7 Quick Tips to Speed Up WordPress Performance

Did you know that your website speed is a determining factor for search engine optimization? Meaning, the faster your website loads, the higher it ranks on search engines. Additionally, as the mobile user population grows, website speed and loading times become an extenuating factor that determines how long someone stays on your website. Which is crucial for a business looking to increase traffic or sales. 

WordPress currently hosts over 810 million websites, around 43.1% of the internet traffic, and is known for its ease of use and longevity in the industry. With the open-source component, there are continuous contributions, and this creates ongoing security issues and vulnerabilities. We previously explored this in a recentarticle with some tips on how to avoid some of the common mistakes users make. The article identified that the bulk of the security issues can be avoided if WordPress users adhere to best practices.  

How fast is your website? Do you know if visitors are hanging around or leaving? 

The speed of your WordPress site may be creating additional conversion issues, outside of security or content.  Luckily there is always a solution.  But how do you know if a website is slow?  Unfortunately, visitors never send a strongly worded email about your website’s speed, they just leave. That action alone sends a strong message to the search engine overlords that there really isn’t much on your website to see. A high bounce rate is not only bad for your conversion rate, but also detrimental to your business. 

In this article, you will learn how to identify and fix some of the most common WordPress website speed issues. 

Before you tackle the tasks. You must first figure out what is causing the slowdown of your website. In some instances, you can tell when a website is moving at turtle speed. Slow response times, content, especially images and videos take forever to load, and some pages never load. On the front end, this could be frustrating, so what tools are available to test the speed of your website? 

Some Speed-testing Tools

Using a speed testing tool helps to identify performance bottlenecks. While not a comprehensive list, these are good places to start, mostly free of cost and easy to use. 

PageSpeed Insights

Powered by Google, PageSpeed Insights (PSI) assesses the user experience of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved. PSI is useful for debugging issues but might not capture real-world bottlenecks. Additionally, there must be enough data for it to be included in the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) report. The quality of the user experience is grouped into three categories, Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor. 

Lighthouse

Also, through Google technology, Lighthouse is rather different from PSI. PSI focuses on performance metrics while Lighthouse measures at least five different metrics, creating an all-encompassing report. Just a note, PSI uses the information data generated by the lighthouse. 

GtMetrix

Although GtMetrix bears some similarities to PSI, they use Lighthouse, and the performance scores are often like other web performance tools. The tool can be used by anyone looking to improve their site’s performance.

What are we testing for? 

The obvious thing is how fast a site loads. There is also the issue of analyzing server response times, page load time, and resource usage.  The tools that are available will provide detailed information about what requires immediate attention and a course of action. 

How do we fix some of the main areas?

Based on your results, there could be many issues with large images, WordPress themes, or custom code. Taking the time to address them could improve the efficiency and overall functionality of your website. 

Find An Image Optimization Tool

A great user experience will include the best images. But what if those images are causing your website to run slower? This is usually because of the image size and quality. To avoid this, check the size of the image you wish to use and make sure they are in the correct format. WordPress also offers image optimization plug-ins. According to HubSpot, here are some of the top image optimization WordPress plugins.

• Smush
• Optimus
• EWWW Image Optimizer
• ShortPixel Image Optimizer
• Compress JPEG and PNG Images
• Imsanity
• Imagify
• reSmush.it
• Kraken Image Optimizer
• WP Compress

Use A Caching Mechanism

One of the most common and useful ways to improve a website’s speed is through caching. Having temporary access to data to avoid overloading the server has been a common practice. With a smaller, faster memory storing frequently used data, larger content loads faster and improves the overall performance of the website. There are several benefits of caching including improved application performance, reduced data cost, reduced backend load, predictable performance, elimination of data hotspots, and increase in read throughput (IOPS). 

Minimize HTTP Requests

A website visit means a request for files resulting in an HTTP request; an increase in the number of requests could slow down the site. You can minimize the number of requests by deleting unnecessary images Also, reducing image sizes using one of the image optimization tools like Smush, can be useful.  Another technique is to implement a lazy loading mode. What this does is stop large images at the bottom of a page from being loaded if the visitor never scrolls that far.

Choose a Lightweight Theme

Selecting the right WordPress theme for your website is important. However, selecting a theme that will not slow down your website might be more crucial. While style is obviously important, now for SEO purposes, speed takes the lead in determining the details. 

By using some of the page speed testing tools we suggested, Kinsta looked at some of the fastest WordPress themes, and here is a list of the fastest WordPress themes in no particular order.

• Hello Elementor
• Neve
• Astra
• Generate Press
• OceanWP
• Zakra
• Customify
• Twenty Twenty
• Responsive
• Sydney
• Blank Canvas
• Go
• Hestia
• PopularFx
• Twenty Twenty-One
• Twenty Twenty-Two

Practice Database Optimization

A thoughtful design that carefully accounts for functionality is at the core of performance enhancement. But even then, most well-designed websites get bogged down over time. Ensure that you back up before beginning the tasks. It is key to identify and clean up any unnecessary data, remove unused tables and metadata, rebuild, or repair your database tables, optimize database indexes, compress database files, and reduce the size of database images. The database structure is a crucial factor as it relates to speed. Cloudbase noted that the WordPress 4.4.2 version and onwards carries 12 tables in the database that carry out varying functionalities and the number varies based on the number of themes and plug-ins used.  

Develop Content Delivery Optimization

One of the best ways to optimize content delivery is by using a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a geographically distributed set of servers that caches content close to end users. A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content, including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.  Using a CDN can Improve a website’s load times, reduce bandwidth costs, increase content availability and redundancy, and improve web security. 

GZIP Compressions

Websites use copious amounts of data, so storage and deliverability are a big deal. GZIP compressions are the second fastest way to speed up your WordPress website. As the current standard for file compression on the web, GZIP’s technology reduces the size of data frequently transferred over the internet. GZIP is not only faster than other methods, but it also uses fewer resources, requiring very little computing power and memory space. 

A website speed testing tool like PageSpeed Insights can tell you if GZIP is enabled on your website. Despite being one of the easiest ways to compress a site, most WordPress sites don’t use it. 

Use CDN

Web applications use CDNs largely because they offer four important benefits: better performance, increased reliability, cost savings, and resilience against cyber attacks.

Sometimes, things go wrong on the Internet. Servers go down, networks become congested, and connections get interrupted. A CDN enables web applications to provide uninterrupted service to users even in the face of these problems.

CDNs balance the load of network traffic, ensuring no one server gets overwhelmed. In the event that a single server stops working, a CDN can initiate a “failover” process that allows a backup server to take over. Some CDNs, like the Cloudflare CDN that is recommended by WP Engine, can route around network congestion, like GPS navigation software finding a way around heavy freeway traffic.

So, what’s Next?

Digitization comes with many pockets of details that clearly affect the functionality of your business. SEO optimization not only rests on building a good-looking website, but speed holds a very prominent position for that placement. Where you land in the rankings can be improved. Revamping or building a website from scratch requires attention to the specifics and WDB is fully equipped to handle those issues, from security to speed, to functionality.  

Let us know how we can help you improve your website. Schedule a call with us. 

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