Do you’ve a WordPress blog or website? And It’s loading time is 5secs or more, I think you should follow some guide to reduce your website loading speed. This tutorial basically on speed up WordPress performance, so i think this gonna be a quick way to know all about how to boost WordPress speed and make a faster blog or website. I’m starting with a little bit briefing with WordPress blogging platform.
WordPress is a great blogging platform. Also it’s a free CMS software that you can use to create beautiful websites or blogs. As a blogging platform it is a huge popular world wide. Many of the most successful websites in the internet use it.
Important Notice:
You know, Google has now included site speed in its ranking algorithm, meaning that the slower the speed of your site, the lower your ranking on their search engine. I’m sure you’ve not heard about it so thank me for telling you. That’s probably why you are still ranking low in search engines. If you want to get a well rank then should speed up WordPress performance and make a faster website or blog.
How to Boost WordPress Speed & Performance?
It’s the most commons question from new bloggers who’re using WordPress. You know the question is single but answers are huge. Hope you will get all of those answers in this article.
By the way, server slow loading is a common issue for any types of platform like WordPress, Joomla or other. But it is most important to make your WordPress site load faster to get most of benefits for the incoming traffic. In this tutorial, I would like to share 11 ultimate tips which will help you to speed up WordPress.
1. Use Reliable Web Hosting
When starting up your blog, you could use the normal hosting plans (shared hosting), but when your users, and visitors become really much, I’ll advice you go for a virtual private server (VPS) hosting or cloud hosting.
Server space and bandwidth is one of the most important factors responsive for server loading speed. Compare the features and read the reviews carefully before making the final decision. Cheap and reliable shared hosting companies, like GoDaddy, Bluehost, Hostgator are reputable web hosting providers.
2. Use a Clean Theme
Your theme can go a long way in determining your blog load speed. I advice you to use a clean and optimized theme which would not put so much load on your site. Make sure the theme you use pass the validation of W3C. Consider optimizing your CSS and JavaScript files. You can also use CSS3 and HTML5 in your website as they are much technology and makes your website load faster.
3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The original goal of CDN is designed to provide high availability and high performance to the end-users. Basically, a content delivery network, will take all the static files that you have on your site, including CSS, Javascript and images, then allows your visitors to download them faster, by serving the files to the closest servers to the user. Some popular CDN’s are Max CDN, CloudFlare etc.
Max CDN is not free anyway. My web hosting company has CloudFlare enabled for all its users, and CloudFlare has some free plans. The use of a CDN can go a long way in increasing your site’s load speed. You can read about free CDN services for WordPress.
4. Use a Good Caching Plugin
If you want to speed up WordPress site performance then should use a good caching plugin. Don’t tell me you are a blogger and you don’t know about this. Caching Plugins help to temporarily save all the static files of your site on your visitor’s browser, so that such files do not have to load again every time the visitors visits your site. The most popular and common caching plugin is the W3 Total Cache. You can also use WP Super Cache and WP-Rocket (it’s a paid caching plugin).
You may read: The 5 Ultimate WordPress Caching Plugins
5. Optimize Site Homepage
Your website speed basically depends on your website front page. You know it’s really important to optimize site homepage because the homepage is one of the place people do visit a lot.
Here’s the list of what you should do;
- Show post excerpts instead of full posts on your homepage
- Reduce the number of posts that show on your homepage. For me I show just 6 or 7.
- Remove unnecessary plugins features and sharing widgets from the home page. Remember your reader did not come to admire all your widgets. Use floating share bars only on post pages.
- You could also remove your gravatar images from your home page.
With these simple changes, your home page won’t only look simple, it would load faster, and chase away less visitors. I do all these on my site, and my site still looks simple and fast loading.
6. Optimize your Images
I know you must have heard about this but apart from the manual method of reducing the size and quality of images on your site, there is also a free plugin that can help you to drastically reduce/optimize the file size of your images, without reducing the quality of the image. Don’t ask me how it’s possible, I really don’t care all I know is that it works for me. The plugin is called WP-SmushIt. WP-SmushIt optimizes all your images as you upload them, and like I said, it won’t affect the quality of the image. EWWW Image Optimizer is the another plugin to optimize your website images.
7. Make Sure Images Lazy
May be you’re laughing to see the funny heading, right? But it’s really good thing to make sure your website is loading fast. It’s just about making images at the top of a page load first, then as the visitor scrolls down, other images will begin to load. This will increase your page load speed and also save bandwidth by loading less data if a visitor does not scroll down at all. BJ Lazy Load is the best plugin to use lazy loading functionality in your images.
8. Optimize Website Database
Most of the time you will have so many auto-saves posts, spams, revisions and unwanted files in database. It can be the reason to increase your website load time. Optimizing your website database: Just the way it sounds, is about “op-ti-mi-zing” the WordPress database files. It can be done manually (which is a bit complicated) or automatically with third-party plugins like WP-Optimize and WP-DB Manager. They help you do the simple task of optimizing your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.)
9. Turn off Pings and Trackbacks
Simply put, turning on Pingbacks and Trackbacks will end up generating a lot of work for your site. So turn it off, don’t worry it will not destroy the backlinks to your site.
10. Avoid Using More Third-Party Plugins
Try to avoid using more third-party plugins in your WordPress site. Because, the more plugins you have installed, the slower your site speed becomes. I suggest to keep your plug-in count below ten.
11. Keep WordPress Updated
You should use updated version of WordPress. WordPress updates fix security holes and memory leaks, which can otherwise slow down your website. There are so many cool features comes with latest WordPress and it’s more bugs free. I always keep my WordPress version updated and recommend you to do it.
Final Thoughts
I think all of those tips you’ve read carefully and will follow to make your website faster. If you’ve still facing loading problems then can ask me in comment. I will try to give you a good solution on it. I know most of the WordPress users don’t know how to speed up WordPress.
So, finally I request you to share this valued tutorials for them who don’t know this things!