Here is the complete beginner’s guide to help you start your blog and see the bottom section to learn how to use WordPress.
All this information is free, feel free to take action and start building something new.
- Part 1: WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org: Which Should You Choose?
- Part 2: How to Buy Hosting for Your WordPress Blog
- Part 3: How to Install WordPress on Bluehost
- Part 4: Basic Setup After Installing WordPress
- Part 5: How to Install WordPress Plugins
- Part 6: How to Choose a WordPress Theme
- Part 7: How to Install a WordPress Theme
- Part 8: 14 Tips to Secure Your WordPress Site
- Section 9: << You are here >>
Want to reduce your WordPress site’s loading time?
Well, I’m going to share ten proven steps to speed up any WordPress website.
Here are the results after implementing all the tips from this guide:
continue…
How to Use WordPress SpeedUP Guide:
While I’ve done my best to make this tutorial as beginner-friendly as possible, you’ll still need to be attentive to get the most out of it. These days, not all WordPress sites are created equal. You might be using WordPress as:
- blog
- Membership Site
- WooCommerce Website
- Learning Management System
- Corporate WordPress Website
Or maybe something else.
However, most of the methods explained below apply to all WordPress sites, and some of them are more specific to specific types of sites. For example, later in the post, I shared in-depth WordPress temporary options, which are more applicable to membership sites or any WordPress using WooCommerce or EDD.
Additionally, I’ve tried my best to recommend a free plugin for all of the WordPress performance enhancement options below. However, it’s wise to use one plugin that does it all.
I’ve found WP-Rocket to be the best for this, and I use it at SidelinePlay. Just get a license for the WP-Rocket plugin .
So, now you don’t need to install 4-5 plugins because this one plugin provides all the features that you need in other plugins.
WP-Rocket is only half the solution, there is still a lot of work to do to achieve a super fast WordPress website. As we move forward in this guide, you will understand the basics of it and should be able to implement it on your own.
Let's get on with this...
Before starting with the WordPress SpeedUP guide:
The first thing you should do is measure the speed of your WordPress website.
Run a speed test:
Here are some WordPress speed testing tools you can use:
- GTMetrix
- Web Development
- tools.Pingdom.com
- Google’s Page Speed Insights
- Web page testing
- TTFB Checker (Time to First Byte Checker)
Now, take a screenshot of the result and save it or note it somewhere convenient.
After completing the WordPress speed optimization steps mentioned below, you can simply re-run the speed test and compare the before and after results.
First, back up WordPress:
Before you start fine-tuning WordPress, you should back up your WordPress database.
Since we’re going to be doing some optimizations at the database level, backups can add a safety net in case the inevitable happens. You can use any of these WordPress backup plugins .
Should you apply all of these WordPress speed-up techniques?
There are a few tricks you can apply right away, and you can gain significant speed improvements.
However, some techniques may require developer involvement or require more technical knowledge, such as implementing a CDN, using advanced DNS, and these techniques can be used over time.
Your goal should be to use as many of these tips as possible to reduce your WordPress site’s loading time.
In the next few days, you should work on implementing all the speed optimization tips to reach the ultimate goal of loading time of less than 1 second.
A few days ago, I told you that Google started ranking websites based on speed, and since then we all realized and understood why it is not necessary to provide a faster loading blog.
Fast loading times help both search engines and your readers. Not only does it provide a great user experience, but it can also help reduce your blog’s bounce rate.
Today, I’ll share seven tips to help you speed up WordPress and reduce WordPress loading time. The ultimate goal is to provide fast-loading pages for your users.
Effective Ways to Speed Up WordPress: How to Improve Loading Times
1. Use the latest PHP – 8.0+
This change alone can increase your WordPress speed by almost 1.5 times. Many WordPress sites are still using PHP 5.6, which is a depreciated version of PHP. The latest version is PHP 8.1 , which offers significant performance improvements.
The PHP part is handled by your web hosting company, you can manually check the current PHP version your WordPress site is running, or you can ask customer support directly:
Which PHP version is your WordPress site running?
If it is lower than 7.0 (ie 5.6), you can ask them to upgrade to the latest PHP version.
If you are using Bluehost hosting , you can follow this tutorial to update Bluehost PHP version .
2. Choose quality web hosting that is optimized for WordPress and speed:
This change alone can significantly speed up your WordPress site.
How would I know?
Because that’s exactly what happened to me when I moved SidelinePlay from basic hosting to a managed host called Kinsta .
Many of us make the mistake of choosing a local web hosting provider to host our WordPress website. Usually, such hosting is recommended by our designer/developer or someone we know in our circle.
Are they the best?
Well, your speed test will probably reveal the same thing.
Remember, you should only choose a hosting company that is optimized for running a WordPress blog.
SiteGround undoubtedly offers the highest quality servers in the shared hosting category, which is more than enough for most of us to use.
If you run a business website on WordPress or have a professional blog, you should get hosting from Kinsta .
Kinsta offers many advanced features that will instantly reduce your WordPress site’s loading time. Some of these features include:
- Advanced DNS
- Free CDN
- PHP 7.4
- Kinsta MU (Built-in Cache)
Kinsta uses Google Cloud infrastructure to host your WordPress website, which allows you to choose from a wide range of data center options.
Only use these hosts if you use the WooCommerce platform:
3. Don’t use too many WordPress plugins
One of the most powerful features of WordPress is plugins, some people are so obsessed with plugins that they use 30-40+ plugins in their blog. Well, not all plugins are bad, I have written a great article about how many WordPress plugins you should use.
Try to reduce the number of plugins on your blog and clean up your database regularly. Advanced database cleaning plugins can help you do this quickly.
Make sure you use at least one caching plugin on your blog, I recommend WP-Rocket . A rule of thumb is to get rid of outdated plugins.
Many users also ask “How to speed up WordPress plugins?”
The best approach is to use as few WordPress plugins as possible. Whenever possible, get custom code to add the functionality you need.
Another way is to use a plugin called Asset cleanup plugin and prevent scripts from loading on specific pages. Watch the following video to see how to do this:
4. Optimize images for fast loading
Your goals for using images on WordPress should be to:
- Highest quality
- Efficient data compression
- Smaller files
Images are the backbone of the visual web, and if you use too many of them on your articles or product pages, your pages are likely to load slowly.
The average website transfers 800-900kb of images per URL.
It’s good to make your post more illustrative by integrating relevant images, but too much of anything is not good.
If you had a photo-intensive blog, what would you do?
What you need is to optimize your images for speed. Here are a few things you can do right away to improve the performance of your photo-intensive WordPress site:
- Use CDN: preferably cloudflare
- Use the correct image format
Using the right image format can significantly reduce the size of your images. Sometimes, simply changing the file format from .png to .jpg can reduce the size by 80% . With WordPress 5.8+, you can use webP images, which are 30% lighter than the .jpg format.
If you have a graphic designer on your team, have them compress the images using Photoshop. In our experience, this is the best way to reduce the size of an image without losing quality.
Another technique you should use is image compression and image lazy loading . Both of these methods have been proven to speed up any WordPress page that uses images.
Use a plugin called ShortPixel to optimize your WordPress images. It provides 100 free image optimizations per month and also allows you to do the following:
- Serve in Webp image format (this will be very helpful)
- Convert existing .png images to .jpg or better yet webP format
- Various compression levels
- Compress old pictures with one click
- Automatically compress new images
5. Choose a modern and fast WordPress theme:
If you’re still using an old WordPress theme designed in 2016-17, then it’s time to upgrade. A lot has changed in the past few years, and most themes are now designed to load faster.
Additionally, you should make sure to use a truly responsive theme so that your blog loads faster on mobile phones and tablets.
If you are looking for recommendations for fast loading WordPress themes, then I recommend Astra theme which is the best WordPress theme.
Here are two more that are very popular in 2023:
6. Select the server location closest to your available viewers:
Most web hosting companies allow you to choose the data center that your website is hosted in. If you know the country where your target audience is located, you should choose the data center that is closest to your idle customers.
If you use Kinsta, you can use the GCPing tool to see the latency from your location to the various data centers that Kinsta servers are served from.
Here is a list of the fastest WordPress hosting you can choose from .
7. Use CDN network for faster transmission:
In most cases, you will host your website in a specific geographical location.
For example, if you have purchased hosting from Bluehost , there is a high chance that your website is hosted in the United States. Now, when a user from an Asian country or even Australia browses your website, it will take quite some time to load your website.
The reason lies in the distance between the user and the server.
What is the solution?
Well, you can use a CDN network.
CDN helps solve this problem and your website will load quickly around the world.
Note: Cloudflare provides a free CDN service that can be used by various blogs.
On ShoutMeLoud, other contributors have covered CDN in detail, and you can become a CDN expert by following the links below:
- What is a CDN (Content Delivery Network)? What are its benefits?
- Set up free Cloudflare CDN for your WordPress blog
8. Avoid too many ads and scripts
Don't display too many ads on your blog. Many PPC ads are cluttered with unnecessary HTML content, which can seriously affect your site's loading time.
If you must run ads, you should use Google AdSense or Media.net as it is well optimized and offers the best cost per click (CPC).
Now, in many cases, third-party scripts cannot be deleted, and the best solution is to delay the loading of scripts. I recently discovered a plugin called " Flying scripts ". After using this plugin to delay script loading, the GTMetrix test showed that it was improved from 4.6 seconds to 1.4 seconds.
This is the plugin setup I'm using, but you'll need to customize it depending on the script you're using:
Flight script settings
9. Reduce DNS Lookups:
DNS lookup can be one of the reasons that increase the loading time of your WordPress website.
This is a very common question since we all use a lot of third-party scripts for analytics, statistics, conversion optimization or for other reasons.
The first thing you should do is:
- Go to tools.pingdom.com
- Run a speed test
- Scroll down to the bottom and load the results based on DNS load time
You can easily see which third-party scripts are loading on this website and how much DNS lookup time it consumes. It is best to run 3-4 tests every 60 minutes. The idea here is to find out which host is taking the longest DNS lookup time.
Now, here are a few methods that you can use to minimize DNS lookups.
1. Delete or replace the script:
If the script is taking a long time to do DNS lookups, delete it or replace it with a more appropriate script.
2. Use a fast DNS provider
If you purchased your domain from NameCheap, GoDaddy or any other service, then their DNS resolver is not as fast as that provided by Cloudflare, Amazon route 53 or even Google domains.
You can consider migrating your domain to Cloudflare or Google Domains. I personally like Cloudflare's domain hosting services because they are good value for money.
If you don't want to move your domain, you can still keep your domain with your existing registrar and configure Cloudflare to use their similarly premium free DNS service.
3. Start using CDN
I've talked about using a CDN before, and I'm here to expand on it again. The idea is to help you understand when a CDN is most useful.
If you find that DNS lookups are the culprit for your slow-loading WordPress site, then you should immediately use a CDN.
Using a CDN will significantly reduce the number of DNS lookups and you will see an immediate speed increase. IMHO, if you really want to speed up WordPress, using a CDN is no longer an option.
4. Implement DNS prefetching in WordPress
Another technique to improve WordPress speed performance is to use DNS prefetching. Here’s how the Google Chromium Dev project explains DNS prefetching:
DNS prefetching is an attempt to resolve a domain name before a user attempts to access a link. This is done using the computer's normal DNS resolution mechanism; there is no need to connect to Google. Once the domain name is resolved, if the user does navigate to that domain name, there is no effective delay due to DNS resolution time.
The most obvious example where DNS prefetching can help is when a user views a page that contains a lot of links to different domains, such as a search results page. As we encounter hyperlinks in a page, we extract the domain name from each hyperlink and resolve each domain to an IP address.
All of this work is done while the user is reading the page, using minimal CPU and network resources. When a user clicks on any of these pre-resolved names, they save an average of about 200 milliseconds of navigation time (assuming the user hasn't visited the domain recently). More important than the average time savings is that users don't experience the "worst case" delay of DNS resolution, which can often be over a second.
At the time of writing, all major browsers support DNS prefetching.
In WordPress, you can enable DNS prefetching using a plugin or custom code.
The easiest way to do this is to use the WP-Rocket plugin. This is a premium caching plugin that costs about $47 per year and is what I use at ShoutMeLoud. This plugin provides the ability to pre-fetch DNS requests, which can significantly improve performance.
Alternatively, you can use the Simple DNS Prefetch plugin which does the same job.
10. Delete temporary options
By removing expired temporary options, you can get a significant performance boost. In particular, if you are running a WordPress membership site, or using something like WooCommerce, EDD, or even a social sharing plugin, then this WordPress speedup tip is perfect for you. First, let’s understand what temporary is.
What is WordPress Transient:
The Transients API helps developers store data with an expiration time in the database. Usually, expired transient data in the database is automatically deleted, but this is not always the case. Sometimes, they stay there and bloat the database, causing performance delays and significantly slowing down load times.
The solution is simple: remove the expired temporary option
This option is available in all database optimizer plugins and even in WP-Rocket. However, if you are looking for a standalone plugin to remove expired transients, use this Transients Manager plugin by Pippin Williamson .
After installing the plugin, go to Tools > Transients to manage and delete WordPress temporary options.
WP-Rocket plugin users can find this option under Database > Transient Cleanup
SML WordPress performance acceleration summary: Thinking from the user's perspective
It’s okay to be obsessed with speed, but don’t just rely on the numbers displayed by tools like GTMetrix or Pingdom, focus on more user-friendly metrics.
Even if times like TTFB and First Significant Paint are high, but your page loads in less than 2 seconds, you can see the effects of that in Google Analytics or any other stats program you use.
Keeping your visitors in mind when optimizing will also help you not to abandon important scripts and features you’ve built over time. In addition to speed, keep your conversion rates in mind, which will help you a lot in the long run.
Okay, those are a few simple steps I recommend for optimizing your blog’s loading time.
Can you tell me more tips that can help us improve the speed of WordPress websites?
Further reading:
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