Implementing these website optimization techniques can significantly improve the performance and user experience of your site. By optimizing images, enabling caching, and minifying CSS and JavaScript, you can enhance loading speeds, reduce server load, and streamline the rendering process. How to Speed Up a WordPress Website-7 Steps
This not only benefits your SEO efforts but also helps retain visitors on your site by providing a faster and more responsive browsing experience.
Additionally, ensuring your website is mobile-responsive is crucial for providing a seamless user experience across various devices. With the increasing number of users accessing websites on mobile devices, having a responsive design is essential to keep visitors engaged and satisfied.
By optimizing your site for mobile, you can improve usability, increase user retention, and ultimately drive more conversions.
Why Speed Is Important for Your WordPress Site
Research indicates that between 2000 and 2016, the typical human focus duration decreased from 12 seconds to just 8 seconds. Currently, it hovers around 8.25 seconds on average.
What does this imply for you as someone who owns a website?
It suggests that you’re left with a brief window to present your content and persuade visitors to remain on your WordPress site.
A sluggish website could result in visitors abandoning your page before it even appears.
A StrangeLoop study that included Amazon, Google, and other major websites found that a mere 1 second delay in page loading could cause a 7% drop in sales, a 11% reduction in the number of page views, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
1. How to Check Your WordPress Website Speed
Many novices believe their website is sufficient simply because it doesn’t seem sluggish on their device. This is a grave error.
Given that you often browse your own site, contemporary web browsers such as Chrome cache your site and automatically load it as soon as you begin to type in a URL. This results in your site loading almost instantly.
Yet, a typical visitor who is exploring your site for the first time might not enjoy the same speedy experience. Moreover, users across various locations will encounter a vastly different experience. This is the reason we suggest conducting a website speed test using a tool like IsItWP’s WordPress speed test.
It’s a completely free online resource that lets you measure your website’s loading speed. For additional advice, check out our guide on the correct way to perform a website speed test. After performing your website speed test, you might be pondering what loading speed you should strive for.
An optimal page load time is below 2 seconds.
2. Good WordPress Hosting
Your WordPress hosting provider is crucial for how well your website performs. A top-notch shared hosting service, such as Bluehost or SiteGround, goes above and beyond to fine-tune your website for peak performance.
Nonetheless, with shared hosting, you’re sharing the server’s resources with numerous other sites. This means that if a nearby site experiences high traffic, it could affect the whole server’s performance, leading to slower website speeds.
Conversely, opting for a managed WordPress hosting service ensures you receive the most efficient server setups for WordPress. These hosting companies provide automatic backups, updates to WordPress, and enhanced security measures to safeguard your website.
We suggest WP Engine as our go-to managed WordPress hosting provider. They’re also the leading choice in the market.
3. Install a WordPress Caching Plugin
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Do you recall our discussion about how people in various parts of the world might face different loading speeds on your website?
This difference is due to the placement of your web hosting servers affecting the speed of your site. For instance, imagine your web hosting provider’s servers are located in the United States. A user in the same country will typically experience quicker loading times compared to a user in India.
By employing a Content Delivery Network (CDN), you can enhance the loading speeds for all your visitors. A CDN consists of a global network of servers. Each server holds static content necessary for your website, like images, CSS, and JavaScript, which are not part of your WordPress content, as we’ve discussed before.
Whenever a visitor accesses your site, the CDN delivers these static files from the server nearest to them. This arrangement makes your own web hosting server more efficient, as the CDN handles much of the work.
5. Use a Theme Optimized for Speed
When picking a theme for your website, it’s crucial to focus on making it fast. Many attractive and eye-catching themes are actually poorly written and can make your site load very slowly.
It’s often a smarter choice to choose a simpler theme than to pick one that’s overloaded with complicated designs, flashy animations, and other features that aren’t needed. You can easily add these features with high-quality WordPress plugins.
Top-notch WordPress theme vendors such as StudioPress, Themify, CSSIgniter, and Astra provide themes that are well-written and designed for speed. You might also want to read our article on finding the right WordPress theme for tips on what to consider.
Before you start using your new theme, make sure to follow our guide on how to correctly switch your WordPress theme for a seamless transition.
6. Optimize the WordPress Database
A database serves as the storage location for all the content on your website, including articles, pages, themes, and settings for plugins. WordPress typically employs MySQL as its primary database.
As time passes, your WordPress database could gather excess data that enlarges your website. This excess data might encompass changes to posts, removed comments, outdated settings for plugins, and tags that are not in use.
If not managed, an enlarged database can make it more difficult for servers to quickly access certain data. This issue can negatively impact the website’s performance, decreasing its speed. On the other hand, a database that is well-managed can provide quicker responses to requests.
7. Use the Latest PHP Version
PHP is a scripting language that enables developers to build dynamic, interactive web sites. W3Techs reports that 76.2% of all websites utilize PHP, which is recognized as a server scripting language. The WordPress content management system (CMS) and all its websites are developed using PHP.
Since its inception, PHP has undergone numerous updates, similar to other software. Each update brings improvements in both performance and security.
A benchmark test by Phoronix found that PHP 8.0 outperforms its predecessor, PHP 7.4, by 10%. This version includes a plethora of new features and optimizations, enhancing the language’s efficiency.
A significant new addition to PHP 8.0 is the just-in-time (JIT) compilation. Essentially, JIT allows PHP 8.0 to convert a program into machine code right before it is executed. With tracing JIT compilation activated, PHP 8.0’s performance on WordPress is notably faster.
At present, WordPress supports PHP versions 7.4 and above. Regrettably, 13.8% of WordPress websites continue to use PHP versions that are no longer supported by WordPress. Furthermore, less than 3% of WordPress websites are utilizing the most recent PHP version.