My Inquisitor
Today our aim is to speed up our WordPress website and as usual, I’ll try to cover everything from why speed matters, factors that are responsible for your WordPress site’s speed, and how to speed up your WordPress website?
Before starting, I request you all, please don’t skip the article and read it completely, or hit the back button and read some jokes, this is not for you.
Let’s start!
Why does the speed of websites matter?
If you have a slow website then you will never reach your potential customer. A slow website will kill your search engine ranking and revenue stream as well.
Nobody loves a slow website and that’s a fact. I’m willing to bet a slow website isn’t one of your favorite things. Slow websites can drive you crazy if you’re patient enough to stick around.
According to recent research, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds, which means you have very little time to show your content and convince the users to stay on your website.
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A slow website means users will potentially leave your website before it loads.
If Amazon’s site loads 0.5 seconds late in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%, that means Jeff Bezos could lose $5 million in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition.
Now, you can imagine, How is speed important to a website owner?
What makes your website slow?
Well, there are lots of factors that are responsible for your website’s speed.
Some of them are listed below.
1. Web Hosting
If you are running on cheap and slow hosting, that will hurt your wordpress website speed the most.
2. WordPress Configuration
If your WordPress site is not serving cached pages, then it will overload your server thus causing your website to be slow or crash entirely.
3. Infected Plugins
Choose the plugins wisely, if you’re using an infected or poorly coded plugin, then it can significantly slow down your website.
4. Poorly Coded themes or Nulled themes
If you’re using a wp-theme that is poorly coded or downloaded illegally (Nulled) which may have malware or backdoor, then it may also slow down your website or crash/hacked entirely
5. Page Size
Page speed depends on many factors like non-optimized images, using java-scripts on the top, unused code and so on.
6. Third party scripts
Third party scripts or external scripts such as ads, font loaders, etc can also have a huge impact on your website performance.
7. Unused themes and plugins
If you have so many unused themes and plugins, that may also affect your website’s speed.
8. Too many redirects and HTTPS requests
Does your website require a thousand files to display that first instant? If so, you’re losing a lot of precious seconds.
9. Geographical locations
If your users are in different geographical locations will have a completely different experience.
How to test the website speed?
Now we come to know how to test website speed?
For that there are lots of tools available online for free, you can use to test your page speed.
Some of them are given below.
1. IsItWP’s
It is a free tool which analyzes whether your website is fast enough and gets insights into how to improve your page load time with our free WordPress website speed test tool.
2. Page Speed Insights
It is a completely free tool provided by Google to test your page speed, showing results for both, mobile and desktop. It also provides suggestions to improve your page speed.
3. Gtmetrix
It is one of the most trusted and oldest tools for testing page speeds with suggestions too. They are providing both, free and paid services.
4. Pingdom Page speed test
It is one of my favs because they are using more than 70 global polling locations to test and verify our customers’ websites 24/7, all year long.
Their services are also available in both categories, free and paid.
5. Wp-Engine Web speed tester
They are also following Google’s footprints, as they are testing WordPress site page speed, including both desktop and mobile versions, and receive actionable recommendations to make it faster & speed up your WordPress website.
Now, we come to our main topic!!
How to speed up your WordPress website?
WordPress claims that 23% site all over the world are running on their CMS platform, Hence
1. Choose the best WordPress hosting Services
As I told you before hosting is the most important factor that is responsible for your webpage speed.
So, choose the hosting wisely.
By the way, we are running on Hostgator, but may choose one among the Bluehost, WP-Engine, Hostinger, hostgator, godaddy, and sitegrounds.
Most of the WordPress experts refer to Wp-Engine as they claim 54% speed faster than other hostings, but it is a little bit expensive!
Now, it all depends on your budget.
2. Delete unused themes and plugins
Unused themes and plugins may slow downs your page speed as they are still using your server space which may face more load by keeping them.
So, delete your unused themes and plugins as soon as possible.
3. Use the latest versions of plugins, themes, and wp
Always use the latest version of your themes, plugins, WordPress(5.4 in April, 2k20) and php(7.4).
For Updating wp-theme and plugins,
https://site.com/wp-admin > Dashboard > Update
4. Use Optimized Images
Always use optimized images on your site, by optimizing compress the image size without any change in quality, you should use plugins like EWWW image optimizer or use online tools like Image optimizer, Image compressor.
5. Turn on Gzip compression
Gzip compression is a cool and easy way of speeding up your WordPress site. It is a feature that instructs your server to compress your website (all the files) before sending the same to your web visitors.
Your website is then decompressed at the browser level. It is also a file format. Compression allows your web server to provide smaller file sizes which load faster for your website users.
You can use a plugin like Gzip compression for this, it may help you to do this for you in just one click.
Or
Just navigate to your WordPress Options Screen at http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/options.php and change the value of the gzip compression field from 0 to 1.
Replace http://yourdomain.com with your own domain.
Obviously, you must first login to your site for this to work
6. Use Latest PHP Version
WordPress is mainly written in the PHP programming language. It is a server-side language, which means it is installed and runs on your hosting server. So, it is very necessary to be up to date with PHP versions.
For Updating php version from cpanel,
Login to your cpanel > Software section > Select php version > select latest version > update
7. Reduce HTTP requests
HTTP requests are requests that get sent to the server whenever someone visits your website. Reducing HTTP requests to your server is the biggest improvement you can make to your website.
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8. Use CDN
CDN stands for Content Delivery Networks are a network of optimized servers across the globe that guarantee fast delivery of static content such as images, CSS and JavaScript. The goal of CDNs is to overcome the impact of geographical location on the page speed and serves with the same speed all over the world.
Some of the popular CDNs are:-
We are using CloudFlare CDN.
9. Enable caching
Enabling cache on your WordPress website is super duper easy and the most important way to speed up your website.
Actually, it is very helpful for those users who visit your websites frequently.
It is important because it reduces the load on your WordPress hosting servers and makes your website run faster.
You can enable it in three ways:-
- By using a plugin like WP Fastest Cache, W3 Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, Sucuri Firewall, etc. (We are using w3 cache)
- By enabling caching directly from Cpanel or WHM.
- You can enable browser caching by placing the code below in your .htaccess file.
## EXPIRES CACHING ## <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year" ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month" ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month" ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year" ExpiresDefault "access 1 month" </IfModule> ## EXPIRES CACHING ##
10. Minify CSS, JS and Database
Minify means smaller in size, by minifying your css and js code and database leads to reduce in page size.
Here is an example of normal CSS code:
body {
margin:20px;
padding:20px;
color:#333;
background:#f7f7f7;
}
h1 {
font-size:32px;
margin-bottom:10px;
}After minifying the code it will look like this:
body{margin:20px;padding:20px;color:#333;background:#f7f7f7}h1{font-size:32px;margin-bottom:10px}You may do it by using some plugins like Better WordPress Minify, or online tools after coding like Minifier, WillPeavy.
11. Lazy Load
Instead of loading the entire web page and rendering it to the user in one go as in bulk loading, Some of the best plugins are Lazy Load, Smush.
Or if you are using Jetpack then you don’t need to install any other plugin.
12. Use Stylesheets at the top and scripts at the bottom
If you want your site to load faster, place your CSS at the top in the <head> section and JavaScript at the bottom.
This allows the browser to load your CSS first so that users can see the content on your site load before the javascript so users are not waiting for the JS to load if they have slow connections.
Site architecture affects the performance of your site in more ways than you think, So always use your follow it to enhance your site’s SEO and performance as well.
14. Deactivate Jetpack features you don’t use
Deactivate the Jetpack features you don’t use because it may also affect your webpage speed as they have js which may take time to load.
15. Take out trash
Trash is like a recycle bin on your server, and WordPress auto empties trash in every thirty days, but you can change this by editing your wp-config.php file:-
<strong>define( 'EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 7 );</strong>
The above code will instruct WordPress to clear trash after every seven days while the following code will disable the trash feature for good:
<strong>define( 'EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 0 );</strong>
16. Disable Hotlinking and Leaching of Your Content
Simply add this code to your .htaccess file to block hotlinking of images from your WordPress site.
#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?myinquisitor.in [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L] Note: replace myinquisitor.in with your own domain.
17. Limit Your External Scripts
Again, Scripts! I.e. js (javascript) actually it is your enemy 😉 who hate your website speed.
Jokes Apart!
Some examples of external scripts are:-
- Social media sharing buttons:- the famous Facebook Like and Twitter Follow buttons.YouTube and other video embed scripts.
- External comment plugins such as Intense Debate, Google+ Comments, Disqus etc. (by the way, if you have jetpack, then I don’t think you guys need these types of plugins.)
- Live Chat
- External opt in forms and pop ups
- External font scripts, Et cetera, et cetera,
So, use as minimum as you can!
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18. Activate Plugins Wisely
Be careful what you install because some plugins could destroy your entire website due to poorly coded or infected with malware.
Some beginners installed too many plugins, even for small works. And after some time they will realize that they might not need all of them.
Some plugins are multi-talented as they do multiple works,
For example, if you have Yoast SEO, therefore you don’t need an XML sitemap plugin,
If you have a jetpack, you don’t need comment plugin, lazyload plugin, related posts plugin.
19. Ads Matters too
Advertisements are a great revenue stream for many websites, but they too can negatively impact your page load time and you will kill your own revenue.
So, use them wisely and limited.
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Last Words 🙂
I know this is a very long article but if you wanted to speed-up your website and rank it in search results, then you have to follow the given tips strongly.
If you do so,
Congratulations!!!!!
You are a Pilot of your own website, press the accelerator as much as you can.
If I forgot something, please tell me in the comment section.
And leave your feedback also, because it will motivate me to write more content like this and also improve myself.
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