13 Tips to Speed up WordPress Website Loading Time

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It’s as simple as that: the faster your website loads, the better user experience you deliver. Higher conversion rates, fewer bounce rates, and other benefits result from the improved user experience.

Learn how to make your website load faster and provide your visitors with a better experience. Learning how to speed up your WordPress site is critical if you want to produce successful WordPress websites for yourself or your clients.

You should not only consider the design and content but you should also focus on website loading speed. Load times have an impact on the user experience, SEO rankings, conversion rates, bounce rates etc.

How to speed up your WordPress site.

1. Use Fast WordPress Hosting

While choosing the hosting, choose performance-optimized WordPress hosting.

Simply stated, if your hosting is slow, your website is likely to be slow as well, even if you do a great job with front-end optimization.

Consider managed WordPress hosting choices like Kinsta, WP Engine, or Flywheel for the ultimate optimal speed.

When selecting a host, it’s also important to consider the available server locations. Because download speeds are affected by geography, the physical location of your server will have an impact on your page load times.

Ideally, you’ll want to go with a host that has a server in the same location as your main target audience.

2. Consider theme size

WordPress themes that include a lot of dynamic features, such as sliders, widgets, social icons, and other flashy elements, are very enticing to the eye.

Always remember that if your site have too many elements or have greater page sizes, your web server will surely suffer.

In this instance, using lightweight themes is the best option. Using one of the WordPress basic themes is one possibility.

3. Reduce image sizes

The most major contributors to a webpage’s size increase are imagery. The goal is to reduce the size of the photos without reducing their quality.

The process will take a long time if you use the Chrome PageSpeed Insights extension, Photoshop, or any other tools to manually optimize the photos.

Fortunately, there are plugins for almost anything you can imagine, including picture optimization such as Optimole.

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4. Avoid using too many WordPress plugins

Plugins are one of WordPress’ most powerful features, and some of you are so hooked with them that you have more than 30-40 on your blog. Not all plugins are negative but still, you should avoid using too many plugins.

Reduce the number of plugins on your site and clean up your database regularly. This is something that an advanced database cleanup plugin can help you with within no time.

Make sure your website has at least one cache plugin installed.

5. Use a CDN

Visitors to your blog come from all over the world, and site loading times may vary depending on how far away they are from where your site is hosted.

Many CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) are available to help reduce site loading times to a minimum for visitors from all around the world.

A CDN stores a duplicate of your website in multiple data centers around the world. A CDN’s main job is to offer a webpage to a visitor from the closest possible location. Cloudflare and MaxCDN are among the most popular CDN services.

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6. Enable GZIP compression

Compressing files on your local computer can help you save a lot of space on your hard drive. GZIP compression can also be used on the web.

This technique will significantly minimize bandwidth use and the time it takes to access your website.

GZIP compresses numerous files so that when a visitor attempts to view your website, their browser must first unzip it. The bandwidth utilization is significantly reduced as a result of this approach.

You can either use a plugin like PageSpeed Ninja to enable GZIP compression, or you can add the following lines to your .htaccess file.

7. Avoid too many advertisements and scripts

Avoid putting too many advertisements on your website. Many PPC ads contain unneeded HTML material, which can significantly slow down your site’s loading time.

If you must have adverts, you should utilize Google AdSense or Media.net because they are well-optimized and provide the best CPC. In many circumstances, removing third-party scripts is now difficult, so the best approach is to delay script loading.

8. Pick an optimized WordPress theme

The majority of users choose WordPress themes based on how appealing they are to the eye. Okay, it’s not an awful strategy, but it has some drawbacks.

To begin with, elements with a lot of flashes will take a long time to load. Second, not all themes are coded efficiently, especially when it comes to graphics.

In an ideal world, you’d choose a theme that has only the design aspects you need. It’s the stuff you don’t use that uses up your bandwidth unnecessarily.

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Try switching to a new, more streamlined theme and replicating your design there. Astra and Neve, for example, are popular themes that are simple but come with a variety of starter sites that can be customized to a massive proportion.

Look into the customization options for your current theme and see if you can disable any of the features you don’t use. This is something that many themes allow you to do.

9. Enable caching

Caching is an advanced concept in and of itself. Fortunately, we don’t need to know how it works behind the scenes to make use of it and have it help us speed up WordPress.

Simply said, caching is the process of keeping static copies of your dynamic WordPress content and then sending these static versions to repeat visitors. It’s just more efficient that way.

If you’re using EasyWP to host your website, caching is enabled by default thanks to EasyWP’s internal integration. If you’re using a different host, talk to them about the best way to enable caching on your account.

You can also look at third-party solutions and plugins. WP Rocket (premium) and WP Super Cache (free) are the most popular.

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10. Optimize your JavaScript

JavaScript is frequently required not only for the design of modern WordPress websites but also for their functionality.

With each extra plugin you install, this becomes increasingly true. For one reason or another, most plugins employ JavaScript. All of those extra scripts add up to longer load times.

Putting all scripts to the footer is an easy way to improve the way WordPress handles JavaScript. This essentially means that all JavaScript code will be removed from the load sequence and placed at the bottom.

The reader will be able to notice your key content more quickly as a result of this, which is all that matters.

11. Offload Media Files

If you use a lot of media files (for example, photos), your server will be strained since it must store and serve all of those images.

A CDN is one approach to alleviate this stress. The CDN will “lift” images from your server into the CDN cache, which it will subsequently serve.

However, because the CDN needs to query your server to fetch those photos in the first place, this still consumes resources.

Offloading your media files to external storage such as Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, Google Cloud Storage, and others will help.

You can continue to use your CDN, but it will now “lift” its media files from cloud storage rather than from your server.

Delicious Brains‘ WP Offload Media plugin can be used to accomplish this on WordPress.

12. W3C-validation

W3C validation is critical for a website’s performance to be as good as possible.

Because the browser doesn’t have to spend time figuring out what something should seem like when it’s given incorrectly, a site that validates is faster than one that doesn’t.

13. Use HTTP2

HTTP2 is a data transfer protocol between the web server and the client. HTTP2 is the first iteration of HTTP, which was created to solve modern online performance concerns.

Multiplexing is a feature of HTTP2 that allows the browser to send several requests over a single TCP connection and receive them in any order.

With this capacity, your website can manage many requests at the same time, dramatically improving its performance and user experience.

HTTP/2 will enable safe communication between browser and web server for e-commerce businesses and other pages with many items on the page, as well as a 30-60% boost in page load speed!

Conclusion

Speeding up your website is an excellent idea to boost your user experience. Above we have listed a few of the methods that will help you speed up your website.