How to optimize WordPress website speed?

Speed up WordPress website results in reducing the loading time of your webpages. It plays a crucial role in improving Google SEO ranking. Actually, you need to optimize your website to load as fast as possible. It help to make a good experience for the visitors of your website.

In this article we are going to teach you how to improve the speed of your site

It is absolutely obvious that speed up your WordPress website can help you to attract more visitors compared to your competitors. That’s why in this guide, we are going to teach you how to optimize WordPress website speed by using some tricks or installing useful plugins. If you want to see a list of professional and specialized iThemelandco WordPress and WooCommerce plugins, click on this link.

Why should you speed up a WordPress website?

it has a lot of advantages for you including:

Increase the traffic of your website

The main purpose of speed up your WordPress website is to prevent losing your potential visitors. The statistics revealed that If loading a web page takes more than 5 seconds, almost near 35% of visitors will leave that page.

So, even if the ranking of your website is so high that your webpages is displayed among the top three results of search engines but the speed of loading your webpages is so slow you will lose your visitors dramatically.

It is not surprising that one of the best tricks to increase the traffic of your website is speed up the loading of your webpages.

Improve SEO

As we mentioned before, the speed of your webpage loading affects the SEO ranking. This factor is one of the most important indicators of an optimized website according to the search engines algorithms.

As a result, if you want to improve your ranking in the future, you have to work on the speed of your webpage loading time. Keep this rule in mind:

The faster loading, the higher ranking.

Boost your sale

When you are planning to increase your customers to boost your sales by creating an online store based on WordPress, definitely you have to consider speed up your website to attract more visitors and encourage them to enjoy buying goods from your online shopping store.

It’s completely usual that adding a lot of products to your eCommerce website causes slowing down the speed of loading your product pages or shop pages. To solve this problem, you need to install some useful plugins such as “Woocommerce product table plugin”. It help to speed up loading the product page by listing all of them in a multi function table.

There are also so many different tips and tricks that you can use to speed up WordPress websites. Stay with us to learn more.

How measure speed of WordPress site?

The first step before you learn how to increase WordPress website speed is to measure the current loading time of each page. By evaluating the loading time, you can exactly determine which solution is useful for optimization of your WordPress website speed.

There are some powerful tools that can test the speed of webpages loading time including:

GTmetrix- a web-based tool for testing the website performance

GTmetrix is a free tool for assessing your website speed with an easy-to-use interface. To test the performance of your website, you just need to:

Open the homepage of GTmetrix
Input the URL of your website in the box
Wait for this online tool to evaluate the loading speed

When the measuring process done, the below useful results will be displayed:

Total loading time of your webpage
The size of this webpage
The HTTP requests total number

If you need more specific results, it is also possible to purchase the premium version and see the below key factors:

Better control the specified results
Set the server region to run the test
Manage search history of your website

PageSpeed Insights – a web-based tool developed by Google developers

PageSpeed Insights is a powerful tool for measuring the speed of loading your website.

Sometimes you optimize everything about the speed of your WordPress website. However the ranking of your webpages is not as you expected. One reason could be the low speed of your website loading on mobile screen. It is one of the most important factors for SEO based on search engines standards.

“PageSpeed Insights” has been introduced as a web-based tool by Google developers to assess the site performance on mobile devices. This is also very useful for checking the website speed on desktop screens.

Evaluating the website speed is simply possible by opening the homepage of “PageSpeed Insights”. Then input your website URL to run a website test.

The results determined by this incredible tool include:

Total optimization evaluations
Some suggestion to speed up your WordPress website
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
First Input Delay (FID)
Eliminate render-blocking resources

WebPageTest- An open-source website performance testing tool

“Webpage Test” is a professional tool for testing the performance and speed of your website. It comes with a lot of incredible control tools.

You are able to set the below conditions for testing the speed of your website loading time:

The server region
The loading device
Extend the result of testing such as customer metrics

After assessing the performance, you can utilize the following suggestions to speed up your WordPress website.

Don’t forget to save the results revealed by the speed testing tool to compare them by the results after optimization. This is a good way to help you ensure that the tricks you have conducted to speed up your website loading time works well.

10 Tips to Speed up WordPress Website without plugin

There are various optimization techniques for increasing WordPress website speed without plugin. It can make you get confused when trying to select the best one. The point is that you may need to utilize more than two or three of the optimization tricks to speed up your WordPress website.

So, there is no need to find just one method as the best. It is better to use as many tricks as possible to speed up your WordPress website perfectly.

We are going to share with you 10 most effective tips to speed up WordPress sites without plugin and optimize the performance of your website.

Remove unused plugins

Installing so many plugins on your WordPress website can have a lot of harmful effects on its performance. The unnecessary plugins are using a huge amount of your resources. Also, they can slow down the speed of your website loading time.

That’s why it is highly recommended to remove unused and unnecessary plugins completely from your database to speed up your WordPress website.

The best way to keep your website optimized is to audit and clean up the unnecessary files and plugins, regularly.

It is worth mentioning that there is not a specific rule for the number of plugins you must activate on your website to keep the speed of loading time optimized. Actually, the number of plugins doesn’t matter but the quality. It means, you may activate more than 30 high quality plugins. Then your website speed remains in a good range however just by activating one or two malfunctioning plugins ran into a nightmare speed.

Removing those unnecessary plugins is not the end of the story. Another issue arises when you uninstall or deactivate a plugin but the folders and data created by them remain in your database. This makes your website slow down.

Although there are some clean up plugins that can help you to remove unused data from your website database, the result is not always what you have expected. Most of the time, you need to remove unused plugins data manually from WordPress website database. It is possible via FTP which is a time-consuming task.

So, as we mentioned earlier the best way to speed up your WordPress website is to just install and activate the must-have plugins on your website published by a well-known and reputable developer.

Optimize Google fonts

Adding custom google fonts is one of the most important factors slowing down the loading time of your webpages. There are some tricks that can help you to optimize google fonts such as host google fonts locally or host them on your own CDN.

However, to make these kinds of changes, you need to have some experience and knowledge in code writing and code editing. Thanks to WordPress open-source platform, there are a lot of amazing plugins available for doing this task fast and easy for you.

Which plugins help to improve the speed of site by optimizing google fonts?

Among the numerous plugins designed to optimize google fonts in WordPress Website. “OMGF- host google fonts” is the fastest one resulting in speed up WordPress website.

Minify HTML and CSS codes

HTML coding and CSS coding contain a lot of useless characters, symbols, white spaces and block delimiters which make reading and interpreting them by browsers more complicated and cause slowing down of your webpages loading time.

By minifying HTML and CSS codes, all of those unnecessary gaps and characters will be removed which can result in speed up of your WordPress website without having harmful effect on your website functionality.

To minify your HTML coding and CSS coding, you can get help from some online tools such as “willpeavy.com”, “cssminifier.com, and “htmlcompressor.com”.

Which plugins help to improve the speed of site by minifying HTML and CSS codes?

There are also some incredible plugins for minifying HTML and CSS codes, including:

Combine CSS and JavaScript files

One of the best methods to speed up your WordPress website is combining CSS and JavaScript files. Considering this fact that in the new protocol of HTTP/2, when a browser wants to open a new URL, all of its assets start downloading at the same time, the largest file of CSS and JavaScript is the reason for slowing down the loading speed of your webpage.

So, combining CSS and JS files can minimize the calls made by the web server for retrieving those assets has definitely a positive effect on speed up your WordPress website.

Which plugins help to improve the speed of site by combining CSS and JS files?

File Optimizer plugin is a powerful tool for minifying CSS and JavaScript files. It can help you to optimize your website codes and speed up the webpages loading time, perfectly.

Other useful plugins

Eliminate render-blocking resources

Render-blocking resources are usually the largest CSS and JavaScript files that can affect the loading speed of websites as we mentioned above. It is obvious that we can not remove CSS and JavaScript files from the website codes as they are crucial for the well behavior of our website and make it interactive and dynamic.

The best solution for speed up your WordPress website even with using CSS and JS files, in addition to combining them, is to eliminate the render-blocking resources manually or with a plugin.

“PageSpeed Insights” is one of the best tools for identifying the render-blocking resources. When you successfully scan the website and find out the render-blocking resources, eliminating the render-blocking resources is not a complicated task by using below plugins.

Which plugins help to improve the speed of site by eliminating the render-blocking resources?

The most useful plugins offer you the best features for eliminating the render-blocking resources are:

Lazy-load images and videos

Lazy-load images and videos define a technique that reduces the page loading time by holding the download of images and videos till the visitor scrolls down to see them in a webpage.

This technique improves the user experiences when visiting your website as they can see the main contents of your webpage, immediately.

This feature has been added as one of the default features to the WordPress. However, if you want to definitely speed up your WordPress website by this process, it is better to use a plugin.

Which plugins help to improve the speed of site by enabling Lazy-loading images and videos?

Use a CDN

Content delivery networks (CDN) are some server networks located around the globe to decrease latency of browsing your website data in different locations.

If the purpose of your website is attracting visitors from all around the world a CDN that can keep a copy of your website data on a local host to deliver it to the users browsing your website from a close location is necessary.

For example, if you are running your WordPress website on a hosting server in the US, but you may have visitors from Europe, you need to use a CDN located in Europe to save a copy of your website data and deliver it very fast to the users trying to load your website from that location.

It means your data needs to transfer within a less distance from a local hosting server belonging to CDN to be loaded on the visitor browser instead of transferring from your main hosting server in the US. That’s why using a CDN can speed up WordPress websites.

There are two types of CDN:

Reverse Proxy CDNs
Traditional pull CDN

To enable “Reverse Proxy CDNs” for your website, you just need to subscribe to a CDN provider by paying extra cost then try to link up your assets to the CDN by the hosting server instructions.

However, if you want to use “Traditional pull CDN”, there are some useful plugins helping you to integrate your data such as:

Optimize your images to speed up WordPress website

We have already discussed this matter that large files such as images or videos can slow down the loading time of your webpages. So, image optimization is a necessary action to speed up your WordPress website.

Like other useful techniques, there are lots of plugins to do this task by compressing images without decreasing their quality.

Most of the image compression plugins let you choose your preferred size and quality for optimizing your images. So, you can easily control and balance the size and quality to fit the images as you need.

Which plugins help to improve the speed of site by compressing images?

Keep external scripts to a minimum

External scripts such as tracking tools or commenting systems add big data to your webpages causing slowing down the loading time of your website. We recommend you to keep the number of external scripts as minimum as possible and try to use just the essential ones including Google Analytics.

Speed up WordPress website by installing a caching plugin

Installing a caching plugin can reduce the loading time of your webpages by optimizing the performance of your website. The main advantages of activating caching plugins are keeping a temporary copy of your data on a local host to send them to your visitors quickly.

The best WordPress caching plugins with an easy set up but powerful functionality are:

WP Rocket (premium)
Cache Enabler (free)
W3 Total Cache (free)

Conclusion

Speed up WordPress websites plays a crucial role in making a better experience for your visitors which can result in better SEO ranking and lower bounce rate.

We suggested some tips and tricks that can help you speed up your WordPress website effectively including: