How to speed up your WordPress website?

Learn how to speed up your WordPress site so it gets better SEO results and is more user-friendly. WordPress is undoubtedly the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world – millions of people have appreciated its ease of use and countless available plugins, using it to create their websites or blogs. Unfortunately, not every WordPress project achieves satisfactory speed. What is responsible for it? How to speed up your WordPress website? Read on to find out more.

How to speed up your WordPress website?

The most important thing is to determine why, in fact, your WordPress site is slow to load. It’s a good idea to conduct a thorough analysis of its loading time and the factors affecting it – for this purpose, you can use free tools, such as PageSpeed Insights (from Google), GTmetrix, or Pingdom Test Tool. Once you have the report, you can start solving the problems.

Why is your WordPress slow?

• Slow server – the main culprit here is the hosting provider or the chosen option. The cheapest hosting, especially shared hosting, will not be efficient enough to handle a lot of site traffic.
• Too many plugins – we will write a little more about plugins below. They are a useful addition, extending the functionality of the site, but installing too many of them has the opposite effect – instead of working better, it starts to become less responsive and slower. The effect of plugins on the site’s load time can be measured, for example, using P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler).
• Non-optimized photos – photographs and graphic elements of the same size can differ significantly in the amount of space they take up, which translates into the time it takes to transfer them from the server to the recipient’s computer. Photos saved in less efficient formats have a significant impact on page speed.
• Gravatars – this feature allows you to display avatars of users who comment on a post at the bottom of the page. The catch is that the avatar has to be downloaded from a different server each time, which increases the page’s load time significantly.
• Outdated version of WordPress, plugins, and data accumulated over the years – updating the CMS and add-ons to the latest version will allow you to take advantage of all the improvements and technical innovations. Cleaning the saved backup copies of pages, drafts, entries or comments will allow you to improve the way it works.

What plugins to use?

Plugins can indeed expand the functionality of a WordPress-based site. However, you need to choose them very carefully, as their excess may lead to performance drops. What plugins to choose, then?

• Cache plugins – thanks to them, you can even speed up the page load time by several times. Caching reduces server load and improves Google SERP results. WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, or W3 Total Cache are the most popular solutions. WP Rocket also allows you to load images gradually and regularly clean up unnecessary data, which also affects page load speed.
• Plugins for managing images – if you have a lot of multimedia on your site, you will appreciate the Envira Gallery plugin, which allows you to optimize photos and make them load faster. The WP Smush plugin, on the other hand, allows you to optimize photos in bulk – so they take up less space and load faster.
• SEO plugins – Yoast SEO will help you optimize your site for SEO. The aforementioned P3 plugin, in turn, will show you which element of the site needs further optimization and what has the greatest impact on the site’s load time.

Summary

Cache, a reasonable number of plugins, optimized multimedia, installed updates, and a good server – these are the main elements that can affect your site’s page speed. Contrary to popular belief, optimization does not have to be difficult and can bring really satisfying results.

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