The Ultimate Guide to Boost WordPress Speed & Performance

This is one of the most profound reasons for lumpish website speed. In order to save money, bloggers and website owners invest the meager amount of money in web hosting. Later, they realize the consequences of their mistakes. Avoid opting for shared hosting, cheap service providers, or poorly configured hosting servers.

This aspect can encompass various factors responsible for slowing website speed. But two most important ones are – no caching and uncompressed website code. When you don’t activate website caching, the server becomes overloaded resulting in slower website speed.

Outdated plugins or plugins that are not compatible with the latest WordPress version may interfere with the website performance. Moreover, plugins from unauthorized sources may inject malicious files that will be detrimental to your WordPress website’s performance.

2. How to Analyze the WordPress Speed?

Someone says to you that your website is slower than a snail. This might hurt your sentiments but you cannot ignore this issue at all. You must act before it’s too late or else you will lose all the potential customers on the web.

Before you make your move, you need to verify the facts. You should have the proof that your website is actually slow.

For this purpose, there are some splendid tools available online. You can consider testing your website speed on Pingdom and GTMetrix.

You can test the loading speed and server response for various locations across the world. Moreover, you can examine the issues that are inhibiting your website’s speed and performance.

Initially, managing WordPress can be easy. This is because you don’t need to deal with excessive data. But as your website gains popularity, you are unable to emphasize on each and every aspect.

This leads to accumulation of irrelevant data such as unused images, plugins, themes, spam comments, etc.

Get rid of these by cleaning the database. You can install a plugin, such as WP-Optimize, to weed out all the useless elements from WordPress database.

Either you can restrict your investment to shared hosting services or you can embrace lightning-fast loading speeds with dedicated hosting servers.

Website speed is a ranking factor for search engine optimization, and dedicated hosting can catapult your website’s speed drastically. These two aspects are enough to instigate you to opt for dedicated hosting rather than shared hosting.

Also, shared hosting is susceptible to security threats whereas dedicated servers are more secure than the shared ones.

As the browsers fetch data from the servers, the loading time depends on the size of the web page. Minifying WordPress code can speed up your website considerably.

Hence, you should enable minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. This will diminish the amount of data that needs to be transferred. You can deploy Autoptimize to fulfill this task.

Heavy, detailed images may look fascinating, but not when it takes ages to load on a web browser. Optimizing images is a wise option for throttling your website’s speed and performance.

Smush Image Compression and Optimization is a decent plugin that can optimize, resize, and compress images for faster loading. And yes, it doesn’t degrade the image quality.

Themes and plugins are an integral part of your WordPress site. But, if they are not updated on time, they can interfere with the site’s performance. As the website owner, you may feel devastated.

Hence, as soon as the updates are released, ensure that you update them as soon as possible.

There are several WordPress themes that look elegant but they are not optimized for faster loading speeds. You should consider minimalistic themes, such as Spacious theme, that ensures quick loading speed.

As the loading speed varies with respect to the geographic location, you would like the website to load as quickly as possible. For this purpose, you can opt for the Content Delivery Network (CDN).

CDN is a network of servers well-distributed across the world. These servers store the static version of your websites. So when a visitor searches for your website, the closest server to the visitor will respond and load the web page immediately.

Some of the renowned CDN providers are MaxCDN and CloudFlare.

The internet browsers make the website loading process look neat and simple. Actually, it is much more complicated and time-consuming.

The server sends requests, gathers data from the database, processes it into an HTML file, and then displays it to the user. A caching plugin simplifies the task for the server without compromising on the user experience factor.

A caching plugin will save a cached version of the web page. Whenever a command is generated to view the content, the cached version will be displayed immediately.

Consider W3 Total Cache Plugin for the caching process. But if you are on a dedicated server, you can do without a caching plugin on your WordPress site.