Last updated on June 5th, 2020 at 11:39 am
In this article, I will reveal how to speed up WordPress website in 5 simple ways. And don’t worry, you don’t need to touch any code or any other technical stuff. All you need is your mouse and follow instructions. That is it.
Don’t be fooled though.
It may sound so easy to optimize your website performance. It takes much work and in some other times, you have to dig deeper into your pockets.
Lucky for you, what you are about to see isn’t complicated, so much that anyone can execute.
You see, website speed is more important today than never before. In fact, it is so important that Google is using your page speed to determine whether you should rank on page one or somewhere no one will ever find you.
For this reason, it paramount that you work on your page load time.
Additionally, a slow loading website drives away visitors. That gets ugly if you are an e-commerce website. Why? Because studies have found that even a 1-second delay in page load can lead to a 7% drop in conversion rates.
I don’t know about you, but that’s huge. Imagine losing customers because your page couldn’t load fast enough?
And yes, humans are now so impatient. We want instant things and that includes your page load time.
How to speed up a WordPress website (5 ways)
Choosing a good hosting plan for a fast website
Unfortunately, this website speed thing starts from that first day you decided to build a website.
You see, your web hosting plan is so crucial, leave alone website speed. If the company you picked lacks quality hardware to store your site, it means one thing: an unreliable website.
Here is the thing:
If your website is unreliable, it doesn’t matter how fast it is, because you will be losing visitors fast.
Moving on, speeding up a WordPress website, we have exactly what you need. This includes shared hosting, VPS, dedicated hosting, and cloud hosting.
The thing is, issues start mounting once your website starts attracting more and more visitors. At such moments, you should consider upgrading your hosting plan.
For example:
If you are using a silver hosting package, you opt for a VPS. And we have a perfect plan, Litespeed VPS, with this server, you can 10X the speed of your website instantly and only a fraction of the cost, KES 699 per month.
Is this something you’d be interested in? Check it out here now.
Enable dynamic caching
This will answer how to speed up a WordPress website instantly. The results will be visible almost immediately.
Here is what’s going on:
A page is loaded every time a visitor comes to your wordpress site. This quite takes up a huge chunk of resources which include your CPU and puts a strain on the database.
Additionally, a page takes some time to load, which means every visitor will experience some delay.
Solution?
Implement dynamic caching.
The cache is a temporary memory. Hence, dynamic caching is the process of saving a copy of the page and serve it to the next visitor.
By doing so, the page load is eliminated since the reader is served a stored page. This means that your server has less work to do, as a result, other pages will work faster.
How to implement caching
- Go to your wordpress dashboard
- Add new plugins
- Search for caching plugins such as WP Super Cache
- Install and activate it
Using a CDN
What is CDN?
It is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). These are networks of servers dispersed across the globe.
Ideally, there are some resources on your website that never change such as images, Javascript, and CSS. As such, you can duplicate and store these types of files on a CDN network.
Then what happens is that every time a visitor comes, a CDN will determine his location based on the IP address, and then serve files from the server closest to him.
Basically, what you just did is reduce latency and hence impacted how fast your website loads by not serving the user from a server located across the other side of the world.
Optimize images on your website
Today, web visitors expect quality images. And unfortunately, such images are of large sizes, hundreds of MBs.
Such sites are the ones causing your pages to load slowly. If only you can optimize them, you can have a faster loading website.
How?
- Use JPEG image formats and maybe PNG. But avoid TIFF and BMP image formats
- Implement lady ‘loading for images’ – this is a feature that enables you to only load images when the user sees them and not before. Use the Jetpack plugin
- Consider resizing images. There is no point of uploading a 2000px image when your website supports 500px
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Your website is relying on JavaScript and CSS to function. While they are vital, their sizes are an issue.
For this reason, consider reducing the sizes of these text files by minifying.
Ideally, you are:
- Doing away with comments
- Removing extra spaces and useless line breaks
- Bloc delimiters
By doing so, you are cleaning the code and making them lighter, which in turn results in reduced data transfer which ultimately culminates in reduce page load time
How?
Install the following plugins:
- WP Super Minify
- Better WordPress Minify
And if you prefer to do it manually, the following tools might help:
Final thoughts on how to speed a website
These are 5 simple ways on how to speed up a WordPress website without coding skills whatsoever.
Implement these recommendations now and see immediate results. We talked about the Litespeed VPS server.
Here is the link again to check available plans and 10X your website speed now