How to Speed Up WordPress and Boost Performance: Top WordPress Optimization Tricks [2023 Edition]

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App Shah

Crunchify » WordPress Optimization and Tutorials » How to Speed Up WordPress and Boost Performance: Top WordPress Optimization Tricks [2023 Edition]

How to Speed Up WordPress and Boost Performance

There are literally hundreds of possible ways a user can speed up their WordPress website and increase pageviews. Steps in this tutorial will optimize WordPress performance and increase site speed.

Do you have any of below questions?

  • 10 WordPress Setting Changes to Optimize Your Site’s Performance
  • WordPress Performance Optimization Best Practices.
  • How to Optimize WordPress for Better Performance?
  • WordPress Performance Optimization Tips
  • How to Speed up Your WordPress Site.
  • Run a Site Speed Diagnosis. Understanding how fast your website loads is the next step towards improving site performance.
  • Speed up WordPress to make sure your website content is delivered the fastest.

From buying traffic (not suggested) to updating your websites server for maximum speed (highly recommended), ensuring that you use proper methods is the best way to increase traffic.

I won’t promise you a million visitors a month using these methods, but they will at least ensure you are using best practices.

Unlike other lists this article isn’t going to tell you how to write Search Engine Optimized content, instead it should work as the foundation for your new or existing site before you decide to create new or more content.

Using these methods you can speed up your sites performance, which in turn SHOULD lead to more traffic.

Step-1. Leveraging Browser Caching via .htaccess

Here is a complete tutorial on How to Speed up WordPress Leveraging Browser Caching via .htaccess.

Step-2. Use Caching

You can cache all of your WordPress pages.  When you cache, it saves a copy of each page and serves that copy up instead of running all of the php code each time someone requests a page.  

This can be really helpful. I use WP Super Cache plugin and really like it. Detailed instruction on how to set it up correctly.

The only down side of caching is that it takes a little while to set up, and it can also make updating your site more confusing because sometimes you are looking at a cached version of your site when you think you are looking at a live version. But once you work through those kinks, caching is great.

Get your copy.

Crunchify Page Loading in less than half a second

Step-3. Minify Your Sites CSS, JS and remove unnecessary Java Scripts

With websites, I believe less is more.  This is undeniably true of loading times. Your sites stylesheets and other CSS forms have a lot of blank white space, the more space you have the more system resources your server uses to search your sites CSS.

Complete tutorial on how to remove unnecessary JavaScripts and Remove JS and CSS if you are using Crayon Syntax Highlighter.

Step-4. Choose a Good Web Host

This might seem like a very obvious one, but a lot of the times people try to save a few bucks and compromise quality. It is not worth it. Pay the extra few dollars and get a better web host.

One that is reliable and have strong servers. If you have millions of visitors / month then it’s not a bad idea to go for VPS hosting or Dedicated Server hosting.

Step-5. Optimize Your MySQL Database

Better take care of WordPress tables

PluginWP Sweep.

When you delete unused plugins they don’t necessarily disappear from your sites database, by using this plugin you can find those unneeded tables and delete them, freeing up database space that didn’t need to be used.

The less database tables you have, the faster your site will run. Here’s the clean options plugin.

Articles:

Top-6. Do a Plugin Check and Remove Inactive Plugins

Do a Plugin Check and Remove Inactive Plugins

If you are using more than 15 plugins on your blog then you need to check to see if you really need all of those. If you don’t then you need to delete them. Also remove the inactivate plugins from the site.

While checking for plugins, make sure that you use the proper format when including the plugin in your template files.

Instead of including the code like this:

<?php wp_page_navi(); ?>

You should add it like this:

<?php if (function_exists('wp_page_navi')) { wp_page_navi(); } ?>

Having it this way ensures that WordPress will only pull that code on the page if this plugin is active. If you use the first way of coding, and you inactivate the plugin, your page will load with error and sometimes it even displays on the page that there is an error.

Step-7. Use Content Delivery Network

Use Content Delivery Network - cdn.crunchify.com

At Crunchify we use MaxCDN as our Content Delivery Network partner. MaxCDN is one of the best Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider so far I came across.

But make sure to avoid duplicate content issue.

Step-8. Removed loading unwanted files

Please read detailed tutorial on how to got rid-off top 9 files out of 10 resources which were loading on all Crunchify pages.

As always, be sure to backup your website and MySQL databases before you use any of these methods, just to be on the safe side. Do you have other tips? Feel free to share them with our readers in the comments section.

Let me know if you have any comment and would like to add more optimization steps.

45 thoughts on “How to Speed Up WordPress and Boost Performance: Top WordPress Optimization Tricks [2023 Edition]”

  1. I read your article, very interesting and knowledgeable. Speeding up a WordPress website is crucial for providing a better user experience and improving search engine rankings. Here are some performance optimization techniques you can apply:

    1.Choose a reliable hosting provider.
    2.Use a lightweight theme.
    3.Optimize images.
    4.Utilize caching.
    5.Minify CSS and JavaScript.
    6.Enable GZIP compression.
    7.Optimize your database.
    8.Use a content delivery network (CDN).
    9.Reduce HTTP requests.
    10.Disable or uninstall unnecessary plugins.
    11.Implement lazy loading.
    12.Optimize your WordPress configuration.

    These are some short and sweet techniques which I would like to share with you.

    Reply
  2. Informative and well-written. Learned a lot of valuable things related to improving speed of website. Thanks for sharing

    Reply
  3. Great article. A good host is the base for lightning-fast websites. These strategies are very useful to improve page speed and boost rankings.

    Thanks for the write-up,

    Reply
  4. Thank you for all your detailed explanation, I read this article properly and apply my website. Now my website speed up and performance better than before.

    Reply
  5. Your web hosting is very important for your website speed and security issues, I personally use Cloudways with Varnish and CDN for my personal and client projects.

    They provide security and backup features free of cost, you can easily launch your CMS within few clicks.

    Reply
  6. I would like to add one point. In the CDN section, you can add Cloudflare as an alternative for those people who want a free CDN. They give you three custom page rules as well. When enabled properly that setup can easily shave off 2-3 seconds from a website’s loading time!
    Nonetheless, great tips! Thanks for the time and effort!

    Reply
  7. Even 3 years but still good advice. About optimize database I can also say that convert your old Mysql tables from the MyISAM format to be InnoDB format helped a lot.

    And for “remove junk files” I will recommend some one click plugin like Speed Demon (free)

    Reply
  8. http requests have a good amount of share in the decrement of wordpress’s speed. Try to reduce as many as you can.

    Reply
  9. Hello Admin i would love to thank you very much for this wonderful Tutorial. Cause it helped me discover over 20 Deactivated Plugin junck file on My WordPress Site. Thanks a lot.

    Reply
  10. Hi App Shah,

    Your tricks have reduced my Loading time to ~3s now.
    I have tried a couple of other tricks also.
    I want to try Trick No. 6, the active plugin trick, Can you tell me where to add this code?
    I am no coder.

    Reply
  11. Hi App Shah. Do you have any plan to create plugin with all of these optimization? Would love to pay for it if you would create one.

    Reply
  12. All these points will help to improve the work performance of a website in the sense of the speed and browser friendly. Thanks for writing this beautiful post.

    Reply
  13. Nice article 😉
    Image optimization is one of the most important things!
    You should use SVG where it is possible.

    Reply
  14. What about caching? I read on the Rosehosting blog that Redis is a good caching mechanism for WordPress.

    Other than that I don’t have something to add except that these tips are useful 🙂

    Reply
  15. Thanks for the tips. I already switched from shared hosting to VPS hosting and noticed the difference. I am planning to move all my sites to VPS hosting. I also use MaxCDN. It is a great service.

    Reply
  16. I did steps 1 and 2 and now the admin toolbar won’t show on the site, Jetpack plugin ignores the settings I gave it, and I can’t use the customizer. I didn’t deviate from the instructions. Any ideas?

    Reply
    • Hi Robert – that happened because in WP Super Cache you may have selected option for

      Make known users anonymous so they’re served supercached static files.

      Try making changes as mentioned in diagram below and you should see your issue resolved.

      Reply
  17. This is excellent advice. Other than CDN and changing hosts, I followed every step and cut page load times in half on a stubborn WordPress AskIt Theme/Chilld and CMAnswers Pro Plugin at the core. These two alone along with GoDaddy Managed WordPress were loading pages at 11 seconds! Thanks { c }

    Reply
  18. Lately I noticed that the loading time of my website has slowed down. I think I have to discard some plug-ins.

    Reply
  19. Hi App Shah,
    Your blog is great and informative. I learn many things related to improving speed of website. Thanks for sharing it.

    Reply
  20. You REALY need to have a look at the link you have for WP-Minify above. It’s pointing to an adware/virusy place that is bad news. Damn thing took over my browser, I had to quit to regain control. Makes me question Crunchify as a reputable source.

    Reply
    • Hi Ken – Thanks much for comment and reporting an issue with link. I’ve completely removed link for WP Minify. I guess – WP-Minify is no longer supported. It hasn’t been updated in over 2 years.

      Reply

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