12 Actionable Steps to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

Search engines like Google consider page speed a ranking factor as it affects the overall user experience. WordPress offers various tools and features that influence your page speed. We will demonstrate how to utilize those features to speed up WordPress.

Test How Fast Your WordPress Website Is Right Now

Before working on your website, conduct speed tests to record your performance and see what you need to improve. GTmetrix and Pingdom are some of the most popular freemium speed test tools available – they’ll provide you with the information you need.

How to Speed Up WordPress – Video Tutorial

Do you prefer video content? In our video, you will find simple ways to speed up a WordPress website!

Pick a Suitable Hosting Plan For Your WordPress Website

Web hosting providers and their plans highly influence site speed. Therefore, identifying your website’s needs is essential when choosing the right web hosting.

Choose the Closest Server Location

The location of your server determines how fast it can transfer and receive requests to load your website. The bigger the physical distance between you and the server, the longer it will take to receive and process a request. Choosing the right server location can reduce latency.

Use a Content Delivery Network

A CDN is a network of geographically distributed servers that work together to speed up the process of delivering websites to users’ browsers.

Install a WordPress Caching Plugin

When making changes to your WordPress website, your content might not update automatically on the front-end. Users will often need to clear the cache to see the updates. However, web caching speeds up WordPress websites.

Choose an Optimized WordPress Theme

The WordPress theme you use can influence your website’s speed. Choosing a well-optimized theme to speed up your WordPress site is essential.

Optimize Images

Images are vital for a website’s aesthetics. They’re one of the best ways to attract attention, show off a product, or evoke a particular emotion.

Uninstall Deactivated Plugins

A WordPress plugin helps extend the functionality of your site’s features and functionality. However, some plugins can be resource-intensive or have high usage of the admin-ajax.php file, taking a toll on the performance.

Use the Latest PHP Version

PHP is a scripting language that lets developers create dynamic, interactive websites. According to W3Techs, 76.2% of all websites use PHP with an identifiable server scripting language. The WordPress CMS and all websites built on it are written in PHP.

Update WordPress Core, Plugins, and Themes Regularly

By updating your WordPress site, you will ensure that your website always has the latest performance and security improvements. Security and performance are interconnected – if a WordPress site is vulnerable, it can be slowed down or even unusable.

Optimize the WordPress Database

A database is where all your website information is stored – from posts and pages to theme and plugin settings. WordPress uses MySQL as its default database.

Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

If you’ve ever opened a CSS, HTML, or JavaScript file, you will notice that some have a ton of spaces, line breaks, comments, and redundant characters. Although this makes these files more readable to other developers, it’s clutter, making the site load slower.

Deliver Content Over HTTP/2

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the foundation of data communication on the World Wide Web. It’s how clients and servers exchange information.

Speed up Your WordPress Site Checklist

Make sure you have done everything to speed up your WordPress site and utilize all the tools and features available.

Conclusion

A slow WordPress website will frustrate visitors and negatively affect search engine rankings. Having a speedy website is essential to ensure a good user experience and search engine optimization.

How to Speed Up WordPress FAQ

Here are some frequently asked questions about speeding up WordPress:

Why Is WordPress Being So Slow?
How Do I Increase My Website Speed?
How Do I Check the Speed of My Website?
How Do I Increase My WordPress Mobile Speed?
What Affects My Website Speed?
What Is a Good Website Load Speed?

👉
Start your website with Hostinger – get fast, secure hosting here 👈

🔗 Read more from MinimaDesk:

🎁 Download free premium WordPress tools from our Starter Tools page.