In this post, we will explain how to speed up loading a WordPress website. Research results show that many people become impatient when dealing with websites. Approximately 25% of visitors leave the web page if the website does not load in 4 seconds or less than 4 seconds.
This is already a consequence if the website does not load quickly. Fortunately, problems like this can be overcome. If you can reduce the loading time to 2.9 seconds, then your website can be the fastest site compared to other websites. In this tutorial, we will show you how to speed up loading a WordPress website which is not difficult for you to implement.
Access your WordPress Admin Area
Before starting the tutorial on how to speed up loading a WordPress website, you must first access your WordPress admin page. Here are the steps:
- Access to your WordPress admin URL address (Example: https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin)
- Enter ‘username’ or ’email address
- Enter your WordPress ‘Password’
- Then press ‘Log In’
WordPress Speed Test
There are lots of useful tools that allow you to measure site performance. Among them using GTmetrix and Pingdom tools. This tutorial contains tips related to increasing speed by combining Google Page Speed Insights and YSlow results.
Remove Unneeded Plugins and Themes
Downloading multiple themes for WordPress is fine, but in the end, we only use one particular theme. You can determine the theme that will be used for your website and leave one backup theme if the main theme experiences an error.
Many plugins, especially plugins that are not used anymore, will only interfere with WordPress performance. Generally, the first thing you should do is remove or at least disable plugins that you don’t need when optimizing WordPress. Ideally, your site only needs performance-impacting plugins.
Minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
Minify is a useful technique if you want to improve website performance. This technique reduces the size of front-end and script files (HTML, CSS, JS) by removing unrelated characters, such as spaces and comments, from these files.
Plugins that can help you minify include Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache. If you want to know more clearly how to improve website performance by minifying files.
Activate Gzip Compression as a way to speed up a website loading
Besides minifying files, you can also take advantage of a separate form of compression, namely Gzip compression. In essence, whenever someone visits your site, the resources (files) from the server will be fetched. The bigger the resource, the more time it takes to load the resource on the client end. By enabling Gzip compression, you can substantially reduce the size of these resources. This step can speed up WordPress loading.
To check if your site has Gzip compression enabled, use checkgzipcompression.com. If it hasn’t been activated, then edit the .htaccess file
Image Optimization as a way to speed up Website Loading
The nature of images that are not moving and tend to be static is often not a problem for website owners. However, did you know that high-resolution images can cause interference with bandwidth? So, all you need to do is check the size of the images used. This doesn’t mean you can’t use high-resolution images and are only allowed to use images that are smaller and look blurry. There are many methods or ways to optimize the images on your website. WordPress plugins, such as Smush Image Compression and Optimization offer an easy way to increase speed without sacrificing image quality. If you want to know more about WordPress image optimization, read our tutorial.
Another keyword that you might come across while looking for ways to speed up loading a WordPress website is pagination. Pagination refers to the technique of dividing up and shortening longer content. These short sections will then be displayed individually as separate pages.
Generally, pagination is used to accommodate comments because loading thousands of comments simultaneously can cause congestion on bandwidth. You can easily enable pagination in the comments section in WordPress – hover over Settings and open Discussions. In this section, you can define the maximum number of comments per page. It is highly recommended to use a balanced approach. Too many comments on one page are undesirable because users don’t want to keep clicking to go to the next page.
Besides being used for comment fields, pagination can also help you divide posts/pages into several web pages separately. This technique is especially useful for very long posts because it is less likely that users will feel confused the first time they visit your website. Pagination of posts can be enabled by adding <!-next page -> to the post version. Automatically, WordPress will detect and activate it for you.
PHP Version Upgrade To Speed Up Website Loading
Not many people know this trick. However, this trick is one way to speed up loading a WordPress website which is quite powerful. Migrating from PHP 5 to PHP 7 on your own is quite a worry. That way, however, you can find other ways to do it. WordPress performance can be increased by a factor of 2 on PHP 7 compared to PHP 5; PHP 7 can process 112% more requests/per second than PHP 5. WordPress also reaps the benefits of PHP 7 memory optimization which results in a 30-50% increase in performance. Because of that, PHP 7 is set as the default version of PHP on all shared hosting services, even though we offer WordPress 5X Optimization Speed.
However, one thing you should keep in mind is that PHP 7 does not have backward compatibility. This means you won’t be able to use certain plugins and themes, including themes and plugins that work very well in PHP 5. To check if your site currently has such a plugin/theme, use the PHP Compatibility Checker for WordPress.
Use the Caching Plugin to speed up a website loading
Caching is an excellent mechanism for offloading some of the load on a web server. The caching engine stores information that is often used on the client system (browser, memory) so that the browser does not need to retrieve information repeatedly from the server. Most caching can improve site performance. Because of this, caching is known as one of the leading techniques for managing WordPress performance.
The many interesting plugins available for WordPress enable various kinds of caching, including WP-Rocket and W3 Total Cache. Also, read our tutorial on how to use WP Super Cache to enable caching on your WordPress site.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Because now the internet is so fast, sometimes we forget that web pages are created by physical hardware devices that are far from your location. And sometimes distance is a big issue with response time. Most sites solve this kind of problem using Content Delivery Networks (CDN).
When you activate a CDN on a website, the client’s browser no longer receives every page from the web server, instead, several static pages are forced to be placed in a data center adjacent to the client’s location. This step reduces the total number of requests handled by the web server as a result of the improved WordPress performance.
Many options are available for choosing a CDN. The most popular options include Cloudflare and MaxCDN. Also, read our tutorial on creating Cloudflare on your WordPress site.