Speeding up your WordPress site by Hamzah Malik
WordPress is a massively influential platform, with well over 60 million websites using it. Starting out as a humble blogging platform, its uses have expanded rapidly and it now supports fully fledged website themes, along with incredibly useful plugins. However, one thing many struggle with is the speed of their WordPress websites. They end up being bloated and inefficient, deterring visitors from spending time on them. Even worse, Google now uses the speed of a website as a search engine ranking factor, so a slow website means Google may shun you in its holy grail of top 10 search results.
Have no fear however, there is hope. Below are a list of 10 tips that’ll speed up your WordPress website drastically, if implemented in the right way. These techniques have seen websites go from a 5 second loading time, down to around 0.4 seconds. They’re ranked in order of importance, with no. 10 being what we perceive to be most vital. Oh, and please ensure you back-up your website before tinkering, as with thousands of themes out there, there’s bound to be a few that won’t play nice with every plugin.
- Use a lightweight framework to begin with
No amount of optimisation and tweaking will hide a buggy theme. Before you consider optimising, be honest with yourself and admit if your theme is naturally bloated. If it is, then take the painful but necessary option of swapping it out for something more simple and lightweight. The less complex a theme is, the better the effects will be of optimising it.
- WP Super Cache
So WP Cache is an amazing plugin which caches your entire website, meaning it loads way quicker for repeat visitors. Rather than reload every single component upon a fresh visit, it ‘hangs onto’ a lot of the information, meaning the load time is significantly reduced.
- WP Minify
WP Minify is great. It grabs JS and CSS files, compresses and consolidates them and pops it in the header for quick referencing. See it as a snapshot of your CSS files, in one neat and simple format. The alternative is loading every CSS and JS element independently, which takes significantly longer. WP-Minify is a free plugin and gives instant results when used correctly.
- Smushit!
This plugin tackles one of the biggest loading issues of any website- images. If your homepage has images on it, odds are that they’re adding to your load time, as they’re typically a few megabytes. Smushit! is a simple tool which optimises all your images, reducing their size drastically without degrading their quality. This’ll give your homepage one less heavy element to worry about when it’s being loaded, hopefully providing a way faster experience.
- Remove any unnecessary widgets on the homepage.
This one covers plugins as well, come to think of it. Deactivate and delete any widgets or plugins on the homepage that aren’t absolutely relevant. They all add a tiny bit to your website’s loading time, but in combination they can add up to a few seconds. They all need to be loaded independently, so if there’s something that isn’t crucial, just get rid of it. And whilst we’re on the topic, if you have ‘posts’ or a ‘blog’ on your homepage, don’t load the full extract, or even half of them. Just a few lines will do- keep things streamlined and be vigorously determined to strip away anything that isn’t vital, to make your website lean. You can use P3 to identify these drains.
P3 is a great plugin which helps you identify which plugins are using up the most resource when you’re loading a page. Once it shows you the plugins which are causing the most issues, you can either deactivate them, or find an alternative way of showing that information. It’s also worth remembering that not all plugins are equal- there very well may be 2 plugins that do the same job but perform vastly differently.
- WP-Optimise
This plugin is pretty swift work. It optimises all your databases without you having to lift a finger. Whilst it isn’t going to supercharge your website overnight, it’s worth using so that you know your homepage overhead is being kept at a minimal.
- Lazyload
LazyLoad only loads images that are in view, meaning the loading time is reduced if your homepage is image rich. When the user scrolls down, the images load just before they come into view, saving resource and, more importantly, time when it comes to people visiting your website for the first time.
- Gzip Ninja Speed Compression
So a quick heads up- this only works on apache servers, which does cover most wordpress websites, but be sure to check before installing. This plugin does the same for your website size as zipping files on your computer does. It makes your website smaller, thus slightly quicker to load when summoned by a user. Because it’s way lighter when it’s zipped, it shoots the website across to them and rapidly unpacks it, making the user experience quicker.
Grab Gzip Ninja Speed Compression Here
- Use Cloudflare
Using a CDN (content distribution network) is a fantastic tool to have in your arsenal if you’re going for speed. A CDN basically ‘holds’ versions of your website all around the world, meaning when anyone wants to access it, it’s way closer than it would have been if they had to make a connection with the host provider’s data centre. Cloudflare is free and makes accessing your website globally fast, reliable and secure.
Visit Cloudflare’s official website here
- Upgrade Your Hosting.
This one is one of the most important factors in a speedy WordPress website. If you’re on shared hosting, the tips above may work to a certain extent, but the harsh truth is that you’ll always be competing for space, resource and speed when on shared hosting. If the server is particularly busy, then you’re out of luck- no matter how lean your website is. This is why for speed, there’s nothing better than a blazingly fast VPS.
It sits perfectly in the middle, between the cost friendliness of a shared server and the blazing speed of a dedicated server. You have your own resource guaranteed, and whilst you are technically still sharing, you have your own resource partitioned, meaning you’re guaranteed good performance if your website(s) are optimised. If you’re serious about speed and security, then a VPS is definitely the way to go.
If you’re considering making the switch to a VPS and you’re looking for a safe pair of hands, look no further. With more than 10 years experience and over 55,000 happy customers, FreeVirtualServers are industry veterans at this stuff.
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