How do I speed up a WordPress website?
Website speed is one of the key components to a great website.
You can drastically improve your WordPress website speed by simply following these steps:
Test & analyze your website with a free tool, i.e. GTMetrix, Google page speed
GTMetrix is a great free tool that analyzes your website and identifies issues which you can improve. There are two main reports to look at:
a) PageSpeed card report
The PageSpeed card report evaluates many different aspects of your website performance and grades them. It also gives recommendations on what exactly can be improved.
b) Waterfall report
The Waterfall report is one of our favorite tools. It shows the order in which different elements of your website were loaded, and how much time it took for them to load.
Both of these GTMetrix reports will help you discover what exactly is slowing down your website. Often times it may be CSS files or scripts, which may be completely unnecessary. You may not even know you have been using them. Turning these off can greatly increase your website’s speed.
2. Remove unnecessary plugins
It is common to add new features to your site to keep it modern and relevant. On WordPress sites, this is done via plugins and themes. Many times, newer plugins replace the functionality of the original feature by making it less functional. As time passes, you might find your site filled with plugins and themes that haven’t been in use for a while.
An excessive number of plugins, especially those which are no longer used, can dramatically slow down your website. The first thing you should do is remove or at least disable unnecessary plugins. Ideally, your website should only have plugins that are essential.
3. Minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript
This is one of the most useful techniques if you want to enhance the performance of your website. It reduces the size of your front-end files and scripts (HTML, CSS, JS) by removing extraneous characters, such as spaces and comments, from these files. The result is the exact same functionality delivered without the added bulk.
Plugins that can help you achieve minification include Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache, Super Cache premium.
4. Optimize images
One of the most common issues facing website speed that we see is – large, heavy images. However, this doesn’t mean that high-quality images cannot be used.
There are multiple methods to optimize images on your website. WordPress plugins, such as Smush Image Compression and Optimization offer a convenient way of achieving greater speeds without sacrificing image quality.
5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN), such as Cloudflare
With lightning fast internet speeds, sometimes it is easy to forget that ultimately, web pages reside on physical hardware located far from your location. And at times, this distance is so large that it can adversely affect response times. Most sites tackle this issue through Content Delivery Networks (CDN).
When you enable a CDN on your website, the client’s browser no longer has to retrieve every single page from the web server, instead, some static pages are forced to reside on data centers that are closer to the client’s location. This reduces the total number of requests handled by the web server, consequently improving WordPress performance.
6. Cache your website with LiteSpeed, Super Cache Premium
aching is a well-known mechanism to offload some of the burdens on the web server. Basically, caching engines store information that is used often on the client’s system (browser, memory) so that the browser doesn’t have to fetch that information repeatedly from the server. Caching can substantially enhance site performance, and is thus, one of the foremost techniques for WordPress performance tuning.
Hostinger is proud that all of our servers come equipped with LSWS (LiteSpeed Web Servers), which enables LiteSpeed from both sides – the server and the client. LiteSpeed cache is installed automatically on all WordPress websites, hosted on Hostinger’s platform. This makes WordPress websites load blazing fast.
7. Choose a good web hosting provider
Depending on the size of your website and the amount of visitors/clients your business has, you may choose to use either: shared web hosting, cloud hosting, VPS hosting, or a dedicated server.
If you are still starting out, there is no need to overspend and choose an expensive plan. At Hostinger, most of our clients start out with one of our shared web hosting plans. Once their businesses take off, then they switch to either Cloud hosting or host their website on a VPS server.
If you are not sure which plan is best for you, or simply need a helping hand, we at Panpic host also provide 24/7 Live Chat Support and Ticket support for all of our clients.
You can find more information here: https://www.panpic.vn/hosting/
We hope this tutorial is helpful and wish you the best of luck speeding up your website
WordPress Developer – Panpic technology
Bang Andre
Tel: +84986 97 38 97 (zalo, viber, whatsapp)
Email: nhantam.webdeveloper@gmail.com
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