Why is my wordpress site so slow?
How to speed up my wordpress site?
How to make wordpress faster?
If you are looking for an answer for all these queries then you have landed on the right article.
Do you know the reason why almost 445 million websites are using WordPress in 2021?
WordPress covers almost 40% of internet websites as per the statistics of 2021 and this is because WordPress is one of the best and widely used CMS (content management system) in the world.
Although, wordpress is used by many people around the world but one thing which almost every wordpress user might be facing or have faced is the Issue of WordPress Site Loading Speed.
A slow site is something which every user hates and this might even affect your website’s SEO and overall traffic. But, don’t worry as in this guide I will be telling you about some of the best ways using which you can enhance and speed up your wordpress site easily.
But before that let me tell you that why your site speed matters the most.
Why Does Website Loading Speed Matters The Most?
Suppose you are looking for some information about a topic and you clicked on a page from the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and it takes more than 10 seconds for that page to open and show you the information.
Will you still wait for that web page to fully load or will you go back and look for a new web page from the search results.
Well I am sure that you will be definitely going to look for another page from the search results rather than waiting for that page to load completely.
This is why your site’s speed matters the most because if your site loads slow than you are surely going to lose many users and potential customers.
As per many marketing and SEO experts, if a customer is visiting your webpage for the first time then you only have 3 to 4 seconds to capture your user’s attention or else there are 73% chances of you losing your user.
Yes, you read it right.
Even though your webpage or site looks very appealing but you are losing many users even before they could see your website’s actual look just because of page speed issue.
Scared Right!!!
The SEO team of Microsoft Bing recently released a report which stated that if your site is loading slower or taking more than 2 seconds to load then there are high chances of you losing your customers satisfaction by 4%.
But what’s more scarier is that recently Google announced that they will be including site loading time, speed and page experience as one of their search ranking factors to rank websites and pages on SERP.
You can read the whole information about the same on Google’s blog here.
The page loading time and speed is also a ranking factor in mobile search ranking.
You can read about the same here.
So, if your website is on wordpress and it is loading slow then you are certainly lacking in one of the major ranking factors which will definitely affect your website’s SEO.
But, don’t you worry about this as I am going to help you on How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site In Easy Ways.
Do you know how to check your website loading speed and what all factors are causing issues by making your website load slow?
NO??
Here is the answer.
How To Check Your WordPress Website Speed?
There are many free tools available online through which you can see the actual status of your site speed and ways to improve it.
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
Developed by Google, this tool is one of the best tool using which you can check the status and performance of your site as per Google.
This tool is totally free to use.
To run your website’s audit on this tool just click here and you will be redirected to Google Page Speed Insights where you can just enter the URL you want to check and done.
After entering your website URL, click on the analyze button to start the analysis of your website loading speed and other important factors.
Here is an audit result of my website:
As you can see that the score given by google to my website i.e MrGoyal.com is 99 of 100 which is quite impressive. This means that my website loads very quickly for all users.
The result given by Google PageSpeed Insights is available for 2 versions:
- Desktop
- Mobile
The result for every version has its own importance because more than 65% of search queries on google are now coming from mobile devices (as per reports) which means that if your site is not loading fast on mobile devices or is not optimized for mobile devices then you are definitely losing high volume of traffic and users.
2. GTmetrix
GTMetrix is another popular tool used by people to audit their site and webpages performance and how they can optimize to increase the speed of their site.
The process to analyze your site on GTmetrix is very easy.
Visit the official website of GTmetrix and enter the URL you want to test in the space provided.
Here is an audit result of my website:
The report by GTmetrix includes many factors like PageSpeed, YSlow, Timing, etc.
And in each factor, you can see what are the issues on your site due to which your site and webpages are loading slow.
13 Best Ways To Speed Up Your WordPress Site
The ways given below will surely optimize your site to its best and speed up load time.
All these ways have worked for me and this is the reason why I am sharing them with you so that you can also take benefit from it and speed up WordPress web site effectively.
1. Choose A Good Web Hosting
The first thing which comes in the list when talking about a website is WEB HOSTING.
There are many types of hosting available in the world like Shared Hosting, Managed WordPress Hosting, VPS or Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Server, etc.
But the question is which hosting will be best suited for your site so that your site loads fast for your users.
Every hosting provider claims to provide fast loading time, complete safety from malware and spam attacks and much more but we all know that this is not the truth.
In my opinion, if your your site is on WordPress then go for Managed WordPress Hosting to have your page load quick and increased site speed.
But again, it depends on what your site is made for. If it is a blogging site with less than 50,000 users per month then you can even go for a shared hosting.
Here are 2 best Managed WordPress Hosting providers which I will recommend to you:
2. Use A Lightweight and Quick To Load Theme
You might have seen that the very first time you install WordPress on your web site you get “Twenty Nineteen theme” as the default one but you have never questioned that why only this theme comes as default and not any other.
This is because the Twenty Nineteen Theme is the most lightweight and quick to load theme ever made for wordpress.
Obviously, you can customize the the default one but instead of doing the whole time taking customization part by hiring a dedicated coder, people usually prefer buying a wordpress theme.
You can purchase and import wordpress themes on your site along with the whole demo import data in just 1 click but what make sure that the theme you are planning to buy should be lightweight because a heavy theme will surely put load on the hosting server which in turn will increase the site load speed and time.
In my opinion and from the list of themes I have used, GeneratePress is quite lightweight and quick to load theme which you can use for your website.
You can make customization on your site using Elementor or Thrive Architect Page Builders.
3. Limit The Number of Plugins
I have always advised SEOs to use less number of plugins because more the number of plugins, more it will affect the speed and performance of your site.
Make sure that you do not have any deactivated plugins in your wordpress dashboard as having a plugin which you are not even using is just increasing the load on web server. This is why I will recommend you to delete all the deactivated plugins and delete their database too so that no unused files or folders are present on your server.
Also, having many plugins will increase the backup size which in turn will put more load on your hosting server.
Therefore, either delete all unnecessary plugins or try for alternative methods using which you can make your work done without using any plugin.
4. Use A Caching Plugin To Reduce Server Load
All caching plugins are good but there is one plugin which I personally like the most and that is WP Fastest Cache.
Caching plugins usually helps in clearing the system cache only but this plugin improves the performance of your site and page load time by doing browser caching, clearing system cache, decreasing the size of page by minifying the HTML, decrease size of css files by minifying CSS, reducing HTTP requests by combining js files (header and footer), reducing the size of files sent from your server via Gzip and much more.
This plugin is quite easy to install and setup.
One good alternative of WP Fastest Cache is W3 Total Cache.
I personally haven’t used W3 Total Cache but has heard a lot about this plugin.
5. Optimize Your Images Before Uploading Them
Images plays an important role in increasing or decreasing load time and speed of a website and webpage. It is always advised to upload images which are low in file size but while compressing the images the quality of images will surely going to get affected.
Then how can you optimize images?
Well there is a solution for this and that solution is SMUSH PRO.
It is a wordpress plugin which reduces the size of image by optimizing the image to its best without degrading the quality of image.
My recommendation will be to go for this plugin instead of manually optimizing every single image using photoshop or any other image compressing tool because doing so will take a lot of your time and the final image will surely be of low quality.
This is why to save your time and to optimize images in bulk you can use SMUSH PRO plugin.
There is a free version of SMUSH available on wordpress which you can install and try by yourself. If satisfied then you can buy the pro version of SMUSH.
6. Optimize and Clean The Database
If you are thinking that optimizing the images was the last thing you had to do in order to increase your wordpress site speed then you are wrong.
Optimizing your website’s database is as important as optimizing images because your site’s database will be containing database of deleted plugins, spam comments, post revisions, drafts and much more which will be increasing the size of database which will directly increase load on the hosting server.
This is why optimizing and cleaning your site’s database is very important
There are 2 ways using which you can clean and optimize the database:
- First way is by manually removing all the unused files and folders from the database. But, this method is difficult and time taking as there are high chances of you deleting some important files by mistake which can harm your website.
- Second way is by installing the WP-Optimize plugin. There are a few parts of a wordpress website for which you should definitely rely on plugins as optimizing those parts without plugins can take lots of time.
Using the WP-Optimize plugin you can remove all spam data, post revisions, drafts and other unnecessary files from your website’s database in just a single click.
7. Use CDN To Speed Up WordPress Site
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) as it is very useful when you have visitors on your website from all parts of the world because the site speed will differ for visitors who are located far away from your hosting server’s location.
This is where content delivery network comes at your rescue.
A CDN will store a copy of your website in its datacentres and data collectors which are situated in different locations so that your site loads faster for all your visitors who are located far from your actual hosting server but are located close to one of those CDN datacentres.
CDN stores all the static files which are present in your site’s database like (Images, Javascript files, CSS file, etc) and when a visitor visits your website then the CDN shows the saved copy without downloading the whole content again.
There are many popular CDN services available for you like Cloudflare, StackPath Max CDN.
There is also a free plugin available for CDN which you can use to apply CDN on your website.
8. Minify CSS and JS Files
A website contains many important files and folders which are the backbone of that site like CSS file, JS file, etc.
Minifying html, css and js files will improve your site speed.
By minifying, I mean that the number of calls made to CSS and JS by your server will be reduced which in turn will improve your site performance and user experience.
There are two ways using which you can minify CSS and JS files:
- The first way is by manually adding expiry header on your site so that none of the CSS and javascript are called again and the server will not fetch for content every single time.
You can copy paste the below given code in your website’s .htaccess file. You can find the .htaccess file in the root folder of your cpanel.
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
- The second way is by installing a plugin on your site which will minify css and js files in a single click. The most best plugin for this is Autoptimize. Using this plugin, you can easily optimize and minify your website’s CSS, JS and even HTMLs in a single click.
NOTE: Minifying CSS and javascript will reduce load on your site and server resources which will enhance your page load speed.
9. Use LazyLoad On Your Website Images
Using LazyLoad for your site’s images can enhance your wordpress site speed drastically because in lazyload the text and other features of the web pages will be loaded first but the images will be loaded only when you have hovered over them.
Lazy loading is when all the images present on your site or on particular web pages will not be loaded at once and hence the load on server will not be increased which means your website loads faster now. Also, it will save your data bandwidth since image loading will not be done all at once.
There are plugins available in your WordPress dashboard for lazy loading. You can choose any as all works the same.
10. Remove or Disable HotLinking Of Images On Your Site
Have you ever faced an issue where the load time of your server is increasing but you do not know the reason why it is increasing rapidly.
Well it might be due to HotLinking.
HotLinking is a way which mostly your competitors will be using to increase the load time of your site by directly linking the images of your web pages in their articles. Doing this will slow down your site which in turn will degrade your user experience & user satisfaction.
But there is a way using which you can stop this.
You can disable hotlinking manually without using any plugin on your site by adding the below given code in the .htaccess root folder.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?sparringmind.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/sparringmind [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
11. Enable GZIP Compression For Your Website
GZIP compression is as same as compressing folders on your computer or laptop in order to create more space and by creating more space the system will function more fast.
Similarly, is the case with GZIP for a site.
GZIP will compress many static and useful files and folders of your site and when a recurring visitor visits any of your webpage then instead of loading the whole content again, the browser will look for the GZIP and if present the browser will unzip that first instead of loading the whole site again and increasing the load on your server.
You can enable GZIP compression on your website in 2 ways:
- First, by using a plugin.
- Second, by manually pasting the below given code in the .htaccess in root folder.
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
12. Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Pingback, as the name suggests is a WordPress feature in which whenever any of your blog or web page gets any backlink then the pingback features alerts you about that backlink. Trackbacks works in the same manner as pingbacks do.
Having the data of pingbacks and trackbacks stored on your WordPress will put extra load on your server which in turn will decrease your WordPress performance for search engines.
This is why I advise you to keep the pingbacks feature turned off for your blog post to enhance your WordPress performance.
How To Deactivate Pingbacks & Trackbacks?
To deactivate the pingbacks & trackbacks all you need to do is open your wordpress dashboard and go to settings –> discussion and untick the check box which says “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts“.
By doing so the pingbacks and tracebacks feature will get deactivated for your site which will eventually enhance your wordpress speed.
13. Remove All Post Revisions
Suppose you are writing an article and you saved it in the draft section of your WordPress. Now you start editing that article again and after few edits you saved it again in the draft section. You have now repeated this process 5 more times.
Now you are having a total of 7 post revisions stored in your WordPress database for that single piece of content.
Every time you update an already published piece of content it gets stored in the post revision section from where you can get any version of that article in just a single click.
You can clean up every post revision manually by deleting them from every post or you can even clean them by using a plugin.
There are many plugins available for post revision clean and you can use any of them.
Clearing post revisions will speed up WordPress speed because deleting those unwanted revisions will put less load on your server.
Conclusion
Bottom line of this article is, the above given 13 ways are the best speed optimization tips one could ever get about his/her WordPress website.
Increasing your WordPress speed and lowering the load time will improve the WordPress performance. Also, as per Google’s recent announcement, website speed is now a ranking factor. Therefore, if your site loads slow then speed it up by applying the above given tips on your site.
I hope that this article has given you every required information on how to speed up your WordPress site and improve your website loading time effectively.
If you have any questions regarding any topic given in this article or you want to ask anything related to SEO, Content Writing, Content Marketing, social media then you can either drop a comment in my comment section or can directly contact me by visiting the Contact Me page.
Thanks.
FAQs - How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site
Can A Hosting Slow Down A WordPress Website?
Yes. Hosting plays a very important role in increasing the speed of a site. If you are using a good hosting for your website then your website's loading time is surely going to be good.
Is Loading Speed A Ranking Factor?
Yes. Google have even published a blog about this. So from ranking and SEO point of view, website speed is one of the ranking factors to rank on Google.
How Fast Can A Website Load?
This depends on how well optimized your website is. If your website is completely optimized then the loading time can be 1 or 2 seconds even.
Are Website Speed Checking Tools Reliable?
Yes. If you are checking your website speed and performance on Google Speed Insights or GTmetrix then you can surely rely on the result given in them.
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One Response
Thanks for giving this helpful guide. After following the steps i was able to speed up my wordpress site from 57 to 93 on desktop.