How to Boost your Website Speed in WordPress?
Your website too slow to load or server response time is high. Want to boost the speed of your WordPress website even if it’s not slow.
Page speed is one of the most important factors in ranking search results in google and it definitely impacts your overall SEO score. A good page speed gives you an edge over other websites with similar content. In this post we’ll cover how you can boost the speed of your WordPress blog.
Web Hosting Provider
Choose a reliable web-hosting service provider for your WordPress. Some of the shared hosting providers sell the WordPress hosting as product and host too many websites on the single server leading to high load on servers which results in system crash and delay in processing. You can refer to how to chose the best WordPress hosting service.
Themes
Always install the themes which are coded by professionals and receives regular security updates. You can check the reviews of all themes available on WordPress themes and the overall rating of theme. You can also see the number of downloads it has received to determine the popularity. Generally good themes are more popular with good score and latest updates just few days or month ago. You can review themes from Theme Forest, Divi, Astra, Twenty-twenty. You can also buy themes from developers and extend the frameworks like genesis. Also, remove the unused themes, this will free up the space in server public domain.
Images
Compress images to reduce load time by using multiple plugins –
Smush
Optimize your images turn on lazy load, resize, compress and improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher. Smush will compress all your images without a visible drop in quality.
Lazy Load
a3 Lazy Load is a Mobile Oriented, very simple to use plugin that will speed up sites page load speed. The more content heavy your site the better the plugin will perform and the more you will see the improvements in performance.
a3 Lazy Load is the most fully featured, incredibly easy to set up lazy load plugin for WordPress. Use the plugins admin settings to easily define what elements are lazy loaded and when they become visible in the users browser. As the user scrolls down the page the next lot of elements you have applied lazy Load to are only loaded as they become visible in the view port.
Jetpack : Lazy images
Part of Jetpack plugin. Speed up your site and create a smoother viewing experience by loading images as visitors scroll down the screen, instead of all at once.
EWWW Image Optimizer
The EWWW Image Optimizer will increase your page speeds by way of image optimization. Increased page speeds can result in better search engine rankings, and will also improve conversion rates (increased sales and signups). It will also save you storage space and bandwidth. While EWWW I.O. will automatically optimize new images that you upload, it can also optimize all the images that you have already uploaded, and optionally convert your images to the best file format. You can choose pixel perfect compression or high compression options that are visually lossless.
Add Cache Function
When a page is rendered, php and mysql are used. Therefore, system needs RAM and CPU. If many visitors come to a site, system uses lots of RAM and CPU so page is rendered so slowly. In this case, you need a cache system not to render page again and again. Cache system generates a static html file and saves. Other users reach to static html page.
In addition, the site speed is used in Google’s search ranking algorithm so cache plugins that can improve your page load time will also improve your SEO ranking.
In WordPress, you can add multiple plugins to create static pages on the server to load sites fast. Use any of the below plugins to generate cache content –
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance and reducing load times by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
W3TC is the only web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress trusted by millions of publishers, web developers, and web hosts worldwide for more than a decade. It is the total performance solution for optimizing your WordPress Website.
- Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and dedicated servers / clusters.
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support
- Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk or on (FSD) CDN (by user agent group)
- Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
- Caching of feeds (site, categories, tags, comments, search results) in memory or on disk or on CDN
- Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
- Caching of database objects in memory or on disk
- Caching of objects in memory or on disk
LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) is an all-in-one site acceleration plugin, featuring an exclusive server-level cache and a collection of optimization features.
LSCWP supports WordPress Multisite and is compatible with most popular plugins, including WooCommerce, bbPress, and Yoast SEO.
Features
- Free QUIC.cloud CDN Cache, DNS Prefetch, Cloudflare API, Multiple CDN support
- Object Cache (Memcached/LSMCD/Redis)
- Image Optimization (Lossless/Lossy), Lazyload images/iframes
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, Minify inline CSS/JS, Combine CSS/JS, Automatically generate Critical CSS
- Responsive Image Placeholders
- Load CSS/JS Asynchronously
- Browser Cache, OPcode Cache
- Database Cleaner and Optimizer
- PageSpeed score optimization
- HTTP/2 Push for CSS/JS (on web servers that support it)
WP Fastest Cache
Setup of this plugin is so easy. You don’t need to modify the .htacces file. It will be modified automatically.
Features
- Mod_Rewrite which is the fastest method is used in this plugin
- All cache files are deleted when a post or page is published
- Admin can delete all cached files from the options page
- Admin can delete minified css and js files from the options page
- Block cache for specific page or post with Short Code
- Cache Timeout – All cached files are deleted at the determinated time
- Cache Timeout for specific pages
- Enable/Disable cache option for mobile devices
- Enable/Disable cache option for logged-in users
- SSL support
- CDN support
- Cloudflare support
- Preload Cache – Create the cache of all the site automatically
- Exclude pages and user-agents
Plugins
Plugins can slow a website down. The more plugins you have the more load they place on CPU, Memory and loading times, so don’t go overboard with plug-ins. Only install plugins that are required. Remove the plugins that are not required and always weigh in the processing time vs benefits of using that plugin.
For example – Security plugins always run round the clock and use a lot of resources on your site. At the same time, they are critical to your website.
Another example – JetPack, some features use resources round the clock and you can deactivate them if you don’t see any benefits in thier usage.
Review all the plugins and delete them if they are not in use.
Errors Logs
Check your Error logs on your server. Most of the webhosting control panels provide error logs, that will list down all the errors a server is hitting including – 404, 501 codes, 500, Redirect errors, System crash errors, Php failures etc.
Also, you can get a report of errors on pages related to devices, links etc that can be reviewed on Google Search console. That’s a great place to review all the errors and resolve them. After resolution, mark them as resolved on google.
Another free google service – Google Analytics, provides lot of insights on the website like Audience profiling, Page speed, Bounce rates, Most visited pages where you can create static html.
Audience / CDN
Target your audience profile. If the target user profile is from USA, then preferably use US hosting servers and for UK, use UK servers.
But if you are targeting general users across the globe, then you may use Cloudflare, MaxCDN as your content delivery network.
Cloudflare provides free plan where you will good enough options to host DNS and proxy the traffic. At the same time, it also adds a layer of protection to protect your website from DDoS attacks, virus attacks. It has features like Firewall, DDoS protection, rate limiting, bot management, VPN, DNSSEC, Cache building, IP based rules, CSS/JS files cache, DNS management, DNS analytics.
Backups / Data Migration
This is not a factor for slowness, but in cases where your site is hacked or deleted by mistake or some user, then you should have backups in place to restore the website to its original state. Make sure any automated backups, etc. you are doing are at off-peak hours for your traffic. You can use any of the below plugin to backup your website automatically. You can also use these plugins to migrate your website from one host to another.
UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin
UpdraftPlus simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over two million currently-active installs. Backup your files and database backups into the cloud and restore with a single click!
Backup into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email. The paid version also backs up to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV.
BackWPup – WordPress Backup Plugin
The backup plugin BackWPup can be used to save your complete installation including /wp-content/ and push them to an external Backup Service, like Dropbox, S3, FTP and many more, see list below. With a single backup .zip file you are able to easily restore an installation. Please understand: this free version will not be supported as good as the BackWPup Pro version.
Duplicator – WordPress Migration Plugin
Duplicator creates a package that bundles all the site’s plugins, themes, content, database and WordPress files into a simple zip file called a package. This package can then be used to easily migrate a WordPress site to any location you wish. Move on the same server, across servers and pretty much any location a WordPress site can be hosted. WordPress is not required for installation since the package contains all site files.
With over 15 million downloads Duplicator successfully gives WordPress users the ability to migrate, copy, move or clone a site from one location to another and also serves as a simple backup utility. Duplicator handles serialized and base64 serialized replacements.
All-in-One WP Migration
This plugin exports your WordPress website including the database, media files, plugins and themes with no technical knowledge required. Upload your site to a different location with a drag and drop in to WordPress.
There is an option to apply an unlimited number of find and replace operations on your database during the export process. The plugin will also fix any serialization problems that occur during the find/replace operation.
Mobile device compatible: All-in-One WP Migration is the first plugin to offer true mobile experience on WordPress versions 3.3 and up.
Optimize Database
CMS systems create a lot of crappy data on servers and this needs maintenance regularly to clean the database. These crappy data increases the database size and every website visit requires a lot of queries to be run in this heavy database. It delays the site load time significantly and impacts SEO scores.
These can be done by using any of the below plugin –
WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache.
WP-Optimize is a revolutionary, all-in-one plugin that cleans your database, compresses your images and caches your site.
Our cache feature is built around the world’s fastest caching engine. This simple, popular and highly effective tool has everything you need to keep your website fast and thoroughly optimized!
It does it in three clever ways:
- It allows you to clean and optimise your database.
- It gives you the option to compress your images.
- It allows you cache your pages, for super fast load times (read more caching information below).
Advanced Database Cleaner
Clean up database by deleting orphaned items such as ‘old revisions’, ‘spam comments’, optimize database and more…
If you have been using WordPress for a while, then you should think absolutely about a database cleanup. Indeed, your database may be full of garbage that makes your site sluggish and bloated such as old revisions, orphaned post meta, spam comments, etc. You should clean-up this unnecessary data to reduce your database size and improve website speed and performance. In addition, you will have quicker database backup since the file of your backup will be smaller.
‘Advanced Database Cleaner’ is a must-have plugin that allows you to clean database, optimize database and more.
Autoptimize
Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML. You can optimize and lazy-load images, optimize Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, remove WordPress core emoji cruft and more. As such it can improve your site’s performance even when already on HTTP/2! There is extensive API available to enable you to tailor Autoptimize to each and every site’s specific needs.
Revisions
With every review or autosave while writing posts or pages, WordPress creates full backups/revisions of all changes of each content. Some of the posts could have 100s of revision copies. All these copies take a lot of space and should be removed to clean the website DB and servers. Use the below plugin to delete the unused revisions.
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
Main Features –
- Deletes revisions of posts, pages and / or custom post types (you optionally can keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions and you can choose to delete revisions older than…)
- Deletes trashed posts, pages and comments, spammed comments (optional), unused tags, ‘expired or all transients’
- Deletes ‘pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Clears the ‘OEMBED cache’ (optional)
- Deletes ‘orphan postmeta items’
- Optimizes the database tables (optionally you can exclude certain tables, or even specific posts/pages, from optimizations
- Optimization can be scheduled to automatically run once hourly, twice daily, once daily or once weekly at a specific time
- MULTISITE compatible: optimizes all sites in the network with one click
WP Revisions Control
Revisions are stored in the database, and if many are stored, can cause bloat. This bloat may lead to slower queries, which can have a noticeable performance impact. The value of these revisions also depends on what is being tracked. For example, I may want to store every revision of the posts I write, but only desire to keep the latest five versions of each page on my site. Starting in WordPress 3.6, this control is available. WordPress doesn’t provide a native interface to specify revisions quantities, so I wrote this quick plugin to do so.
WordPress / Themes / Plugins Version
Use the latest version and to avoid manual intervention, use autoupdate option. These updates might break some of the features or customizations made manually in themes or plugins. There are many updates received in plugins, themes or core.
- Security updates.
- Bug Fixes.
- Enhancements to existing functionality.
- New features.
- Performance improvements.