How to speed up WordPress surely is a hot topic these days. Fortunately, there are numerous techniques that you can employ to get the job done. So, our intent here is to list every trick we know of that can make your WordPress site a lot faster.
Why should you speed up WordPress?
- Search engines (like Google) rank websites with fast-loading times higher than the slow-loading ones. So, if you want to improve your position in the SERPs, improving speed should be one of your priorities.
- Online buyers are the most impatient lot; they expect the page to load within a second.
- Studies have shown that site-loading speed of more than 2 seconds usually results in about 47 percent of visitors bouncing off the website. So, to keep about half of your visitors interested, you should speed up your WordPress.
How to Speed up WordPress Site?
CONTENT
- Make fewer HTTP Requests
- Avoid Redirect
- Minify HTML
- Make AJAX Cacheadble
- Minimize the Number of DOM Elements
- Reduce DNS Lookups
- Avoid 4o4s
COOKIE
- Reduce Cookie Size
- Use Cookie-Free Domains for Components
SERVERR
- Reduce Server Response Time
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Enable Compression
- Add Expires or Cache-Contorl Header
- Configure ETags
CSS
- Avoid CSS Expressions
- Make CSS External
- Minify CSS
- Choose <link> Over @Import
- Avoid Filters
JAVASCRIPT
- Make JavaScript External
- Minify Javascript
- Remove Duplicate Scripts
- Minimize DOM Access
- Develop Smart Event Handlers
IMAGES
- Optimize Images
- Optimize CSS Sprites
- Do Not Scale Images in HTML
- Make favicon in Next-Gen Formats
It is not necessary to try all of these solutions simultaneously for a faster WordPress website. Depending on your requirements, you can choose to use only a few of them.
The primary causes for a slow WordPress website are:
Web Hosting – When your web hosting server is not properly configured it can hurt your website speed.
WordPress Configuration – If your WordPress site is not serving cached pages, then it will overload your server thus causing your website to be slow or crash entirely.
Page Size – Mainly images that aren’t optimized for web.
Bad Plugins – If you’re using a poorly coded plugin, then it can significantly slow down your website.
External scripts – External scripts such as ads, font loaders, etc can also have a huge impact on your website performance.
Now that you know what slows down your WordPress website, let’s take a look at how to speed up your WordPress website.
