Essential Tips To Optimize Your WordPress Site For More Speed

WordPress is a versatile CMS platform for bloggers and digital marketers!

However, if the right precautions aren’t taken, WordPress would become a sluggish medium and hassle your site visitors by loading slowly. 

Are you puzzling over a question “Why is my WordPress Site slow?

Do you want to speed up WordPress site?

If you nod your head with the answer “Yes”, then this is the exact blog post that you need to read right now!

We all want faster loading websites. No one likes to stay FOREVER on your sites to read your content or buy your stuff.

If you are not focusing on optimizing your website speed, your competitors will steal away your site audience and traffic. Itā€™s as simple as that.

Why Is Website Loading Speed Important?

According to a survey, 47% of your website visitors expect a page to load under 3 seconds, and 57% of visitors abandon a page that takes more than 4 to 5 seconds. That means each second counts.

The slower your website loads, the more traffic, and sales you will lose.

Besides, Greater Site Speed = Higher Search Engine Rankings 

So how to make your WordPress site load blazing fast?

Letā€™s first talk about the basics!

Analyze Your Website Speed

Before looking for ways to optimize your website speed, you should know how much time your website is taking the time to load.

Use tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom tools or Google Page Speed tools to find how your site performs by also knowing how fast it is loading.

As a rule of thumb, your website should take no more than 3 seconds to load. If it is taking more than that, you must implement the strategies mentioned on this page.

5 Simple Ways To Speed Up WordPress Loading  Time

Now, letā€™s talk about few of the proven ways to speed up WordPress site if it is loading slow!

speed-up-wordpress-site

#1. Enable gZip compression

Did you know that by compressing both your HTML and CSS files with gzip saves around 80% of your website’s file size? Yes, that’s true.

It means you will be able to save 80% of your hosting bandwidth, so your website loads 80% faster than it usually is just by doing gzip compression.

How can you do WordPress gzip compression?

You can do this by several methods including editing your .htaccsess files. But if you are a beginner, I donā€™t recommend making changes to any of your web server files.

So letā€™s talk about an easy way to enable gzip WordPress compression to boost your website speed.

You can use a simple yet most effective WordPress plugin called Gzip Ninja Speed Compression. It will help you to compress your files quickly into gzip format.

It not only makes your website to load faster but also reduces the bandwidth of your hosting servers.

You can also know your website speed performance by checking your site speed using Pingdom tools or GTMetrix before and after making gzip compression and you will find out why I highly recommend doing it.

#2. Cache Your Web Pages

By installing the plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache, you can quickly clear all the cache from your databases, files, and websites.

Whenever you update or deactivate a plugin, your website databases store some cached information (temporary data) which results in slowing down your website speed.

By frequently clearing all the cache using the above mentioned popular WordPress plugins, you can always increase your website performance thus also by improving its speed.

W3 total cache optimizes browser caching, database caching and also supports CDN support which makes it possible to improve your website speed effectively.

#3. Three Simple Yet Essential Factors That Affect Your Website Speed

The following are the three primary factors that can make or break your overall website loading times.

So make sure to optimize or eliminate them to speed up WordPress site!

Say No To Post Revisions

Whether you know it or not, whenever you update your posts while creating content or updating them after publishing, post revisions are stored in your databases. If you frequently edit your posts or pages, you will be wasting your databases storage consumption.

The best way to improve your website loading efficiency is to stop post revisions. You can use plugins like Revision control to take control over post reviews.

Optimize Your Homepage

If you want to make your homepage to load blazing fast, I recommend you showing fewer posts and removing all the clutter from your sidebar or footer.

If you are showing 10 pages on your homepage, consider showing up 5 to 7, and you can see dramatic improvements in your loading times.

Browser Caching

You can use sites like refreshyourcache.com to make your web pages load faster. It will refresh all the cache from your browsers which result in boosting your speed.

You can use it once in a while to take care of your site performance.

#4. Optimize Your Databases

Did you know that your website database files take a huge chunk of your hosting’s bandwidth and affect your website speed?

If your databases are consuming too much size, your site naturally takes more time to load which ultimately result in slow loading times.

If your site is a bit sluggish and taking more than 3 to 4 seconds to load, you should start optimizing WordPress database regularly to improve your site performance.

There’s a cool plugin (free) called WP-Sweep, and it helps you clean all the duplicated and unused data files from your WordPress sites by also optimizing your database files.

Apart from them, the plugin optimizes the following stuff from your site.

  • Revisions
  • Auto-drafts
  • Deleted comments
  • Unapproved comments
  • Spammed comments and all the remaining unused or duplicated files.

#5. Compress All Your Images

We all know a picture is worth a thousand words and you can improve your blog’s content by adding more appealing images.

But what most people don’t usually remember is, they don’t optimize their images.

What happens when your images are of large size?

They create a huge burden on your loading times, and it can result in making your web pages to load slowly. It hurts both your website speed and your user experience.

I highly recommend you to compress the size of your images before using them. You can use online tools like TinyPNG, or you can simply start using WP Smush it plugin to automatically compress the size of your images.

Other Effective Tips For WordPress Speed UP

Conclusion On Making Your WordPress Site To Load Faster

The internet is a competitive medium, and thus, the website speed matters a lot!

When you search for terms like “increase website speed”, “how to speed up WordPress site”, “WordPress speed Optimization” on Google, you will find a gazillion of results.

Still, most of the bloggers, online publishers, and internet marketers are struggling to boost their website speed.

Do you know why? They just skim through the articles they come across online and don’t implement what they read.

So my recommendation for you is simple. I’ve mentioned the simple tips on how to increase the speed of WordPress site. Just start implementing them right away to see better results.

What are the other tricks do you follow to speed up WordPress site?

Are you interested in knowing some superior strategies to make a WordPress site load super fast? Check my advanced WordPress site speed optimization guide

Meanwhile, leave your pleasant thoughts to improve WordPress speed in the comment section. 

by Nirmala
Nirmala is an avid blogger, WordPress enthusiast who has been blogging since 2010. She loves to write useful WP tips & tricks on this active blog.

25 thoughts on “Essential Tips To Optimize Your WordPress Site For More Speed”

    • Hi Santhosh bro, thanks for checking the WP speed optimization tips listed in this post.

      Yup! CDN is really good to speed up the websites and I use Cloudflare for my main blog. I’m writing an advanced guide to speed up the WordPress, where I listed some improved strategies.

      I’ll let you know once the post goes live. You just have a look at the WP speed tips and leave your thoughts.

      Reply
  1. Hi Nirmala,

    Another useful article šŸ™‚ Several questions regarding the gzip compression:

    – what do I see after the gzip compression is enabled? Instead of 100 files (100 is just an example), do I see 100 gzip files, or just one single gzip file?

    – after the compression, are the original uncompressed files deleted? If the answer is yes, then…

    – if I need to modify one single file, how do I get back only the unzipped version of that file?

    – after I modify that file, what’s the next step? I guess I have to compress it before overwriting the old compressed file. Right? How do I compress it?

    Thank you in advance.
    Adrian

    Reply
    • Hi Adrian,

      Thank you so much for your prompt visit! Let me answer your questions.

      Gzip is a very nice compression program that would make the websites to loads fast. Actucally, the server compresses our files and give them to the browser. Thus, our readers could get the fast loading webpages.

      If you enable gzip compression either by adding codes in htaccess file or through plugin, all your files will get 70 – 80 % compression and yes the original files will get deleted.

      For example nirmala.txt file will be removed when it compressed to nirmala.txt.gz (Note that the original file will get deleted after the completion of compression)

      However, if you want to decompress the files, you may use gunzip.

      I think that you don’t need to get original files to do the modifications. As you said, the FTP files remain unchanged and invisible to admin.

      Thanks for asking so many questions, it would add value to my post.

      Stay tuned for advanced WordPress speed optimization guide. Have a good day, today!

      Reply
  2. Hi Nirmala,
    Nice article.
    Website speed is an important search engine ranking factor. People also love to browse fast site.
    Recently I also published an article on speed up wordpress site.
    Anyway you have covered all the cruicial tips here.
    Thanks for sharing.
    Cheers

    Reply
    • Welcome Riju! Yes, website page speed is significant in driving organic traffic.

      Good to know that you have also written some tips to make the WordPress to load fast. I’ll check and leave my viewpoint soon.

      Thanks for your visit, keep coming!

      Reply
  3. Hi Nirmala,

    One of the most important factors for a good website is the speed. Bloggers should know that it helps their website to get good ranking.

    I have noticed many bloggers who don’t optimize their images which increases the size of the page. They should use any optimizer for the images they embed in the posts.

    You didn’t leave the cache plugin. I prefer W3 Total Cache. Though it’s hard to set up but still has the best performance.

    All the factors you have included are really helpful for enhancing the speed.
    Informative post indeed.
    Have a great week ahead.
    ~Ravi

    Reply
    • Good to see you here, Ravi!

      Yes, I agree with you that the speed of the site matters a lot. As you said, many webmasters never care about the loading speed of their site.

      Readers never like the sites that load slowly. They would just get nudged to competitor’s site to grab the data that they need.

      I too use W3 Total cache, it is a handy plugin to speed up the WordPress blog. I’m planning to write a step-by-step guide to set up this WP plugin.

      Thanks for your support in sharing my post, keep visiting.

      Reply
  4. Useful information. Few days back, I faced slow speed problem in my site. when I read and use the details listed in this post, I properly speedup my site!

    Thank you
    Have good day

    Reply
    • Hi Sachin,

      Welcome to my blog! Glad I could help you in speeding up your site.

      More WP tips to come, stay tune to learn and leave your thoughts.

      Reply
  5. Hi Nirmala,
    At one moment, my blog was loading 8seconds and more. That was terrible and I lost almost half my traffic.

    One of the things I did was move to a high speed hosting option. Though more expensive, this has helped my speed big time.

    Thanks for these useful suggestions. I’ll find out from my host if gzip compression is something I can setup

    Have a wonderful week

    Reply
    • What a surprise šŸ˜€ Great to see you Enstine!

      Thanks for getting time to check my post and leave your thoughts, means a lot for me.

      Good to know that you have opted the host that supports the speed of your blog. It is worth to pay for the WordPress speed optimization as the loading speed of the site is a ranking factor.

      Hope you get back the traffic that you have lost. Yes! ask you host to enable gzip compression or you may add the codes given in this post in the htaccess file through your cPanel.

      Keep coming to leave your valuable opinion, have a good day, everyday!

      Reply
  6. Hi Nirmala,
    It was really a awesome article, my blog loading speed was showing 70 when i checked through Google speed test, then i was worried that how could i optimize this website for faster loading speed.
    I tried optimizing all my images, but speed was increased by only 2%, then i started searching for the best optimizing tricks, i was landed on to this page, really it helped me a lot, thank you for sharing this information.

    Reply
    • Hi Akshay,

      Thanks for your regular visit!

      Performing the image optimization would help to speed up the WordPress. However, we need to do a hell lot of stuff to improve the loading speed of a WordPress site.

      I feel good that my post had helped you in making your site fast. I’m writing some improved tips for the WP users, so stay tuned for my next post.

      Reply
  7. Hi Nirmala,

    Yet Another useful article from you. Got to know about some good ways to speed up wordpress site that I wasn’t aware of before reading this post.
    I’ll try these tips and check the site’s speed changes.
    Thanks for sharing this post.

    Reply
    • Welcome again Kuldeep,

      It is really good that you have learned some useful tips to increase the speed of your WordPress blog.

      Sure! Implement the speed optimization tips and share your experience with us.

      Donā€™t forget to visit my next post where I write some enhanced speed up methods for WP sites.

      Reply
  8. Hi, Nirmala, It was classic useful! Going to implement for my wordpress avada template used website. I feel very slow using many plugins. Let see how useful it will be. Any way awesome tips in a single page keep going!

    Reply
    • Hi Maze,

      Welcome to my blog and glad you found some helpful tips to make your WordPress fast from here.

      Great that you are using Avada template, and it is one of my ThemeForest favourites.

      Yes, it would be better to find out the culprit plugins that make your site load slowly.

      Thanks for getting time to read my post and I feel good with your kind appreciation as well.

      Have a good day every day, keep coming!

      Reply
  9. Great article to learn different ways to speed up wordpress site. Explained well about some tips that I am unaware of. Thank you for sharing.

    Reply
  10. Valuable post from a great blogger (Nirmala madam), learned many blogging things from her, well come to this post every serious blogger or webmaster always check the site score or speed. Site speed plays a vital role in online business not only visitors, google also loves the speedy render sites. Above points are honestly worthy if we done s.e.o friendly site proper way. Definitely, our blog/site will be in good google ranking. Thanks Nirmala sharing your knowledge.

    Reply
    • Hi Charan,

      Thanks for your kind praising words, means a lot. Yes, as you said, speed of the site in one of the ranking factors and thus we need to care about the loading speed of our WordPress site.

      Good to know your thoughts, keep coming!

      Reply
  11. Hi Nirmala, man I’ve been around for so long. I remember when one of the largest issues with website load time was the fact that users would stuff their sidebars with so many ads and plugins it would take forever to load. However WordPress has come along way over the years and I feel as it’s improved greatly.

    You’re tips are awesome anyone of our members on Blog Engage can benefit from them when it comes to increasing load times and improving their blog visitors experience on their blogs.

    Reply
    • A pleasure to share the useful WordPress tips, Brian. Thanks for leaving your comment. Yes, the sidebar of a blog should be clean and contains no distraction elements.

      Reply
  12. Hi Nirmala, another great article. I agree that GZIP compression is a must since it’ll increase the speed significantly. I could say the same with optimizing the image first before using it on our website.

    By the way, between Page Speed Insights, GTMetrix, and Pingdom, which one do you use as a reference? I just curious since I got three different results.

    Reply

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