If you’re a blogger or a website developer you already know by now how website speed can affect your search engine rankings, your bounce rates, your Click Through Rates (CTR) and most importantly the number of visitors coming on your website.
If you’re not sure how fast is your website, you can check the speed using one of the following website speed test tools or use one of the links below:
In this article, we’re going to discuss how you can leverage simple skills and improve speed for your WordPress website.
So if you want to speed up your website, check out and implement these WordPress Performance Optimization Tips
#1 Find a better hosting plan.
So once we really talk about how to optimize a WordPress website we cannot forget the fact that hosting is the #1 thing that could possibly ruin your website speed. Personally, I’ve seen people make poor choices just because a “Blogger” or a “YouTuber” recommended a hosting plan, I’ve been there to.
Whichever hosting people are talking about, research which one works out for you, look at their reviews, ask your colleagues, your friends and then finally pick one.
#2 Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Hosting your files on a CDN can immensely improve your website.
How does it operate? Let’s say your MAIN server is from the United States and you get a visitor from the Philippines, your visitor will be downloading files from a server that’s closest to them and not from United States.
#3 Use a caching plugin
If you’re using WordPress this over here is a no-brainer. You have to take the trash out; you can use these plugins for it:
Both work the same and both are absolutely free.
#4 Use a fast loading theme
If you don’t want to invest on your website, there are plenty of free themes out there. Again whichever theme you choose, look at its page loading time on websites like GTMetrix and Pingdom.
Before choosing a theme for Chasing Millennia I actually narrowed down 10 themes and checked their speeds individually, finally, I figured one out that loaded in 2.2 seconds. Now Chasing Millennia loads in under 2.2 seconds
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#5 Compress your Images
You can’t have a good loading speed if your WordPress database is full of heavy images.
Personally I use plugins called WP Smush and EWWW image optimizer. Both of them are perfect for reducing image size. However, the free version of WP Smush can compress images below 1 MB whereas EWWW has no limit.
If you’re looking for more excellent image optimization tools, check out the list of best image optimization tools you can use for free.
#6 Have to take out some more trash
Like every CMS platform, WordPress has its disadvantages. One of its disadvantages is that your database can get very chaotic because of your post revisions and saved drafts.
You can use a plugin called WP optimize to clear up your database. It will delete everything that you don’t need.
#7 Declutter your pages
When building a website, don’t get carried away. Using Pop-up windows can surely make your website look beautiful but it can immensely increase your Loading Times.
#8 Zip up your website.
Gzip compression helps by compressing your website into one small website which makes it blazing fast. You can always ask your hosting service to set it up for you.
#9 Broken links are Horrible
If you’ve got links that are not working, it can ruin your website performance. Broken links end up causing a bad user experience, ruins your search rankings, and most importantly, slows down your website.
#10 Minify your CSS and JS files
Just like GZip compression, minifying your CSS and JS files is going to make you WordPress website size smaller. Minifying these files will remove all the white spaces, lines and unnecessary characters from the source code.
Most websites use Autoptimize plugin, it’s plain, simple, and gets the job done,
#11 Enable Keep-Alive
If you have a lot of images on your website, Keep-alive will speed up your WordPress website. Keep-alive keeps a single connection that will be used continuously to transfer multiple files.
You can ask your hosting provider to set it up for you.
#12 Specify Image Dimensions
If your visitor’s web browsers won’t know the image dimensions of pictures it’s going to slow down your website. That’s why you need to specify image dimensions to get your page speed score up.
All you have to do is go to the image, edit and modify the image dimensions in your WordPress Dashboard.
#13 Disable trackbacks and pings
Trackbacks and pings were basically introduced to notify people about links that you don’t need.
Pings and trackbacks are mostly used by spammers to send fake trackbacks.
Here’s how you can turn it off:
- Go to your WordPress Dashboard> Settings> Discussion> Uncheck the box that says “Allow link notifications from other blogs on new articles.
- Now go to Posts> All Posts> Select All> Select Edit> Apply> Pings: Do not allow (you will see this on the right side)
#14 Leverage browsers caching to increase your website speed
Leveraging the browser cache basically means that you can specify the amount of time web browsers keep CSS, javascript, images and other files.
You can use a plugin for this called WP Rocket.
Another way to enable your browser caching is by asking your hosting provider.
#15 Disable hotlinking of images
Hotlinking images will steal bandwidth from your website that can increase your page load times.
You can disable hotlinking by adding the following code to your .htcaccess file
Be sure to add your site instead of “yoursite.com”
#16 Leveraging Browser Caching via .htaccess
Set caching headers by adding the following code to your .htaccess file. You can grab the code here.
