In this blog post, we at WPressBlog have effective ways to speed up your WordPress site in 2024.
Speed is one of the most essential ranking factors. Everyone wants to reduce website load time to increase website traffic, user satisfaction, lessen the bounce rate, and ultimately profit.
If you left your site unchecked, due to more data accumulation it gets more complex and less efficient. It’s normal for all WordPress sites but it shouldn’t have to be.
To get rid of this kind of issue, go through these 15 key ways and get your website accessible all the time for users worldwide.
15 Effective Ways To Speed Up Your WordPress Website
1. Use Best Quality Hosting Provider
Page load time depends on the fact what type of hosting do you use to host your website. There are a few types of hosting like Shared, WordPress, VPS, Cloud, Dedicated hosting, etc.
- Shared Hosting: your website shares the resources of all websites hosted on the same server. In this case, your website may cause you to get slowed down due to overload. Check here the best shared hosting providers.
- WordPress Hosting: This type of hosting is designed only for WordPress-based websites. So that you will get good support and speed in this type of hosting. Check here the best WordPress hosting providers.
- Virtual Private Network (VPS) hosting: all the resources are evenly distributed to all the sites on the same server. Hence there is no way to exceed the load time. Check here the best VPS hosting providers.
- Dedicated Hosting: there are no resources to share. You would’ve only one server dedicated to you. Means dedicated hosting provides the maximum speed to your website. Check here the best dedicated hosting providers.
Also, the technology used on the server also influences the website speed. For instance, the version of PHP, HTML, and other web technologies, SSD hard drives, and memory are some of the factors in how quickly it can serve up your website files.
The other thing is the server location. The closer the server location to the visitors, the faster will be the page load.
I strongly recommend you to use WPX hosting if you want to make your website super fast. We are also using it for the last few years and it really works great.
2. WordPress components
The software powering your website is also an important factor for influencing the website speed. WordPress offers plenty of ways to build websites naturally faster than other CMS.
WordPress site performance is just like the traditional sites that were built on pure HTML and hence they didn’t require any processing.
In the same way, WordPress offers dynamic web pages that are retrieved from the MySQL database. It then generates the HTML code to deliver it to the browser for immediate processing.
You may also use lots of other add-ons and WordPress plugins. But excessive use of plugins may cause you to lead slow down your site as they require more codes to get loaded.
3. Keep your web technology up to date
Keeping your technology up to date is also one of the great ways to speed up your website. This is the reason for the development of many latest versions of HTML and PHP. Hence, you need a quality web host. But even after choosing a quality web host, it doesn’t mean that you are free from the responsibility of checking.
Make sure for the PHP version and configuration you are using prior to updating. For instance, some older versions of WordPress are not compatible with the latest version of PHP.
4. Use a proper WordPress theme
Make sure of the theme. It should have fewer or no unnecessary features. That’s because some themes offer so many features that require additional scripts. It may cause you to slow down your website from sheer weight.
Hence, you should try to find the theme as per your need and nothing more. You can use the lightweight theme and WordPress plugins to add functionality.
Check here the fastest loading WordPress themes to use in 2024.
5. Regular database maintenance
Like WordPress, the core database is also gets bogged over time due to the temporary accumulation of disk space and unused data of uninstalled plugins and more culprits.
To make your database lean and usable, it’s necessary to perform regular database maintenance. WordPress offers many tools (like Advanced Database Cleaner, WP-Optimize, and WP-DBManager) out there which can help you to do the same.
These tools make you able to perform the process of database maintenance with ease and plus, you can reduce the post revisions.
This way you can easily speed up your WordPress website.
6. Set up monitoring
You can’t ignore the fact that you can only manage what you can measure. In other words, you can correct things properly if you know where the problem is.
You can register for many online tools (like Pingdom) to automatically monitor your site in terms of speed, rendering requirements, and other optimizations to improve the website speed.
7. Reduce Server requests
Whenever the user’s browser asks for any resource, a server request happens. It can be in the form of files like CSS, Script, or an image. Website load time depends on how long your server takes to respond to the user’s browser.
The fewer requests from the browser; the faster will be the load time. Here we have listed some of the key ways to reduce server requests.
- Reduce the number of posts on a web page.
- You can split longer posts into pages.
- Break the comments up into several pages.
- Reduce the number of pages and other elements.
- Unnecessary and slower plugins must be uninstalled.
- Deactivate the extra plugins.
- Reduce external resources such as fonts, and other scripts or plugins.
You can use Pingdom and GTmetrix tools to be aware of all sorts of server requests and the required time to load. After that, you can easily take an effective step to reduce or eliminate these requests to make your website faster.
8. Reduce Image Size
Images required more space than text or CSS. Hence, images take a very long time to load. It’s more crucial for a WordPress site owner to reduce the image size. Make sure image size reduction should not affect the image quality. In other words, images should be compressed.
Check here the best image optimization plugins for WordPress websites.
9. Don’t host videos
Although WordPress is capable to host multimedia elements like videos, audios,…etc yet you should avoid doing so.
There are two reasons for this response:
- It requires more bandwidth.
- It makes your site considerably larger and harder to create back up.
It is recommended to just copy and paste the video links to the WordPress editor. It will do a much better job than your own server ever could.
10. Enable caching
Caching is one of the best ways to improve website performance in terms of speed. WordPress offers lots of plugins to enable caching but I recommended using WP Rocket as it is one of the best caching plugins.
Browser Caching enables the users’ browsers to serve the webpage without loading and hence makes the website faster to load. If you are a web developer, you can implement caching via .htaccess.
For server caching you can ask your hosting provider. WordPress offers its own caching solutions for the users’ convenience.
Check here the Best Caching Plugins to Speed Up WordPress Site in 2024.
11. Use a Content Delivery Network(CDN)
As we have discussed above, server location is the most vital factor that influences website speed. If the server is located at the longest distance then the response will be slower. And hence it will take too much time to load a site.
Content Delivery Network immediately hosts your static files on many servers distributed globally. So the server can easily provide the fastest response to the user.
Check here the best CDN providers to use in 2024.
12. Files Concatenation
Concatenation is the way to reduce the files by combining them into fewer and larger files. It is also one of the crucial steps because downloading one larger file requires less time than that of downloading several small ones.
For web developers, there is a tool called Gulp. The common tool for concatenation is Autoptimize. This plugin combines all the files like HTML, CSS and JS files into one large file. Installing this plugin would be really beneficial to a great extent.
13. File Minification
Usually, web developers use comments and formatting to make the code easier to read and understand. The downside of this way increases the file size. Unfortunately, browsers and servers execute the whole code flawlessly.
To get rid of such issues, WordPress offers several plugins like WP Rocket, Autoptimize, Gulp (recommended for developers), W3 Total cache, and more.
14. Enabling Gzip Compression
Compression makes the web files smaller and hence lowers the load time. In reality, WordPress is nothing but a cloud of files.
So, WordPress websites perform faster after the compression of files. WordPress offers easy-to-implement plugins to add the minifying code to the .htaccess files in the root directory.
15. Disable Hotlinking
Using images to your web content without hosting them on your own site is called Hotlinking. Instead of uploading images on the server, you put an external link to the website from where an image is to be loaded.
This will create problems when your content starts getting traffic. In this case, your server has to work to deliver images from one site to another. To avoid hotlinking you can add this simple code to the .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|zip|rar|mp3|flv|swf|xml|php|png|css|pdf)$ – [F]Conclusion
All these are great steps to speed up your WordPress site. By following these steps you would really have great WordPress experiences.
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Hi there,
I love how you have started off with web hosting. I too think that having a reliable and reputable web host is essential if you want to speed up your WordPress website. A lot of new timers, including me, fall for the trap and choose a cheaper hosting to save money. Thankfully I learned my lesson early and switched to a better web host which did cost me more but my site performed better than ever.
Another thing that I did to improve my site speed was to disable the pingbacks and trackbacks. If your WordPress site is receiving a lot of pingbacks then it adds to your load time.
If you want to update your article and add more tips, then you can check out this piece which covers more or less everything related to WordPress speed.
https://www.wpblog.com/speed-up-wordpress-websites/
Cheers 🙂
You are great. What a fantastic lettering to me . keep it up.
my wordpress site speed is very slow.
You can use above tips to increase your website speed.
You can also use “wp rocket” plugin that will increase your website speed instantly. WP Rocket plugin with discounted price from here.
Thanks for sharing such an informative article. My website is not so fast, because of too much HTTP request. can you tell me, how can I reduce HTTP requests?
Images are the major contributors to size increment of a given webpage. The trick is to reduce the size of the images without compromising on the quality. If you manually optimize the images using Photoshop or any other tools, the process will take a long time. Fortunately, there are plugins available for just about everything you can think of, including image optimization. The ones worth mentioning are:
1.) Optimole
2.) WP Smush
3.) EWWW Image Optimizer
Using any of the above mentioned plugins on your WordPress site will drastically reduce image sizes, thus improving the speed of your website.
The methods you have given to increase the speed of the website are very effective. Thank you for the ways you have told to increase the speed of the website with full detail.
You are welcome, Krishna.
Great tips! Implementing these strategies can significantly enhance website performance. I’m especially interested in the recommendations for optimizing images and leveraging browser caching. It’s amazing how small adjustments can lead to faster load times and a better user experience. Thanks for sharing!