Today one of the most important things is speed. And you must speed up a website to make it grow. If you have a slow website that you should know that you will have very low traffic.
And that’s bad.
You must be sure that your website loads fast. Because imagine yourself going to a website and it needs 5 seconds to load.
You will be annoyed and go to another website. The same happens to other people.
But good thing is that there are different ways to speed up your WordPress website.
Also Read: WordPress vs Wix
In this post, I will share 9 ways that will help your website to load faster.
When I create a website I make sure that all the steps are covered. They work and they really speed up a website load time. So, if you do it you will see the result immediately.
Table of Contents
How To Check Website Speed
There are different tools that can tell you how fast your site is. And they are free. It will test your website and show you statistics like page speed, rating, page size, problems, etc.
You can check the speed for different pages like home page, blog page, post page, etc.
Places you can test your site’s speed:
Now let’s dive in and see how you can speed up your WordPress site.
1. Choose Good Hosting
The first thing you need in order to have a fast website is to choose a good, reliable, and fast hosting platform. There are too many hosting but not all are that great.
If your website is not on good hosting, then the rest steps on this post won’t make that much of a difference. So, choose the best platform.
For more affordable hosting platforms, I recommend NameHero, Hostinger, and a little bit expensive SiteGround. They are fast and very reliable.
But for more power, speed, and convenience I suggest you host your website on Cloudways. It offers one of the best hosting options and is affordable compared to other high-level platforms.
Remember, if you want to speed up a website, you need good hosting.
2. Update WordPress & PHP
In order to speed up a website, the next thing you should do is to check if you have the latest version of WordPress and PHP.
If you don’t have the latest versions then you could have some issues and problems.
Because update means new features, bug fixes, and speed optimization, the update is crucial. Also, plugins may have problems with old versions.
Every hosting platform supports different versions of PHP. Try to update to the latest version they offer.
If you don’t know how to update it yourself, contact the support of your hosting company, and they will do it.
3. Choose a Good Theme
The next thing you should do is to choose a good and modern theme that has good speed, reputation, and the team behind it.
Web development went so far and old ways don’t work anymore. So, if you have an old theme then you definitely will have problems.
Because of that, you should always choose new and well-built themes. The theme is very important because if a theme is not good then all these methods won’t have too much effect.
So, when choosing a theme make sure it is new or recently updated. I personally recommend these themes. They are fast, beautiful, modern and full of features. They also work great with page builders like Elementor.
4. Use Fewer Plugins
Another great way to speed up a website is to use fewer plugins.
There are thousands of different plugins but that doesn’t mean to use all of them. Just use what you really need and also use good plugins that have many installs and good reviews.
Also, it is better to use plugins that can do many things.
Hummingbird is a great example. It is a cache plugin, can minify files, compresses HTML & CSS, and gives you a site performance report.
So, instead of three different plugins, you can use one and it will make your website lighter.
Also Read: Must Have Plugins
Also, page builders like Elementor have many add-on plugins that add different blocks.
But almost all of them have the same blocks and 3 or 4 different ones. So, choose one that has the features you need and use that one.
5. Install Caching Plugin
In order to speed up a website, you definitely need some kind of caching plugin. When a visitor comes to your website caching plugin creates a static version of the page.
When a visitor returns they will see the cached version so it won’t load the same content all over again.
Also Read: Hello Theme Speed Test
And that helps the speed and user experience. Caching plugin is mandatory for every website.
And there are countless number of caching plugins and many are free. The best free caching plugin is Hummingbird and I use it on my website.
Other good cache plugins are:
6. Use CDN
I think that CDN is a must-have for all websites. Especially for websites with a lot of images.
CDN is like an external server. Instead of storing images on your WordPress database, it stores images on its server.
So, it really helps your website to load faster because you don’t host images. And if you have a lot of images then your website will have some speed problems.
You can store videos on CDN too. It is a great way to speed up a website.
There are many CDN services but the one I like the most is Bunnynet. It works great and is very cheap.
7. Reduce Image Size
The next way you can speed up a website is to reduce image size without quality loss.
It doesn’t matter if you use CDN or not. You should always reduce the image size.
If you want to have a clean and beautiful website you must have high-quality images.
High-quality means a big image size that will slow your website. So, you need to make them smaller but don’t lose quality. That is what image compressing plugins do.
Great plugins I recommend are:
But you can do it without a plugin or use both. You can use websites such as TinyPNG which is an image compression tool. It can reduce the size of the images with minimal quality loss.
8. Gzip Compression
Also, a great speed-up helper is Gzip compression. When you want to reduce file size on your computer you zip it with Winrar.
The same goes for websites.
When a page is loading it is delivering files from a server that are big and will slow your website.
Gzip compression zips and reduces the size of that files so it will help to speed up the loading time. So, it is a great tool to have on your website.
Plugins you can use:
9. Minify JavaScript & CSS
And the last thing that will speed up your website performance is to minify CSS and JavaScript.
It will make your website files smaller and will help your website speed.
You can also minify PHP but it won’t improve speed because it is a server-side programming language.
These plugins will remove white spaces, lines, and unnecessary characters and make a file smaller in size.
This is how a CSS code will look like after file minification.
Plugins that work great:
Conclusion
So, there are many ways to speed up a website. Follow these steps, install plugins, and test your website load time. You will see the difference. And remember – a fast website means more traffic and it is also good for SEO.
