The Ultimate Guide to Wordpress Speed Optimization
14 minutes
Introduction
Optimizing WordPress website for speed and performance is crucial for better user experience, reducing bounce rates, and possibly improving its position in search engine results. Therefore, it's suggested that a collection of effective and practical steps be followed to speed up WordPress websites to make them stand out against competitors.
The WordPress speed optimization is the process of refining, tweaking, and customizing a WordPress site to make it load faster and more easily discoverable. Prioritize optimizing WordPress website for speed and performance as much as you can to create a strong initial impression and improve search engine ranking(SERP).
This article will put together actionable and comprehensive steps to speed up WordPress websites. Follow this guide as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time fix to optimize WordPress site for speed and performance.
Why is a fast site important?
Website speed determines SERP ranking
Google indicated that a good score in Core Web Vitals is essential for better SERP ranking and user experience. The Core Web Vitals is a set of three factors - Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint that Google considers important for page performance and user experience.
Better conversion rates
The fast sites are not only easier to crawl but also relevant from a visitor's perspective. Your site always needs to keep users' attention within a very short window of time. Any delay in loading a page will most likely drive away visitors' attention to something else thereby losing an opportunity to convert a targeted action on the page.
How to check your current website speed?
There are plenty of tools out there to measure site speed and page loading time. The following two tools will let you find your site's performance pointing to any anomalies in Core Web Vitals.
PageSpeed Insights(PSI): A free tool from Google itself that scans your sites, reports performance across devices, and provides you suggestions to speed up your WordPress site.
An extension of PageSpeed Insights by the name lighthouse is available in Google Chrome to make it easy for you to diagnose your site's speed and performance.
GTmetrix: This tool scans sites specifically for speed-related optimization opportunities and utilizes the lighthouse internally.
The first step of optimizing a site for speed and performance is to analyze the page speed reports utilizing any of these mentioned tools and based on provided suggestions, start optimizing your site.
What can cause speed slowdowns
There could be multiple factors contributing to the delay in page load time. If you've examined the page speed analysis, you have already got an idea about the reasons behind your site's sluggish performance. The analysis will offer recommendations for addressing all issues related to page speed. However, the primary causes, though not exclusive to WordPress sites, include the following:
Plugins
WordPress plugins serve as tools to enhance the capabilities of websites, but they can lead to significant performance problems if not carefully selected. The performance of plugins also plays a role in the speed of pages, and certain plugins might be overburdening your server. Nonetheless, with a plugin profiler like code profiler, it's feasible to identify which plugins are slowing down your site's page load time.
Additionally, you can identify which plugins are causing your website to load at a slower pace by temporarily disabling them and then conducting speed tests with tools like Lighthouse or GTMetrix. By reviewing the results of these speed tests, you can identify the plugins that are using a lot of server resources, thereby impacting the page load time of your website.
Heavy Theme
The primary role of a WordPress theme is to present the material on your website in an appealing and organized manner through CSS and Java scripts. The theme you've chosen likely comes with numerous features and options at the expense of page loading speed.
In this scenario, although the theme may seem attractive, its performance issues could deter visitors from returning to your site. Therefore, it might be a good idea to discuss changes with the developers or theme creators to adjust the theme to speed up WordPress sites.
To determine if the WordPress theme is affecting the website's performance, access the Lighthouse or GTMetrix report and look for the loading time required to access resources from the theme's folder. If the time it takes to load resources from the theme's folder is notably higher, you should either optimize the theme or at the very least, implement a caching plugin to speed up WordPress websites.
Large unoptimized images
The Image sizes of your site contribute to the size of the web pages and the size of the web page is directly proportional to the page load time. The solution is to reduce the size of the original images without compromising the quality by choosing a suitable image format and size.
The WebP image format is particularly effective in achieving better compression without any loss in image quality, while you perform the steps for speed optimization in WordPress.
Alternatively, you can manually optimize images with software like Adobe Photoshop. Nonetheless, there are several excellent add-ons available that can handle the optimization of images before they are uploaded to a site. One example of a free add-on is WP-SmushIt, which simplifies the task of optimizing images as you upload them to your website.
Slow Server
A different factor contributing to your WordPress site's sluggish performance might not be your fault but could be attributed to the hosting provider. With shared hosting, there's no assurance that your site's page load times will always be in line with your expectations, even after optimizing it for speed.
This is because you're sharing resources like space, computing power, and bandwidth with numerous other websites, all vying for these resources during busy times. By choosing a shared hosting, you can't adjust the server settings to meet your specific needs. To sum up, shared hosting often results in slower page load times.
Conversely, WordPress hosting services such as WPEngine provide access to a readily available, optimized server with assured speed and performance. In addition, they might include complimentary backup and updates for your WordPress sites without any extra charges.
If your website is large and has the resources to maintain it over time, you might consider a dedicated server. This option benefits from its high speed and bandwidth. Many cloud hosting providers offer dedicated servers that are exclusively for you, though the initial cost might be slightly higher. Nowadays, virtually all hosting companies offer virtual private servers (VPS), which strike a balance between speed and cost, making them a good alternative to a dedicated server.
Importance of choosing a proven web hosting provider
Selecting an appropriate web hosting provider is crucial for achieving optimal page speed and performance. If your web host is utilizing old or substandard equipment, there will be limits to how much you can enhance speed, even after optimizing your site for speed.
While choosing a web hosting service, it's essential to review their uptime guarantee, customer support, and security measures. If you're managing your WordPress site on a dedicated server or a Virtual Private Server (VPS), be sure to examine all the features related to memory, speed, or storage that impact the performance of a web page.
Speed Optimization
Different elements influence how quickly a WordPress website loads, beginning with picking an appropriate theme, choosing the correct plugins, utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and more. The checklist might seem extensive, but you need to follow these steps to speed up a WordPress site, ensuring it loads in under 2 seconds.
Choosing the right theme
As previously mentioned, when you begin to optimize a WordPress site for faster performance, it's essential to select a lightweight, clean, and minimalist theme that is already optimized for speed on both the front and back end. Fortunately, there are tons of such themes available for free selection.
Alternatively, you can opt to create a lightweight theme from the ground up. However, while deciding to choose or create a theme, it's important to consider the following factors:
- The theme should be based on a proven framework like Bootstrap, Avada, or Genesis which are already optimized for speed.
- The theme's files ought to be compact.
- The HTML and CSS scripts should be optimized.
- The theme should be devoid of unnecessary features that are of no interest to anyone.
Install a Caching Plugin
WordPress pages are dynamic, meaning each time a page is requested by a user, an HTML page is instantly created. This process includes connecting to the database, pulling data from the database, and creating an HTML page by using CSS and JavaScript. However, if your site experiences high traffic, creating a new page for each request can significantly slow down your site.
To avoid this, a caching plugin can store a copy of the generated HTML page in a temporary file. The next time the page is requested, it can be served from this temporary file, eliminating the need to recreate the HTML page each time and increasing the performance of WordPress sites.
There are a lot of caching plugins available freely that you can choose in the process of optimizing a WordPress site for speed. WP Fastest Cache is one such plugin that you can leverage to speed up your WordPress website.
Image Optimization using a Plugin
We've mentioned how poorly optimized images can make a page load slower. Using an image plugin is highly effective for the WordPress page speed optimization process. To speed up the load time of images, use an Image optimizer plugin to compress images with different sizes and formats while you upload images to your site.
Leveraging an Image optimizer plugin will compress images with different sizes and formats while you upload images with less time and more efficiently. If you prefer a free plugin then try using EWWW Image Optimizer - an awesome plugin to optimize images in WordPress sites.
GZIP Compression
By utilizing gzip compression, it's feasible to reduce the size of a web page by 70%, thereby making it smaller and accelerating its loading speed in the browser. All contemporary web browsers are capable of decoding compressed files, and by employing this capability, you can significantly enhance the load time of web pages.
The browser will retrieve the compressed pages, and then decompress them before rendering them in the browser. This leads to a significant reduction in bandwidth consumption on the server side. The caching plugin we mentioned earlier can automatically compress web pages.
Implement GZIP compression on your HTTP server (NGINX, Apache) in the process of WordPress page speed optimization.
Using a CDN
The time it takes for a page to load for users located across different geographic locations will differ. Users close to the server's location will see quicker loading times compared to those who are further away. A content delivery network (CDN) is made up of a series of servers spread worldwide. These servers store the non-changing elements of web pages, such as CSS, JavaScript, or images.
When a user requests a page, the non-changing elements are retrieved from the server closest to the user. By using a CDN, your web hosting server will no longer need to handle these non-changing elements, which can make the page load times slightly faster. Consider checking out well-known CDN services like MaxCDN, KeyCDN, Sucuri, or Cloudflare before deciding on their premium plan.
Update your website, plugins, and themes regularly
WordPress is a well-preserved, open-source initiative that regularly introduces new versions. These updates include new functionalities, enhanced security, and fixes for bugs. A newer versions often improve performance, resulting in quicker page loading times.
This applies to WordPress themes and plugins as well. It's advisable to ensure that your main WordPress files, themes, and plugins are always up to date. By doing this, you're safeguarding your WordPress site against potential slowdowns and security risks.
Embed Media such as videos to an external site/service
While it's feasible to upload and stream media content such as audio or video files directly to a WordPress site, this approach can lead to significant bandwidth consumption and also increase the file size of your site. This, in turn, can result in slower page load times for your site.
A better alternative is to store the media files on third-party platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, or SoundCloud. To do this, simply copy the video's URL and insert it into your WordPress post. WordPress will then automatically embed the video into the post, and there's a good chance that the third-party platform will stream the media files more efficiently than your server thereby achieving a better page speed/load time!
Using Redis for database storage
When WordPress loads a page for a visitor, it connects to the database to pull up data after running searches, which is costly and leads to slower page load time for all users. This issue can be addressed by leveraging Redis, a free, in-memory data structure designed to store database results and also acts as a message broker.
Redis can alleviate this issue by storing the query results and then serving those results for future page requests, retrieved from Redis objects. If the database results are not present in the Redis cache, they are fetched from the database and then added to the cache.
This means that if a visitor comes back to the same page, the results are retrieved from the Redis cache, eliminating the need to query the database again. When the database is updated, Redis objects for the query are marked as invalid to ensure that the cache data does not get sent to another user. A Redis cache for a WordPress database will significantly speed up a WordPress site.
Therefore, make sure you use Redis cache for the database in your scheme of WordPress page speed optimization.
PHP script caching
When a visitor requests a page, PHP retrieves the scripts, compiles them into bytecode, and then runs the page. Without a caching system for PHP's opcodes, this process is repeated for each request, leading to significant inefficiency. Zend's OPCache enhances PHP's performance by storing precompiled scripts in shared memory, eliminating the need to re-load and parse the script for each request.
This feature is available in PHP since version 5.5 and requires only the adjustment of OPCode settings to meet your needs. With OPCode caching activated, PHP will bypass many steps, resulting in substantial improvements in page speed performance.
Use lazy loading
Another way to improve the page load time is to use lazy loading if you are using too many images, photo galleries, and videos on your site. What lazy loading does is that instead of loading all the images or videos at once, it downloads those images and videos which are visible on the browser's screen while substituting the rest of the images and videos with placeholder images/videos.
When the user scrolls down the page, it will load the images one by one that are now visible in the browser. As a result, the page load time will increase significantly and save bandwidth as well by loading comparatively less data for visitors who don't wish to scroll to the end of the page. There are a lot of free plugins available that you can choose while incorporating the lazy load feature to optimize a WordPress site for performance.
Utilize a WAF like Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a platform that can deliver content from your WordPress site at lightning speed, thereby speeding up your site's performance for faster page load time. Cloudflare is more than just a CDN. Its optimization capabilities enable you to boost the efficiency of any WordPress site more than a standard CDN can achieve.
The 'Bypass Cache on Cookie' feature of Cloudflare enables a full cache of pages that are not logged in, preventing your server from regenerating pages that are essentially static. The good thing about Cloudflare is that it offers a premium DNS service known for its speed and reliability. By leveraging Cloudflare's DNS service, you can expedite page load times as DNS record lookups for your domain, which is a critical step, can be completed in mere milliseconds.
Moreover, Cloudflare's DNS-level firewall safeguards your WordPress site against cyber threats before they even reach your site. Cloudflare is adept at defending your WordPress site against brute force attacks and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Install the newest PHP version
The server-side scripting language used by WordPress is PHP. The majority of WordPress hosting providers utilize a stable PHP version. Nonetheless, it might not be the most recent, and should you be willing, update the PHP to the latest version.
However, If you managing your WordPress site on your server, it's advisable to always update PHP to the latest version to benefit from improved performance over its older iterations. If your site is hosted on a shared or managed WordPress platform, inquire from the hosting provider to update to the latest PHP versions for you if they are not already installed.
Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks are two features of WordPress that are used to communicate with another site in the form of notifications, but it is also a primary source of spam notifications. The notification will be in the form of email but it can also be delivered directly to the Wordpress admin dashboard.
The pingbacks and trackback options will unnecessarily consume the server's resources. Just to mention, fewer calls to your site will make it better and also improve your site’s performance.
Conclusion
This guide outlines several methods to enhance the speed of a WordPress website. Whether you've already taken steps towards optimization, there are ways to confirm the increase in speed through a Speed test. Even a small minor adjustments can significantly improve performance, and you're free to add more steps at a later time.
In conclusion, speed optimization in WordPress should not be a one-off activity but an ongoing effort to make the page load speed faster always. By incorporating strategies to improve speed and performance in WordPress workflow, you guarantee that your site stays fast and effective.
