A hot topic on WordPress these days is on how to increase the WordPress website speed. Data suggests that WordPress powers 35% of all the websites on the Internet.

So, today we’re going to share with you everything we know about increasing the WordPress speed. Whether you’re are an expert developer, or you are just starting to use WordPress; we promise you’ll find something useful in this guide!

Well, there are numerous techniques that you can try to get the job done. So, let’s dig in!

WordPress Site Types

Before we plunge into the technical content, let us have a glance at the basics first. Not all WordPress sites are the same, and the same methods cannot be used to solve every WordPress issue.

Based on the changes in data, the WordPress sites are of two types; static and dynamic. In static sites, the data does not seem to change very often. The static sites include small business sites, blog and portfolio websites. The database calls are fewer for these websites and to achieve satisfactory Google performance, there is no need for plenty of google resources. It is possible to serve all requests from the server directly from cache.

The dynamic sites, however, undergo frequent changes in data. These sites include eCommerce websites, learning management systems (LMS), community forums etc. In every few minutes or seconds, server transactions take place. This means that all requests to the server cannot be served directly from cache. Additional server resources and database queries are required for these websites.

On the other hand, in dynamic websites, frequent changes occur in the data. These sites include eCommerce websites, learning management systems (LMS), community forums etc. In every few minutes or seconds server transactions take place. So, all requests to the server cannot be served directly from cache. Additional server resources and database queries are required for these websites.

Why Speed Matters?

Online buyers are the most impatient lot. In online business, you just have a few seconds to showcase your content and convince the visitors to stay on your website. The resultant data from various studies conducted suggest that the slow loading sites would force the potential customers to leave the website even before it loads. So, it is very important to keep the visitors interested.

Moreover, slow-loading websites are ranked lower on the Search engines (like Google).
So, to attain a high SERP position, you must work on your speed.

Only a fast website provides satisfactory user experience and you can get more traffic, subscribers and revenue from your website.

Test the loading time of your website

Before taking action to speed up, you must determine the loading time of your website. The speed of a website depends on various factors such as the size of the page, the frequency of change in content, the number of requests generated etc.

You can test the speed of your website using various online tools. These are the most popular ones:

• WebPageTest.org
• Tools.Pingdom.com

Okay, it’s time to get to the topic! Here are the easiest ways to speed up WordPress:

1. Choose a better web hosting provider

Shared hosting is the most popular kind of WordPress hosting. However, it has drawbacks too. In shared hosting, you are at the same server with hundreds of other websites. Experiencing slow website and server errors are a common issue.

Shared hosts tend to overcrowd the servers, and this affects your site performance poorly. There is a high probability of your website getting affected by the issues that arise in other websites too. Besides, there is no information regarding the optimization of their servers.

You can also query on the web hosting provider for their product and compatibility with WordPress.

 2. Choose a Lightweight WordPress theme

An important point to keep in mind while building a website is to use a clean and light WordPress theme. Sliders, widgets and other dynamic elements make your website look attractive, but at the same time, they increase the page size. High page size and too many elements also increase the risk of website getting thrashed. The best solution is to use a minimal lightweight WordPress theme.

3. Install a Caching Plugin

An efficient cache plugin is helpful when it comes to increasing the speed of your WordPress site. A caching plugin has advanced-cache mechanisms. They make complex tasks of adding caching rules to the website elements easier. It helps store the ultimate view of your site for any future visitors. Cache data includes HTML, JS and CSS code, images, fonts, and Flash files. So, with the cache plugin, WordPress won’t have to generate it for every following person viewing the site.

4. Compress media files

Uploading very large images and videos are the major contributors to size increment of a given webpage. They significantly slow your WordPress site down. To solve this issue, you can simply reduce the image size without compromising on the quality.

You can manually optimize the images using tools like Photoshop or Chrome PageSpeed Insights extension. However, these are time-consuming. You can try Plugins like WP Smush or tools like Tiny.png.

Thus, by reducing the size of the image you can drastically improve the speed of your website.

5. Look for Inactive Plugins or for Plugins that Don’t Work Properly

We often install several plugins for various purpose. Sometimes these plugins may be responsible for the slow loading of your site. You must verify if your plugins are functioning properly. If the plugins are causing a lag in your website, it is better to uninstall them and use an alternative plugin instead.

Having several numbers of plugins would also affect the speed of your website. It will add a tremendous amount of junk to your web files. So, it is advisable to uninstall plugins that you don’t need. 

6. Minimize JS and CSS files

It is advisable to minimize the JS and CSS files, as reducing the quantity of CSS and JS calls eventually leads to an increase in the site-loading speed.

7. Split your Blog Post

Long blog posts tend to have high SERPs, but a long article with a lot of images increase the loading time of your site. The trick is to split up your longer posts into multiple pages. All you need to do is to add the following code tag in your article where you want to split it into the next page:

 <!––nextpage––> 

You can use the code wherever you need to break your content.

So, these were some of the tricks that you can us ton increase the WordPress speed.
You can also check out “How to increase the WordPress upload limit” and some other articles on WordPress.