How to Speed Up WordPress Website In 6 Powerful Steps for Quick Loading
WordPress is without a doubt an excellent web development platform. But there is one drawback: it is a little slow.
My website, www.himanireviews.com, loads in about 1.2 seconds.
Here’s the proof.
And, until you address the speed issue, you risk losing business due to a slow website.
This is not a problem for your current visitors or regular blog readers, but it will result in a loss of new subscribers.
Here I’ve listed the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips for improving your WordPress website’s performance and reducing site loading time.
In this article, I’ve explained why speed is important, what’s going on behind the scenes that slow down your WordPress website, and how you can speed up your WordPress website rapidly.
Why is the WordPress website's speed important?
Google began penalising websites with slow loading speeds and ranking them lower in search results.
This means a lower ranking on Google will result in less traffic to your website.
Do you know?
A slower website means that a user will probably leave before it fully loads.
Speed concerning SEO
Google now includes a website’s speed in its ranking algorithm. This means that if your website is slow, it will have an impact on your organic rating and cause you to lose visitors as a result of lower rankings in key search engines.
How can I verify the speed of WordPress website?
Most beginners make one error. When they create a new website and it does not feel slow on their laptops and desktops they assume it is fine, but this is a HUGE mistake.
Because you will be visiting your new website regularly, most modern web browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Safari store your website content in their cache memory, and the next time you type your web address, they immediately fetch your website content from their cache memory, followed by the web server.
However, a new user may not experience the same webpage performance as you.
Even people from different geographical places have varied experiences, but your website must be served to users as quickly as possible in all locations.
Use GTmetrix to test your website's actual speed
GTmetrix is an excellent tool for testing your website speed at multiple server locations using a single computer.
Simply go to www.gtmetrix.com, type your whole website address in the box, and press enter.
Check the webpage speed. It will take a few seconds to fully analyze each module of your WordPress website and display a detailed result with their performance %, as seen in the upper screenshot of this page.
Why does your WordPress website slow down?
After analyzing your website’s speed with GTmetrix, you will most likely receive multiple recommendations for improvements. However, the majority of them are technical, making problems difficult for beginners to grasp and address.
Understanding the causes that are causing your website to slow down will help you speed up WordPress.
Some of the common speed-affecting factors
1. Heavy images: Beginners frequently upload large high-resolution images to their websites, which take a few seconds to load on your page. This is one of the most fundamental reasons why your website is loading slowly.
2. Using many plugins: This is yet another significant mistake made by newbies. Of course, plugins provide functionality to your WordPress website, but they can impair its speed. I propose trying to utilize less plugins.
3. Slow web hosting: Is another key element influencing website speed. All of your website material is stored on your web server, and when someone wants it, your server sends it to his browser. If your hosting server is slow to reply, your website will also be slow.
4. Themes that have not been optimized: Most predesigned themes feature large CSS and JS files that take a long time to load on a web browser.
You must be thinking that I revealed the reason for the slow website but did not advise you on how to improve its speed. Do not fear, now is the time to start our first step to speed up the WordPress website.
We are all aware that making even a minor modification to your WordPress website configuration can be perilous for novices, particularly if you are not a technical person.
But don’t worry, I’m here to help you with your WordPress website speed, and I’ve helped thousands of newbies get started with WordPress speed performance.
Step 1: Delete junk from your webpage.
When you first start constructing a WordPress website, most beginners simply install a WordPress theme and import demo content. During this procedure, a large number of useless pages, posts, and plugins are imported, which are no longer beneficial to your website and slow it down.
The following items should be reviewed and, if found unnecessary, deleted:
Remove trashed posts from the posts area.
Delete the unused post tags.
Delete the unused post categories.
Delete any unneeded post comments.
Under the pages section, delete discarded pages.
Delete imported demo pages (if they were imported with a theme).
Under the topics section.
Remove all inactive themes.
Under the plugins section.
Check and delete any plugins that are no longer useful for your website.
Without question, images bring life into your content and increase people’s interaction with your blog posts. It has been found that using coloured images attracts 85% of visitors to read your information.
However, if you upload heavy or unoptimized images, they may cause more harm than good. Unoptimized images are one of the most common causes of website slowness.
Before uploading images from your computer or camera to your website, I recommend optimizing them using a photo editing application or one of the many internet websites.
Each image has a unique format and size that is determined by the photo’s quality; however, you can use photo editing software to optimize your images up to 5X without losing clarity.
Here at WebsoftGlobal, I exclusively use two image formats: PNG and JPEG/JPG.
What is the difference?
Simply put, PNG images are uncompressed. It signifies they are larger and have high image quality.
On the other side, JPEG/JPG images are compressed. These photos have a variety of colours and are smaller in size.
So, what image format should you use for your website?
- If your image or photo contains a large number of various colours, you can utilize JPEG.
- If you want to use a transparent image, use the PNG format.
I primarily utilize JPEG photos on my website www.himanireviews.com.
How do I optimize images?
There are two methods for optimizing your photos.
Visit optimizilla.com
Upload your images. It automatically compresses your images and allows you to download them to your computer before posting them to your WordPress blog.
This is the ideal approach for compressing photos before uploading to your WordPress website.
Use the WP Smush Plugin
This is the second option for optimizing the existing photos on your WordPress website. It’s an excellent plugin for optimizing photos and speeding up your WordPress website.
It also includes the option to automatically optimize your fresh images before uploading them to your WordPress website.
I use the WP Smush plugin on my website to optimize all of my existing and newly added photos.
Step 3: Install the Caching Plugin (WProcket)
Of course, WordPress supports dynamic pages. It means that when someone visits your website, the pages are generated on the fly each time. In this process, WordPress uses an algorithm to identify the necessary data and information, organize it, and ultimately present a complete page to the user.
When multiple visitors access your WordPress website at the same time, this process slows down its performance. That is why I recommend the WordPress caching plugin to both beginners and experts. The caching plugin speeds up your WordPress website by five times.
How does a catching plugin operate?
When a visitor initially loads your WordPress website, the caching plugin creates a static version of the entire page. This means that instead of creating and assembling the dynamic content, the static version loads first.
Why should I use the plugin WPRocket Cache?
I utilize the W3 Total Cache plugin on my HimaniReviews blog due to its increased performance rate and adaptability.
With over a million active installs and a 4.5 out of 5-star rating in the WordPress Plugin Directory, WPRocket Caching is one of the most well-liked caching plugins for WordPress websites.
This plugin is updated monthly by its developers, and it is used for speed optimization by the majority of the biggest firms in the world, like Mashable, Smashing Magazine, Sony, etc.
Using GTmetrix.com to test my website both before and after installing W3 Total Cache Plugin, I was able to decrease the page load time from 6.0 seconds to 3.5 seconds and boost the PageSpeed score from 45% to 79%.
After all, this fantastic WordPress caching plugin is pretty much done, in my opinion.
How does The WPRocket Caching plugin work?
With the finest caching plugin, WordPress websites may be sped up without any effort. Just adhere to these guidelines:
First, purchase the plugin by visiting wp-rocket.me.
Go to > Plugins in Step 2.
Step 3: Upload the plugin and add the WPRocket plugin under Add new plugin.
Step 4: Install and enable the first plugin that appears on the screen.
Step 5: Immediately test the speed of your website by visiting www.GTmetrix.com. Activating the WPRocket Caching plugin will undoubtedly result in an improvement.
WP Rocket
Step 4: Set up the a3 Lazy Load Plugin.
The most useful information on blogs and websites is images, but did you realize that adding more and more images slows down page loads and uses more bandwidth?
For instance, if you have twenty images on your homepage and someone visits your website, all twenty images load on the user’s browser initially, regardless of whether the browser is open. This is how your web page should look.
It makes sense that loading twenty distinct images at once on a single webpage would take some time, which would slow down the loading speed of the website.
It is possible to load the images on the browser’s active screen only when a user scrolls to that area by using a lazy loading images plugin.
This speeds up the loading of pages, and I suggest using the a3 Lazy Load plugin.
A3 Lazy Load is a straightforward, mobile-friendly plugin that makes WordPress websites faster. You no longer have to be concerned about utilizing 1,000 images on your website at once. With this plugin, images are only lazy loaded when the user scrolls to the section containing them, improving performance.
Make Above-the-Fold Content Better
Give this a close read: For your website to load faster, above-the-fold content optimization is crucial. My website’s above-the-fold material was optimized, and as a result, my page load time dropped from 6 to 2.9 seconds. Yes, it does indeed function. When using GTmetrix or Google Pagespeed Insights to measure the speed of your website, you will typically get a suggestion to “optimize above the fold content.”
For any newcomer, this is a difficulty because they don’t know what that means.
I’ve covered everything in detail here, along with tips for optimizing material that is above the fold. What’s the Content Above the Fold?
Understand it in simple terms.
When you access a website in any web browser, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Safari, the initial content that appears on your screen without scrolling is known as Above the Fold Content.
The definition “Above the fold” refers to the portion of a Web page that appears in a browser window when it is first loaded. The area of a web page that needs scrolling down to see additional material is known as “below the fold.”
Let me explain with an example.
The attached image shows my website’s above-the-fold content from header to bottom.
This means it is the initial material that appears on the user’s browser screen from your website. And, of course, optimizing it will improve your website load time.
How to Optimize For above-the-fold content, follow these steps:
Step 1: Add a new plugin. Go to Plugins > Add New > Autooptimize.
Step 2: Go to the Settings tab > Autoptimize.
Step 3: Enable HTML, JavaScript, and CSS settings.
Step 4: Go to your website’s homepage, right-click in the above-the-fold region, and select View Page Source.
Step 5: On the source page, look for the keyword “autoptimize” and click the link that contains it.
Step 6: Copy the CSS code and navigate to the Critical Path CSS Generator website. In the first box, enter your website URL, and in the box below, paste the copied CSS code from the source page before clicking the “Create Critical Path CSS” button.
Within a few seconds, you will have access to optimized CSS code. Simply copy the full code, then return to your WordPress dashboard.
Step 7: Under CSS, go to Autoptimize > and tick Inline and Defer CSS. Then, put the optimized CSS code into the box and save it.
This short video provides a basic guide for optimizing above-the-fold content:
Invest in reliable and fast web hosting
Choosing a competent and dependable web hosting service to house your website is one of the most significant steps you can take to improve its performance.
There are, of course, many low-cost web hosting services available, but keep in mind that hosting is something you get for your money. Since my entire career as a Digital Marketer and Blogger, I have regarded decent site hosting as a critical speed component.
So, these were the greatest ways to speed up WordPress website and make Google happy so that it ranks higher.
