How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site
Speed is a crucial element for any successful website. It impacts both search engine rankings and user experience.
In fact, you’ll lose around 53% of your traffic straight away if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Page speed has long been a major factor in Google’s ranking algorithm, meaning faster sites tend to perform better in search results. Slow websites, on the other hand, won’t rank as well, which impacts your traffic and revenue.
For example, Google’s experiment with slower-loading pages reduced traffic and ad revenue by 20%. Unfortunately, essential speed optimisations are often missed in site development, but with the right steps, you can enhance your WordPress site’s speed dramatically.
Page speed is crucial not only for retaining visitors but also for improving your conversion rates – each second shaved off your load time can increase conversions by up nearly 5%.
It’s important to remember that every CMS element – whether plugins, themes, or media files – adds to the load time. By optimising these elements, you can enhance your site’s speed, SEO, and user experience.
This guide covers some of the most essential methods to optimise your WordPress site. If you’ve overlooked these elements, then you’ll need to sort them out ASAP to remain competitive.
Methods to Boost WordPress Site Performance
A fast WordPress site can be attributed to many different elements. Here are some of the most important things to get right when optimising your site performance.
1. Limiting HTTP Requests
Goal: Reduce the number of resources loaded with each page view.
Each time someone loads a page, the server must process multiple requests for resources like images, CSS files, and JavaScript.
Reducing the number of these requests improves load times.
You can achieve this by keeping your theme lightweight and well-structured, minimising the use of plugins, and avoiding overly complex themes with unnecessary scripts. Each additional plugin or theme element can increase requests and slow down performance.
This is something that many websites overlook, as it’s only too easy to bog down your site over time by adding plugins and theme elements.
This is also one of the key reasons why ongoing site maintenance and analysis is so important.
2. Minifying Code
Goal: Remove unnecessary whitespace and formatting from code files.
Minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML removes spaces, line breaks, and other unnecessary characters.
While these elements make files easier to read for developers, they’re not needed for the browser.
Minification reduces file sizes, leading to faster load times – especially for larger sites.
Various plugins can automate the minification process, streamlining code and enhancing performance. But, just remember that adding extra plugins without staying on top of them can also slow down your site.
Ultimately, minifying code is all about creating a faster, leaner website.
3. Utilising Caching
Goal: Avoid loading the same resources repeatedly.
Caching saves static elements, allowing the user’s browser to load these resources locally instead of repeatedly fetching them from the server.
You can do this with plugins, like W3 Total Cache that optimises caching across pages. When doing this, CSS, JavaScript, and other elements drastically reduce load times.
Effective caching also complements other speed optimisation efforts, including minification and CDN integration. After all, speeding up your WordPress site needs to be a multi-faceted approach.
4. Optimising Images
Goal: Keep images lightweight and efficient.
One of the most obvious ways to speed up WordPress sites is by keeping images compact.
Large image files are often the most common reason for slow load times. By optimising images before uploading, you reduce file sizes without sacrificing quality.
Only upload images at the dimensions required, and use image compression tools to keep file sizes down.
For a more technical approach, you could consider implementing CSS sprites. This is a method of combining multiple images into one larger image and selectively displaying parts of it through CSS. This reduces the number of requests and speeds up load times.
5. Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Goal: Deliver resources quickly by distributing them globally.
A CDN caches site resources like images, CSS, and JavaScript on multiple servers worldwide.
When users access the site, they retrieve these elements from the server closest to their location, reducing latency. By reducing the distance data must travel, you lower load times for international visitors
CDNs are especially useful for media-heavy sites, as they reduce the load on your primary server and improve speed for international visitors.
Various popular CDNs integrate well with WordPress and plugins.
6. Investing in Quality Hosting
Goal: Ensure a fast, secure, and scalable hosting environment.
Your hosting provider plays an enormous role in your site’s speed and reliability.
Managed WordPress hosting is specifically optimised for WordPress. These providers typically offer advanced features like daily backups, integrated caching, and excellent support, which all contribute to a smoother, faster experience.
Investing in premium hosting is crucial for performance, especially for high-traffic sites.
If your site has high traffic demands, then you’ll want to move to dedicated hosting. This is where resources aren’t shared, to avoid slowdowns from shared server overload. A dedicated server plan ensures your site maintains uptime during traffic spikes.
We recommend that enterprise-level sites use WordPress VIP for the most elite CMS and hosting experience. This is the most effective WordPress platform for a fast and responsive site.
7. Clean Up Your WordPress Site
Goal: Clean up your site for faster performance.
This one’s pretty simple: declutter your WordPress site and get rid of anything that’s slowing it down.
Reducing the number of plugins and themes running in the background is essential for site security and performance. Deactivate and remove any plugins you no longer use, as they can cause security vulnerabilities and slow down your site.
Over time, media files can also accumulate and consume valuable space, impacting performance. Consider regularly cleaning your media library and removing files no longer in use.
Plugins like Media Cleaner can streamline the process or allow manual deletion for more control.
Finally, you’ll also want to optimise your database. A cluttered database can hinder performance over time.
By periodically cleaning out old revisions, spam comments, and other unnecessary data, you can reduce database bloat and improve load times. Plugins like WP-Sweep make this an easier task for non-technical users.
8. Remove Render-Blocking JavaScript and CSS
Goal: Get content to load faster across your site.
Render-blocking elements can prevent a site from loading swiftly.
Tools like WP Rocket can defer JavaScript parsing so that JavaScript files load later in the rendering process, allowing users to see the content faster.
9. Reduce Redirects and Post Revisions
Goal: Keep data minimal.
Unnecessary redirects and multiple post revisions consume resources. Limiting revisions to a manageable number or disabling them entirely prevents excessive data buildup.
10. Run the Latest Version of PHP
Goal: Keep your site’s backend optimised.
Each new PHP version improves performance. Some managed hosting providers offer a PHP compatibility checker, or you can update it manually via your hosting provider’s portal for an easy speed boost.
11. Conduct a Site Speed Diagnosis
Goal: Stay on top of your site’s speed performance to identify and fix issues as they arise.
We’ve covered a few key fixes to improve WordPress site speed. But, before you do all of these things, you’ll need to monitor your website first. This is essential for picking up on any issues and knowing where optimisations can be made.
You can diagnose speed issues through various tools, like PageSpeed Insights. Tools like this can provide a targeted report on what’s slowing down your site and where to focus improvements.
However, working with a technical team who can dig a bit deeper and identify a wider range of websites is more valuable. This is especially important if you have a large site, as straightforward tools often miss deeper issues.
A Note On Plugins for WordPress Site Speed
We’ve mentioned various plugins throughout this guide to help with site speed. Yes, these are effective. But, fully optimising a WordPress site is never that easy.
Plugins are great for non-technical users to make quick site fixes. But, they can have the opposite effect if not managed properly.
In many cases, unused plugins can build up, which could slow your site down rather than speed it up. And if you forget to update these plugins, then your site can get bogged down with outdated tech.
If you’re going to use plugins, you need to be smart about them and only choose reliable plugins that are constantly updated. Again, this is why working with a team to keep your WordPress site up to date is essential.
The Bottom Line
A fast WordPress site is essential for user experience, SEO, and revenue. From caching and minifying code to using a CDN and quality hosting, these strategies work together to enhance site speed.
Remember, even small improvements can lead to significant results, and for businesses, that can mean happier users, better search visibility, and higher conversions.
While a few plugin fixes may seem like quick and easy solutions, this isn’t the best way forward over the long run. Instead, you should work with a technical team to monitor and update your site at all times, protecting your most important online investment and keeping things running smoothly.
Get in touch with us at Itineris to see how our team can help speed up and maintain your WordPress site.
