No one wants to wait for a slow website. We've done everything we can to make SidelinePlay one of the fastest WordPress websites in the world.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, fast-loading web pages are essential. They keep your visitors engaged, increase page views, and even help boost your WordPress SEO.
By tuning our own website’s performance and providing professional website speed optimization services, we’ve learned the most effective strategies for making a slow website fast.
In this article, we will share the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips to improve WordPress performance and speed up your website.
Unlike other “X best WordPress caching plugins” lists or generic “X tips to speed up WordPress” tutorials, this article is a comprehensive guide to WordPress performance optimization.
We’ve tried to cover everything from why speed is so important to what causes your WordPress site to be slow and what actionable steps you can take to increase your WordPress speed instantly.
💡Need help with WordPress website management? Let WPBeginner experts handle all your technical WordPress issues for you. Backups, updates, security – we take care of it. We make sure your website runs smoothly so you can focus on what’s really important.
For your convenience, we have created a table of contents to help you navigate through our ultimate guide to speeding up your WordPress site.
Table of contents
WordPress Performance Basics
- Why Speed Is Important for Your WordPress Website
- How to Check Your WordPress Site Speed
- What Slows Down Your WordPress Site?
- The Importance of Quality WordPress Hosting
Speed up WordPress in a few easy steps (no coding required)
- Install a WordPress caching plugin
- Optimize images for speed
WordPress Performance Optimization Best Practices
- Keep your WordPress site updated
- Optimize background processes
- Use excerpts on home page and archives
- Split comments into pages
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Do not upload audio or video files directly to WordPress
- Use a theme optimized for speed
- Use Faster Plugins
Fine-tune WordPress speed (Advanced)
- Split long articles into pages
- Reduce external HTTP requests
- Reduce database calls
- Optimizing WordPress Database
- Restrict post editing
- Disable hotlinking and scraping of content
- Use lazy loading if necessary
- Use a DNS-level website firewall
- Fix HTTPS/SSL errors without plugins
- Use the latest PHP version
Why Speed Is Important for Your WordPress Website
Research shows that the average human attention span dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds between 2000 and 2016. Today, the average attention span is about 8.25 seconds.
What does this mean for you as a website owner?
This means you have very little time to present your content to users and convince them to stay on your WordPress website.
A slow website means users are likely to leave before your page loads.
According to StrangeLoop case studies involving Amazon, Google, and other large websites, a 1-second delay in page load time can result in a 7% loss in conversions, an 11% decrease in page views, and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction.
On top of this, Google and other search engines have begun penalizing slower websites by ranking them lower in search results, which means slower websites will see less traffic.
To summarize, if you want to get more traffic, subscribers, and revenue from your website, then you must make your WordPress website faster!
How to Check Your WordPress Site Speed
Newbies often think that as long as their website doesn’t seem slow on their computer, it’s fine. This is a big mistake.
Since you visit your website so often, modern browsers like Chrome will store your website in cache and automatically preload it when you start typing the URL. This allows your website to load almost instantly.
However, an average user visiting your website for the first time may not have the same experience. In fact, users in different geographical locations will have completely different experiences.
That’s why we recommend that you test your website speed using a tool like IsItWP’s WordPress Speed Test.
It is a free online tool that allows you to test the speed of your website.
After running a website speed test, you may be wondering what you should set your website speed to.
A good page load time should be under 2 seconds.
However, faster is better. A few milliseconds of improvement here can shave half a second or even a full second off your load time.
What Slows Down Your WordPress Site?
Your speed test report may include several suggestions for improvement. However, most of these suggestions are in technical terms that are difficult for beginners to understand.
Understanding what’s slowing down your site is key to improving performance and making smarter long-term decisions.
The main reasons why your WordPress site is slow are:
- Web Hosting – If your web hosting server is not configured correctly, it can affect your website speed.
- WordPress Configuration – If your WordPress website is not serving cached pages, then it will overload your server and cause your website to run slowly or crash completely.
- Page size – If you use images that are not optimized for the web, your pages will load slowly.
- Bad Plugins – If you use poorly coded plugins, then it can slow down your website significantly.
- External scripts – External scripts like ads, font loaders, etc. can also have a huge impact on your website’s performance.
Now that you know what can slow down your WordPress site, let’s look at how to speed up your WordPress site.
Pro Tip: Want to reduce the number of plugins on your website? Then start using WPCode ! This is a powerful WordPress code snippet management plugin. It can easily help you reduce at least 5 plugins.
The Importance of Quality WordPress Hosting
Your WordPress hosting service plays a vital role in your website’s performance. Premium shared hosting providers like Bluehost or SiteGround take extra steps to optimize your website’s performance.
However, with shared hosting, you’re sharing server resources with many other customers. This means that if your neighboring sites get a lot of traffic, it can affect the performance of the entire server, slowing down your site.
On the other hand, using a managed WordPress service can provide you with the most optimized server configuration to run WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting companies also provide automatic backups, automatic WordPress updates, and more advanced security configurations to protect your website.
We recommend SiteGround as our preferred WordPress hosting provider. We use them on our WPBeginner blog and they are one of the most popular providers in the industry.
Speed up WordPress in just a few easy steps (no coding required)
We know that changing your website configuration can be a scary thing for beginners, especially if you are not a tech expert.
But don't worry, there is a way to fix this.
If you’re not willing to make changes to your site yourself, WPBeginner Pro Services offers affordable website speed optimization services to handle it for you.
Our WordPress experts will help you quickly improve your website speed and performance. Website speed optimization services include cache configuration, CDN setup, image compression, lazy loading, before and after performance reports, and more.
This is a great option if you’re not tech-savvy, don’t have the time to do the optimization yourself, or just want total peace of mind.
However, we have helped thousands of WordPress users improve their WordPress performance.
Therefore, we’ll also show you how to speed up your WordPress site in just a few clicks (no coding required).
If you can point and click, you can do this!
Install a WordPress caching plugin
WordPress pages are dynamic. This means that every time someone visits a post or page on your website, the page is built dynamically.
In order to build your page, WordPress has to run a process to find the required information, put it together, and then display it to your users.
This process involves a lot of steps, and it can severely slow down your website when multiple people are accessing it at the same time.
That's why we recommend every WordPress website to use a caching plugin . Caching can make your WordPress website 2x to 5x faster.
Here's how it works.
Instead of going through the entire page generation process every time, your caching plugin can copy the page after the first load and then serve that cached version to each subsequent user.
As shown in the figure above, when a user visits your WordPress website, your server retrieves information from the MySQL database and PHP files. The server then integrates this information into HTML content and presents it to the user.
This is a long process, but using caching you can skip a lot of it.
There are many excellent WordPress caching plugins available, but we recommend using WP Rocket (premium version) or WP Super Cache (free version).
Check out our step-by-step guide on how to install and setup WP Super Cache on your WordPress site . It’s not complicated to set up and your visitors will definitely notice the difference it makes.
Additionally, many WordPress hosting companies like Bluehost and SiteGround offer caching solutions.
SiteGround SG Optimizer
If you use SiteGround, then your WordPress site will come pre-installed with their SG Optimizer plugin . This plugin has all the great features that premium WordPress caching plugins like WP Rocket offer.
The best part is that it is specially optimized for SiteGround Google Cloud servers to give you superb performance results.
In addition to caching, you also get various other performance settings, WebP image conversion in WordPress, database optimization, CSS minification, GZIP compression, and more.
It also comes with dynamic caching feature to help you speed up your eCommerce website.
Bluehost Cache
If you are using Bluehost, then you can go to Website » Speed section to adjust your cache settings.
If you use a managed WordPress hosting provider, then you don’t need a caching plugin as it is built-in and enabled by default.
Bonus: You can use a caching plugin in conjunction with a web application firewall like CloudFlare or Sucuri to maximize performance.
Optimize images for speed
Images can add life to your content and help boost engagement. Researchers have found that using colorful visuals makes people 80% more likely to read your content.
However, if your images aren’t optimized, they could be doing more harm than good. In fact, unoptimized images are one of the most common speed issues we see on newbie websites.
Before you upload photos directly from your phone or camera, we recommend that you use photo editing software to optimize your images for the web.
These photos can be quite large in their original format, but depending on the image file format and the compression you choose in your editing software, you can reduce the image size by up to 5 times.
At WPBeginner, we only use two image formats: JPEG and PNG.
Now you might be wondering: what’s the difference?
The PNG image format is uncompressed. Compressing an image loses some information, so uncompressed images are higher quality and have more detail. The downside is that the file size is larger and takes longer to load.
JPEG, on the other hand, is a compressed file format that slightly reduces the image quality but is significantly smaller in size.
So how do we decide which image format to choose?
- If our photo or image has many different colors, then we use JPEG.
- If it is a simpler image or we need a transparent image, then we use PNG.
Below is a comparison of the file sizes achieved by different compression tools for a particular image.
As you can see in the chart, the image format you use can have a huge impact on file size, which can affect your website performance.
For more information on how to optimize images without sacrificing quality using Photoshop and other popular editing tools, see our step-by-step guide on how to optimize images for web performance without losing quality .
WordPress Performance Optimization Best Practices
Once you install a caching plugin and optimize your images, you’ll notice that your website will load faster.
But if you really want your website to be as fast as possible, then you need to use the best practices listed below.
These tips aren’t super technical, so you don’t need to know any code to follow them, but using them can help you avoid some of the most common issues that slow down your site.
Keep your WordPress site updated
As a well-maintained open source project, WordPress is updated frequently. Each update not only provides new features but also fixes security issues and bugs. Your WordPress themes and plugins may also be updated regularly.
As a website owner, it is your responsibility to ensure that your WordPress website, themes, and plugins are kept up to date. Otherwise, your website may become slow, unstable, and vulnerable to security threats.
Optimize background processes
Background processes in WordPress are scheduled tasks that run in the background of your WordPress website. Here are some examples of background tasks that run on your WordPress website:
- WordPress Backup Plugin Tasks
- WordPress cron job to publish scheduled posts
- WordPress cron job to check for updates
- Search engines and other crawlers try to fetch content
Tasks such as cron jobs for scheduling posts and updates have minimal impact on site performance.
However, other background processes, such as backup plugins and excessive crawling by search engines, can slow down your site.
You need to make sure that your WordPress backup plugin only runs during times of low website traffic. You also need to adjust the frequency of your backups and the data that needs to be backed up.
For example, if you are creating full daily backups but only publishing new content twice a week, you will need to adjust.
If you want more frequent backups (e.g. real-time backups), then we recommend using a SaaS solution like BlogVault , which will not put a burden on your server.
As for crawling, you’ll want to keep a close eye on the Crawl report in Google Search Console. Frequent crawls that result in errors can cause your site to become slow or unresponsive.
See our complete Google Search Console guide to learn how to adjust your crawl rate.
Use excerpts on home page and archives
By default, WordPress displays the full content of each post on the homepage and archive pages. This means that your homepage, categories, tags, and other archive pages will load slower.
Another downside to displaying full articles on these pages is that users don’t feel the need to visit the article itself. This reduces your page views and the time users spend on your site.
To speed up the loading time of your archive pages, you can set your site to display excerpts instead of the full content.
You can navigate to Settings » Reading and select “Excerpt” instead of “Full text” next to the setting about what should appear for each article in your feed.
Split comments into pages
Are your blog posts getting a lot of comments? Congratulations! That means your readers are highly engaged.
But the downside is that loading all those comments will affect the speed of your website.
WordPress has a solution built in. Simply go to Settings » Discussion and check the box next to the Paginate comments option.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Remember how we mentioned above that users in different geographic locations may experience different loading times on your website?
This is because the location of your web hosting server can have an impact on your website speed.
For example, let's say your web hosting company's servers are located in the U.S. Visitors who are also located in the U.S. will generally experience faster loading times than visitors from India.
Using a content delivery network (CDN) can help speed up loading times for all your visitors.
A CDN is a network of servers located around the world. Each server stores the static files that make up your website.
These static files include files that do not change, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript, unlike the dynamic WordPress pages explained above.
With a CDN, every time a user visits your website, static files are fetched from the server closest to them. Since the CDN does most of the work, your own web hosting server will also be faster.
You can see how it works in this infographic.
We recommend using Sucuri , Bunny CDN , or Cloudflare (free).
CDN works well with WordPress websites and complements your existing WordPress caching plugin for faster loading times.
Do not upload audio or video files directly to WordPress
You can upload audio and video files directly to your WordPress site and it will automatically display them in an HTML5 player…
But you definitely shouldn't do this!
Hosting audio and video takes up bandwidth. Even if your plan includes "unlimited" bandwidth, your web hosting company may charge you for overages or even shut down your site entirely.
Hosting large media files can also drastically increase your backup size and make it difficult to restore WordPress from a backup.
Instead, you should use an audio and video hosting service like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, or SoundCloud and let them do the heavy lifting. They have plenty of bandwidth!
WordPress has a built-in video embed feature, so you can copy and paste the URL of the video directly into your post and it will be automatically embedded.
[](http://127.0.0.1:85/embed-youtube-videos-in-your-blog.html)Learn more details about how this works in our guide to embedding videos in WordPress .
If you’re using WordPress to build your podcast site, then we recommend podcast hosting service Blubrry for the best performance.
Use a theme optimized for speed
When choosing a theme for your website, be sure to pay special attention to speed optimization. Some themes that look beautiful and impressive can actually be poorly coded and can seriously slow down your site.
It’s usually better to choose a simple theme than one that’s overloaded with complicated layouts, flashy animations, and other unnecessary features. You can always use quality WordPress plugins to add these features.
Premium WordPress theme shops like StudioPress , Themify , CSSIgniter , and Astra offer well-coded, speed-optimized themes. You can also read our article on how to choose the perfect WordPress theme for some advice.
Before activating your new theme, see our guide on how to properly switch WordPress themes for a smooth transition.
Use Faster Plugins
Whether your site really needs it or not, poorly coded WordPress plugins often add a lot of weight. This can increase page load speeds and slow down your site.
To help you choose the best plugins, we frequently publish expert picks of the best WordPress plugins . We pay special attention to ease of use, user experience, and most importantly, performance.
Here are some of our top picks for the most common WordPress plugin categories:
- WPForms – The fastest and most beginner-friendly contact form plugin for WordPress.
- All in One SEO – A powerful WordPress SEO plugin that emphasizes website performance and helps you achieve higher SEO rankings.
- MonsterInsights – The best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that won’t slow down your site. It even includes the option to load gtag.js locally to speed up your Google Core Web Vitals score.
- Novashare – Many social media plugins load additional scripts and don’t load smoothly. Novashare is one of the fastest social media plugins for WordPress.
- SeedProd – A drag and drop WordPress landing page plugin that helps you build blazing fast landing pages or even design an entire theme from scratch.
In addition to the tests we recommend, you can also do your own testing. Simply run a speed test before and after installing a plugin to compare its impact on performance.
You can also use this tutorial to find out which WordPress plugins are slowing down your site.
Fine-tune WordPress speed (Advanced)
By using the WordPress optimization best practices and essential speed tips listed above, you should see significant improvements in your site’s loading times.
But every second counts, and if you want to get as much speed as possible, you'll need to make some changes.
The following tips are more technical, and some require you to modify your site files or have a basic understanding of PHP.
You’ll also want to make sure you back up your site first, just in case.
Split long articles into pages
Readers tend to prefer longer, more in-depth blog posts. Longer posts also tend to rank higher in search engines.
However, if you publish long articles with lots of images, then they may affect your page loading time.
Instead, consider breaking up longer posts into multiple pages.
WordPress has this functionality built in. Simply add a pagination block where you want a new page to begin in your post.
Reduce external HTTP requests
Many WordPress plugins and themes load various files from other websites. These files may include scripts, stylesheets, and images from external sources such as Google, Facebook, analytics services, etc.
It's OK to use several of them. Many of the files are optimized to load as quickly as possible, so it will be faster than hosting them on your own site.
But if your plugin makes a lot of these requests, it can significantly slow down your site.
You can reduce these external HTTP requests by disabling scripts and styles or combining them into a single file.
Reduce database calls
Unfortunately, there are a lot of poorly coded WordPress themes out there that ignore WordPress standards and end up calling the database directly or sending too many unnecessary requests to the database.
This can really slow down your server because there is so much work to do.
Even a well-coded theme may contain code that makes database calls just to get basic information about your blog.
Note: This step is more technical and requires basic knowledge of PHP and WordPress template files.
In this example, each time you see <?phpthis, a new database call is started:
01.<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="<?php language_attributes(); ?>">02.<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">03.<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?> charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
You can’t blame the theme developers. There is simply no other way for them to find out what language your site is written in.
However, if you customize your website using a child theme, you can replace these database calls with your specific information. This will reduce all those database calls.
01.<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">02.<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">03.<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
Optimizing WordPress Database
After using WordPress for a while, your database will accumulate a lot of information that you may no longer need. To improve performance, you can optimize your database and remove all unnecessary information.
This can be easily managed using the WP-Sweep plugin or the WP-Optimize plugin. Both tools allow you to clean up your WordPress database by removing things like deleted posts, revisions, unused tags, etc. These plugins can also optimize your database structure with a single click.
See our guide on how to optimize your WordPress database for better performance.
Restrict post editing
Post revisions take up space in the WordPress database. Some users believe that revisions also affect certain database queries run by plugins. If the plugin does not explicitly exclude post revisions, then it may slow down your site by searching for these revisions unnecessarily.
You can easily limit the number of revisions WordPress keeps for each post. Simply add the following line of code to your wp-config.php file:
01.define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 );
This code will limit WordPress to only save the last 4 revisions of each post or page and automatically discard older revisions.
Disable hotlinking and scraping of content
If you create high-quality content on your WordPress site, the sad truth is that sooner or later it will get stolen.
One way this happens is when other sites will serve your images directly from their URLs on your site instead of uploading them to their own servers. In effect, they are stealing your web hosting bandwidth and you are not getting any traffic.
Simply add this code to your .htaccess file to block image hotlinking from your site:
01.#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden ``or` `custom image option``RewriteEngine on``02.RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$03.RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?sidelineplay.com [NC]04.RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]05.RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
Don't forget to change sidelineplay.com to your own domain name.
Some content scraping sites will automatically create posts by stealing content from your RSS feeds. You can check out our guide on how to prevent blog scraping in WordPress to learn how to combat automated content scraping.
Use lazy loading if necessary
If you add many images, multiple video embeds, and photo galleries to your blog posts, then your website can benefit from lazy loading.
Instead of loading all images and videos at once, lazy loading only downloads what’s visible on the user’s screen. It replaces all other embedded images and videos with placeholder images.
As the user scrolls down, your website loads the images that are visible in the browser's viewport. You can lazy load images, videos, and even WordPress comments and avatars.
You can learn more about where we cover how to do this using WP Rocket and Optimole plugins.
Use a DNS-level website firewall
WordPress firewall plugins can help you block brute force attacks, hacker attempts, and malware. However, not all firewall plugins are created equal.
Some of these programs will run on your website, which means the attacker will be able to access your web server before being blocked. This is still effective in terms of security, but the performance is not optimal.
That’s why we recommend using a DNS-level firewall like Cloudflare or Sucuri . These firewalls will block malicious requests before they even reach your website.
Fix HTTPS/SSL errors without plugins
If you switched your website to HTTPS/SSL, then you will most likely run into mixed content errors.
The easiest way to fix this is to install a plugin like Really Simple SSL. However, the problem is that this plugin captures all URLs and converts them to HTTPS before sending them to the user's browser.
This will have a small but noticeable impact on performance. You can reduce the impact by manually fixing all URLs.
Use the latest PHP version
WordPress is primarily written in the PHP programming language. It is a server-side language, which means it is installed and runs on your hosting server.
All good WordPress hosting companies use the most stable version of PHP on their servers. However, your hosting company may be running a slightly older version of PHP.
The newer PHP 8.3 is 42% faster than its predecessor. This is a huge performance boost that your website must take advantage of.
You can use the Version Information plugin to see which PHP version your website is using.
Upon activation, the plugin will display your PHP version in the footer area of your WordPress admin dashboard.
If your website is using a PHP version lower than 7, ask your hosting provider to update it for you. If they can’t update it for you, then it’s time to look for a new WordPress hosting company.
That’s it! We hope this article helped you learn how to improve WordPress speed and performance.
Give these tips a try! Don’t forget to test your site speed before and after implementing these best practices. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much these improvements can improve your WordPress performance.
You might also want to check out our guide on how to speed up your eCommerce site , as well as our picks for the best GoDaddy alternatives that are cheaper and more reliable .
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