Dou you want to speed up WordPress?
Today we’d like to share our guide on how you can make your WordPress website much faster. WordPress is quite a user-friendly and easy-to-run CMS, it should also have the high performance.
If you own the WordPress based website, we recommend you to check whether it’s optimized or not. Present and quick-coming future require the high performance of any process. The users expect more stability and efficiency from websites they visit. Time is the valuable thing now, and even several seconds of the user’s waiting can cause the falling of involvement and visiting of your website. So we need to check the things and fix the problems.
Let’s do it!
First, run Google’s speed test. You’ll see the level of website performance. If you see the red color on a scale, your website needs increasing. You can also check your website with Pingdom. It shows you the state of your website and gives the recommendations.
Then you can speed up WordPress performance following our quick guide a checklist. There you’ll find the basic things that influence page loading time of WordPress website. Let’s begin!
5 Basic Steps to Speed Up WordPress
Here are several most important things you can do to speed up your website.
Minimize CSS and JS Files
Here we talk about the code optimization. The less amount of code your web page has, the faster it’s loaded. The same goes for content. We’ll talk about it later. So, try to write the clean code, and it will help you to keep your WordPress website quick.
You can do it using W3 Total Cache Plugin. This is a pretty helpful plugin in the whole process of WordPress performance optimization and has many advanced features.It includes a built-in tool for minifying CSS and JS file.
Here are the things you should do:
- install W3 Total Cache Plugin;
- run it and find Minifying Setting in General Setting Tab;
- enable Minify in a checkbox and save your changes.
Analogically, you can use such plugin as Autoptimize. You should go to the Settings Page after its installation set the following items in the checkboxes:
- Optimize HTML code;
- Optimize CSS code;
- Optimize JavaScript code;
- Generate data: URLs for images.
Then save your changes.
Also, you can use the online services like:
Don’t forget to check your website speed again after each step.
Optimize Images
Images take up the most part of things that are loaded on your website. It’s better to compress them and reduce the server load.
You can do it with a help of EWWW Image Optimize plugin. It automatically optimizes images you upload and also can work with already uploaded images.
Also, we recommend you to install Lazy Load plugin. It loads the images only when they are visible to the user that reduces the server load in many times.
Optimize Database
When you use WordPress for a while, the database stores much information which is already unnecessary. We mean, some tags and categories, images you don’t use, trash posts, etc.
You can clean up your database using the WP-Sweep plugin.
Use Caching for Better Performance
You should know that caching help to reduce the server load drastically. Cache store the copies of already loaded pages by the user, and provides him with them. So it increases website speed. You can enable caching via W3 Total Cache Plugin. You’ll find all features for caching in General Settings Tab. We recommend you to use caching and take the advantages of it.
Enable GZIP Compression
GZIP compression helps to build pages on a server before the web page is sent to the user. It increases the website performance drastically. You can enable it with W3 Total Cache.
There were 5 common recommendations on how to improve WordPress website performance. Also, try to keep WordPress updated and choose fast and reliable hosting.
Each website should tend to not more than 3 seconds of loading time according to the research. It influences your conversions. Take a look: How page loading speed influences your conversion rate.
Remember, when your website is loaded fastly, and the visitors don’t need to wait, you take care of their time.
Now, when you’ve tried all our recommendations, run the speed test, and if you need more improvements, contact us.
We’ll be glad to help you!