitors in the future upon request.

Use A Content Delivery Network CDN

Real-world distance is yet another frequent reason for subpar performance. On devices that are physically further from your web server, your pages will typically load more slowly. Particularly affected are users from other countries and people in remote locations.

Fortunately, a content delivery network, or CDN for short, can mitigate this impact. A CDN is a huge network of linked web servers. The JavaScript, CSS, and image files for your website are stored on every server. The server nearest to the user sends these files whenever they request a page from your website. With a CDN, your website may be accessed from anywhere in the world and will load equally quickly for all users.

On any WordPress website, CDNs are simple to set up and maintain. Your CDN handles all material distribution for you, and your hosting company probably includes it in your package or charges extra for it. Stack Path and Cloudflare are two well-known CDNs.

Make Use Of GZIP

GZIP is a popular kind of lossless compression for delivering files over the internet. GZIP compresses files more quickly and efficiently than other compression techniques, allowing for up to a 70% reduction in file size. GZIP compression uses far less bandwidth than uncompressed files, thus your website's files will be sent to consumers faster.

Your site can use a variety of plugins to allow GZIP compression. It's a typical characteristic of plugins for performance optimization, which streamline the procedure to the point of just checking a box. You can manually enable GZIP compression if your website is hosted on an Apache server, which it undoubtedly is, by adding code to your htaccess file:

Limit The Use Of External Scripts

Scripts that are used by your website but not kept on it's own web server are known as external scripts. These scripts are frequently used with third-party analytics plugins and tools, such as Crazy Egg and Google Analytics, ad networks, such as Google AdSense, and social media embeds, including "click to tweet."

Additionally, a lot of WordPress themes use external scripts to load JavaScript, CSS, and other material. There are times when external scripts are beneficial. To use the tools you need on your site, you'll undoubtedly need at least a few. Always assess the pros and disadvantages of adding extra plugins and tools that utilize external scripts, and decide whether the extra capability justifies the potential speed cost.