Best Ways To Speed Up WordPress Website
Introduction
Speeding up a WordPress site is one of the main operations to be carried out at the end of the development of a site to improve its loading speed. To speed up your WordPress site we will rely on W3 Total Cache, one of the best plugins currently available for WordPress with which it is possible to increase the loading speed by exploiting special functions made available by the plugin itself. So let’s see how to reduce the loading time of our WordPress site in a few simple steps. Let’s move to Best Ways To Speed Up WordPress Website.
- Install W3 Total Cache
Start by installing the W3 Total Cache plugin from the WordPress plugin installation menu, as in the image below. At the end of the installation, activate the plugin to make it immediately functional.
- View the main settings
After installing and activating the plugin you will see a new item called “Performance” appear in the WordPress side menu.
Click on the “General Settings” item, located within the “ Performance ” submenu to move to the section where all the main functions will be present. At this point, all you have to do is choose which functions to activate to speed up the WordPress site.
- Activate the optimization options
To improve the loading speed of your WordPress site you will need to check the boxes relating to the ” ENABLE ” option of the following items:
- Page Cache – allows you to create a static copy of the pages on the site, thus avoiding having to generate them every time someone views a page, drastically decreasing the loading of the site.
- Minify – compresses the .css files related to the site style and the .js files related to javascript, reducing the space occupied and at the same time leaving their properties intact.
- Database Cache – allows you to store data relating to the database on your browser so that during your use in the management part of the site it is faster.
- Object Cache – another useful function in speeding uploading while using it in the management part of WordPress
- Browser Cache – allows you to store WordPress site files by using the advanced browser storage functions of each user who visits the site, significantly reducing loading times on subsequent visits.
After checking all the boxes, click on “ Save all settings ” to make the changes active
ATTENTION: I advise you not to change any other options, or if you know what they refer to then you are free to change them.
By following these steps you will have greatly improved the loading speed of your WordPress site!
Advantages of speeding up a WordPress site
If you are curious to know why it is important to speed up a WordPress site, here is a list of the advantages deriving from this operation:
- Lower consumption of data traffic and a decrease in bandwidth usage.
- Less waiting time for site visitors.
- Improvement of the browsing experience by users.
- Improvement in SEO indexing in search engines.
- Test WordPress loading speed
To find out how much your site’s loading speed has improved, try a site loading test by comparing the before and after.
You can do this using GTMetrix, a handy free tool that gives you data on page size and site loading time, as well as tips on how to further improve your WordPress site’s loading speed.
- Use fast and efficient hosting
Often too slow loading of your WordPress site is due to the low performance of most of the too cheap hosting on the market.
To speed up the loading of your site I recommend you to use Siteground, one of the best dedicated WordPress hosts, it provides ultra-fast loading times, as well as having excellent customer support that is available at any time to solve any problems or questions.
- Compress heavy images
To put things in perspective, here’s a fact. A simple WordPress theme takes up around 30MB of storage space, while a visually heavy website, such as e-commerce, takes up several GBs of image storage. What if you could reduce the image file size by more than 50% with indiscernible quality differences?
You can resize and compress images in an OS-based compression tool before uploading them or use a WP plugin like SmushIt to reduce the image file size for your WordPress site.
- Eliminate unnecessary and heavy plugins
WordPress plugins are useful, however, too many plugins mean too many requests on the server, which leads to slow page loading. Other related problems include security threats and memory problems. The best practice is to only install plugins that your site cannot do without.
You can use Plugin Performance Profiler (a plugin itself) to identify the worst plugins on your WordPress and replace them with better alternatives.
Read More: 5 Best Blog WordPress Theme
Also, some plugins are barely used more than twice a month (like thumbnail generators, etc.). It is best to activate them at the time of use. You can also check which plugins you can just uninstall and use some online tools instead.
- Take advantage of light structures and themes
WordPress themes carry a good amount of files, which reduces the page load speed of your website. This can be related to heavy stock images, long and inefficient codes, etc.
The best step forward is to find the right blend between a theme’s visual appeal and page loading speed. When looking for a WordPress theme, keep the following points in mind:
- Check reviews on the themeand specifically look for performance information.
- Test the performance of the theme demo pages.
- Look for the default WordPress themes, which are light in code and therefore work well.
- Check out the themes based on Genesis and Thesis Frameworkwhich are known for their performance.
Conclusion
If you don’t want your users to get frustrated with your website speed, try these different tips and tricks I mentioned in this post that you can use to improve your WordPress site performance and increase page load speed.
Let us know how you managed to speed up WordPress and some of my tips have helped you. Happy experimentation.