How To Speed Up Your WordPress Website with 5 Simple Steps

WordPress Themes can be more faster than you think let’s see how !!?

A few months ago, I ran an experiment to see how much faster I could make one of my websites in less than two hours of work. After installing a handful of WordPress plugins and fixing a few simple errors, I had improved the website’s loading speed from 1.61 seconds to 583 milliseconds. That’s a 70.39% improvement, without having made any visual changes to the website.

So, how can you speed up your WordPress website?

So, let’s start with what makes for a good foundation and how to set ourselves up for a website that runs at lightning speed.

CHOOSE A GOOD HOST

Your Web hosting company and hosting package have a huge impact on the speed of your website, among many other important performance-related things.

To put this into perspective, two of my clients have similar websites but very different hosting providers. One uses Godaddy (an excellent hosting company), and the other hosts their website on a cheap shared server.

The DNS response time (i.e. the time it takes for the browser to connect to the hosting server) of the client using Godaddy is 7 milliseconds. The client using the cheap shared hosting has a DNS response time of 250 milliseconds.

If you want your website to run quickly, start with a good hosting company and package.

CHOOSE A GOOD THEME

Unfortunately, not all WordPress themes are created equal. While some are extremely fast and well coded, others are bloated with hundreds of bells and whistles under the pretense of being “versatile and customizable.”

When you choose a theme, check the page speed of the theme’s demo, using a tool such as Pingdom, to see how quickly it runs with nothing added to it. This should give you an idea of how well coded it is.

USE A CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK

I recently started using a content delivery network (CDN) for one of my websites and noticed a 55% reduction in bandwidth usage and a huge improvement in page-loading speed.

A CDN hosts your files across a huge network of servers around the world. If a user from Argentina visits your website, then they would download files from the server closest to them geographically. Because your bandwidth is spread across so many different servers, the load on any single server is reduced.

Setting up a CDN can take a few hours, but it’s usually one of the quickest ways to dramatically improve page-loading speed.

5 Quick Fixes To Speed Up WordPress Website

Now that our foundation is solid, we can begin fine-tuning our website.

A good way to start speeding up a website is to look at what can be removed. More often than not, a website is slow not because of what it lacks but because of what it already has.

1. Identify plugins that are slowing you down

P3 is one of my favorite diagnostic plugins because it shows you the impact of your other plugins on page-loading time. This makes it easy to spot any plugins that are slowing down your website.

A common culprit is social-sharing plugins, most of which bloat page-loading times and can easily be replaced by embedding social buttons into the theme’s source code.

Once you’re aware of which plugins are slowing down your website, you can make an informed decision about whether to keep them, replace them or remove them entirely.

2. Compress your website

When you compress a file on your computer as a ZIP file, the total size of the file is reduced, making it both easier and faster to send to someone. Gzip works in exactly the same way but with your Web page files.

Once installed, Gzip automatically compresses your website’s files as ZIP files, saving bandwidth and speeding up page-loading times. When a user visits your website, their browser will automatically unzip the files and show their contents. This method of transmitting content from the server to the browser is far more efficient and saves a lot of time.

3. Compress your website CSS & Javascript

When you compress your website CSS & Javascript files, it will really help to boost your website speed. Best plugin for this job is Better WordPress Minify. There are much more plugins which help to compress your CSS and javascript files as well as cache your website, that one is WP Fastest Cache.

4. Compress your website Images

Same like above step 3, if you compress you all website images then it will really help to speed up your website. There is a plugin specially for this job. Smush Image Compression and Optimization, first we have to install and activate the plugin and then change the setting as per our need.

5. Upgrade version of plugins theme, and WordPress

The most important thing in the list is that we have to check updates of our website WordPress, plugins and theme and upgrade it periodically. It will help our website from Malware hack and as well as in loading speed.

NOTE: If we follow these steps, our website will never go down and run smoothly without and loading issue.