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.
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
Plugin: WP 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
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
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.
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.
Informative and well-written. Learned a lot of valuable things related to improving speed of website. Thanks for sharing
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,
You are welcome Manoj. Happy to help!
I need good update on how remove those other iPhones that are tracking my activity
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.
Amazing. Thank you so much Lynn for your comment. Happy to help! https://media0.giphy.com/media/VfF7yy7PTUX1l3i0oA/giphy.gif
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.
Thanks for sharing details Danial.
Good ideas for optimizing your site
Thanks!
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!
This helped me optimize my website.
Thank you !
It’s great to see positive result Raymond. Happy blogging!
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)
Yeah. WordPress Optimization is very interesting topic and we have hundreds of tutorial on Crunchify.
WOW this really helped me a lot, now my site runs more swiftly.
Awesome. Good to hear that Vishal. Please share your experience in details when you get time.
http requests have a good amount of share in the decrement of wordpress’s speed. Try to reduce as many as you can.
Totally agree with you Syed.
We have detailed tutorial for it here: https://crunchify.com/how-to-stop-loading-unnecessary-files-and-reducing-websites-http-requests-wordpress-optimization-tips/
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.
Wow that’s so many unnecessary plugins you have there. I’m glad you were able to remove all of those.
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.
For trick # 6, you have to all code to your theme’s functions.php file.
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.
Hi Jia – yup. Working on plugin with all settings for this one. Please stay tuned for more details.
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.
You are welcome Brandon.
Trying to keep plugins upto date will keep site up & running. Nice tips to speed up WordPress website.
Thank you Priya. Happy blogging!!
Nice article 😉
Image optimization is one of the most important things!
You should use SVG where it is possible.
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 🙂
Hi Charlie – I haven’t played with Redis till now. Will update you once have more information.
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.
That’s right. I’m with MaxCDN since last 3 years without any issue.
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?
Hi Robert – that happened because in WP Super Cache you may have selected option for
Try making changes as mentioned in diagram below and you should see your issue resolved.
That worked. Thank you!
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 }
Lately I noticed that the loading time of my website has slowed down. I think I have to discard some plug-ins.
I Would agree. It’s better not to use for only little benefits compare to user experience.
Hi App Shah,
Your blog is great and informative. I learn many things related to improving speed of website. Thanks for sharing it.
Thanks Oliver.
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.
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.