20 Effective Tips to Improve WordPress Speed in 2024

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Check out the post and learn about the 13 effective tips to improve WordPress Speed.

20 Effective Tips To Improve WordPress Speed

In terms of SEO and user experience, WordPress blogs that load quickly are the most desirable.

It is a fact that users will leave your site if it takes a long time to load. It should load in 2 seconds or the user will close the page. Therefore, you must optimize Performance.

WordPress has a large number of users, theme and plugin developers, and hosting providers. WordPress blogs still have a problem with speed. All of these factors have an impact on the load time of WordPress-based websites.

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With some simple and easy techniques, we were able to decrease the load time of a WordPress website from 2.07s to 1.03s recently.

Within 40 minutes, we were able to speed up the WordPress website significantly.

As part of the WordPress Speed Optimization process, we were able to decrease the load time, page size, and several requests, in addition to other things that optimized the performance of WordPress blogs.

You will learn the most effective and tested tips for optimizing WordPress speed in this tutorial.

I have personally tested these ways to optimize a WordPress blog for speed, and these simple tips will have a tremendous impact on the load time of WordPress blogs and will assist you with the optimization of your WordPress blog.

You do not need any technical knowledge to implement these tips to speed up your WordPress website.

You should have only basic knowledge of using WordPress. We will go through all the steps one by one.

I am sure these tips will speed up your WordPress website.

Choose a Good Hosting

A good hosting service plays a crucial role in the speed of a WordPress site.

Hosting providers offer a range of options that can impact the performance of your website, including the type of server, the location of the server, and the resources available to your site.

When it comes to the type of server, shared hosting is the most affordable option, but it also means that your website will be sharing resources with other sites on the same server.

This can result in slower speeds and increased downtime.

On the other hand, a VPS or dedicated server provides your site with its own resources and can lead to faster speeds and less downtime.

The location of the server is also important. If your target audience is mostly located in a specific region, it’s beneficial to have your server located as close to them as possible.

This reduces the distance data needs to travel, resulting in faster page load times.

Managed hosting providers are specially optimized for WordPress and can help you to improve your website speed by handling the technical side of things for you.

They handle server optimization, caching, and security for you, allowing you to focus on creating content for your website.

Check out: Fastest WordPress Hosting Providers

Use Fast Loading and SEO-Optimized Theme

After choosing a good hosting, it is time to choose a good theme to speed up your WordPress website.

There are many themes available on the market that claims themselves best. But, you cannot test them all.

You need to select a theme that is lightweight, well-coded, fast-loading, and SEO-optimized.

I recommend GeneratePress and Astra personally since we use them mostly on our niche websites.

I have also written a post about the Fastest WordPress themes which you can refer to.

Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN stores your website on various server locations globally. Whenever a user wishes to access your content, your website will load quickly for them from the nearest server location.

There are numerous CDN service providers, such as Cloudflare, StackPath, Bunny CDN, etc., that are available in the market and can be utilized according to your preference.

However, if you are seeking a free CDN solution, then Cloudflare CDN service would be ideal for you.

If you use any managed WordPress hosting, you will receive a built-in CDN service for your hosted site, free of charge.

For instance, if you use Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting, you will receive a built-in Nexcess CDN that encompasses 22 Edge locations and includes features like HTTP/2 or Brotli compression to optimize page load time.

Use a Caching Plugin

A caching plugin can help you a lot in reducing the response time of your website.

To check what difference a cache plugin can make in a WordPress website, we tested a WordPress-based website with and without a plugin.

In this case, the load time has decreased mainly due to caching of pages, the cache plugin creates a cache of pages, and when a user requests the pages, they get served from this cache.

We have used the WP Rocket plugin for this test.

Check out: 5 Best WordPress Caching Plugins to speed up your Website

Optimize Your WordPress Database

WordPress database is the place where your blog data is kept and stored, various things can make the WordPress database big and bigger like revision posts and spam comments.

The size of the WordPress database will not have a huge impact on the load time of the site but it may have if the database is too large. However, you can optimize the database using plugins.

Optimize Images

Optimizing images is one of the important tips to improve WordPress speed.

Images comprise more than 50% of the size of any website.

They are an essential part of any website but at the same time, they are responsible for the large size of the website. Therefore, the images you are using on your blog must be optimized properly.

Check out: 5 Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins

Compress Images: Compress the images you are using on your WordPress blog, you can automate this whole process using WordPress plugins.

Scale Images Properly: You have to display an image of size  500*400 but you are loading an image of size 1240*820 and then displaying it in the size of 500*400.

This is a waste of resources, you could have loaded the image in the required form which would result in decreased image size and will ultimately improve the load time of the website.

Therefore, to scale your images properly, you can define the size of images you want to use from settings > media.

Always Update WordPress, Themes, and Plugins

You must always update your WordPress site, themes, and plugins to keep it secure.

WordPress and Theme/Plugins offer updates for security and speed improvement that you must install.

This procedure ensures that your site remains protected, up-to-date, and loads quickly.

Enable GZIP Compression

GZIP is a generic compressor that is used to compress mostly text-based data while sending it from the server to the client.

With the help of GZIP, servers can compress text-based files like CSS, javascript, etc by almost 50% to 70%. Which improves the speed of WordPress websites significantly.

Leverage Browser Caching

Every WordPress website does have some CSS, Javascript, and some other static files like images, etc.

Whenever a user visits your blog, all these files are accessed by the user which means that these files are downloaded by the user’s browser.

In most cases these files do not change frequently, therefore by caching these files in the user’s browser, we can improve the user experience.

Even if the user visits multiple pages on your WordPress website in the same session there will be no need to download these resources again and again.

This helps optimize the overall user experience.

Minify Javascript and CSS

WordPress websites do have at least one CSS file and a few javascript files. Minifying Javascript and CSS files is another best tip to improve WordPress speed.

By minifying Javascript and CSS, we simply refer to decreasing the size of these files, there are numerous ways to reduce the size of these files.

However, I’ll not recommend editing anything in these files until you know what are you doing.

You can use a caching plugin like W3 total cache to minify these files.

By minifying these files, you will be able to reduce the size of your WordPress website which will ultimately improve the speed of your website.

Minimize the Number of HTTP Requests

Several HTTP requests do have a huge impact on the load time of your WordPress website, by reducing the number of HTTP requests you can improve the speed of your WordPress website.

Browsers have a specific limited number of HTTP requests they can handle simultaneously to a domain.

For example, if there are 10 images,1 CSS, and 2 Javascript files to be downloaded, a total of 13 files have to be downloaded and the browser can handle only 6 HTTP requests at a time.

That means the browser will first download 6 files after that another 6 files and after that the remaining 1 file which will take time.

Therefore, by reducing the number of these files, we can speed up our website.

Factors responsible for several HTTP requests:

• Number of CSS files (Themes and plugins both can have CSS files)
• Number of Javascript files (themes and plugins can have javascript files)
• Number of Images (Most of the images are used by your posts)

How can you reduce the number of HTTP requests:

• See, if you can combine the CSS files. You can try plugins or use a caching plugin.
• You can try combining the Javascript files.
• You can try merging two images into one, as each image makes one HTTP request.

You can use the plugin WP Asset Clean up, which gives you more control over javascript and CSS files.

Remove Unnecessary Plugins

Plugins can make your WordPress website load slowly and plugins play an important role in deciding the speed of your website.

Therefore, it is recommended that you remove any unnecessary plugins. You can also see if you can get the required functionality of the plugin in the theme itself.

Check the Load Time of Plugins

You can check the load time of plugins using the plugin P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) which is available for free in the WordPress repository.

If a plugin is taking too much time to load, you can consider removing the plugin or changing the plugin to a better one.

You should also see how many Images, CSS and javascript files the plugin is using and loading when a user accesses your website and decide according to that. If you should use the plugin or not.

Decrease the Number of Fonts Used

If you are using fancy fonts or too many different types of fonts on your pages, you should remember that this will have a huge impact on your website loading time.

You should use only one type of font in your whole blog.

If you use google fonts, you can see the impact of fonts on the loading time on the google fonts website. Choose a font that has minimum impact on the load time of your website.

Avoid Uploading Videos

That is the foolish thing that you must avoid at any cost. If you are directly uploading videos on your site, it will consume excessive server storage and utilize significant bandwidth during loading.

You will encounter extremely poor speed performance for your site. So, it is strongly advised to seek out an alternative platform (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) to upload your video and integrate the video into your WordPress website.

In this scenario, the video would be loaded from an external platform server and not from your server. This procedure will assist you in conserving server storage as well as bandwidth.

Optimize WordPress Dashboard

There are a few hacks that you can try on the dashboard of your WordPress site. This helps in improving the speed to some extent.

• Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
• Limit the number of posts and show excerpts
• Split comments
• Disable gravatar

Limit Your Post Revision

Were you aware that WordPress stores a significant quantity of post revisions every time you modify any blog post/page?

This procedure consumes a substantial amount of storage in the database and slows down your website speed. Therefore, it is crucial that you restrict post-revisions, as this will save your disk space and enhance the loading time of your pages.

In order to achieve this, you will need to insert certain code into your wp-config file. By specifying a particular number of post revisions, you can greatly improve the speed of your site.

Here is the code that you can use

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 );

Always Delete Unused Images

It is possible that you have replaced the image in your post with a new one and forgot to remove the old image from your website.

As a result, you may have numerous (potentially thousands) of images in your media library that are no longer being utilized.

Removing these media files can aid in freeing up storage space and potentially improving the speed of your website.

To do this, you can use a plugin such as media cleaner or manually delete the unused images by navigating to WordPress Dashboard > Media > Library > Unattached.

Disable Hotlinking

Hotlinking involves showing images or other resources from different websites by directly linking to them on your own site. This happens without considering how well the source website works.

Imagine you have a cool picture on your site, and someone wants to use it on their site. The right way is to download the picture, put it on their site, and give credit.

However, instead of doing that, they just link your picture. Then, when people visit their site, your picture comes from your website.

This uses your resources and internet speed. To make your site work better, it’s a good idea to stop hotlinking.

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If you are using CloudFlare CDN, then you can disable it easily.

Follow the steps below:

Login to your Cloudflare account.
Go to Settings.
Select your website.
Choose the Scrape Shield option and enable hotlink protection by turning the toggle on.

For reference, check the image above.

Keep Your Site Clean & Minimal

Visitors come to your website to read your content, not to admire the design of your site. Your site may need an appealing design to capture the attention of visitors, but it is not essential.

Avoid excessively designing your entire website with decorative elements and features, as this will require the addition of numerous lines of CSS code and external scripts for each page.

If you choose to do this, you will end up burdening your web page, resulting in slow loading times.

It is highly advisable to maintain a clean, minimalist layout that allows for easy navigation. By doing so, you enable people to enjoy your website’s content with user satisfaction and improved loading speed.

Final Words

That’s all about the tips to improve WordPress Speed.

There are tons of hacks available to speed up WordPress sites that you can try and make your site load faster.

If you desire to maintain your site consistently quick-loading, you must opt for quality hosting, a fast and lightweight theme with minimal plugins, utilize CDN, and set up a caching plugin.

I hope you find it useful. If so, please share it with your friends.

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