WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) on the market, powering over 40% of all websites on the internet. However, as your website grows and attracts more traffic, it can start to slow down. This not only affects the user experience, but it can also negatively impact your search engine rankings.
In this article, we’ll go beyond the basic tips for improving your WordPress site’s speed and share some advanced techniques to help you take your optimization to the next level.
Before I begin I will show you the proof of the performance of my website in GTmetrix.
I achieved this performance by just blindly following this Udemy course of Mr Andrew Eaton. The course is dirt cheap as well as the instructor is better than the best when it comes to supporting, he answers all your queries within a few minutes as well as he goes beyond what he promises as a part of his course. The amount of expertise that he shares through his course is the knowledge and experience that he gathered over several decades and can’t be gathered from any degree from any college. So, consider yourself lucky if you happened to take his course.
Not only I achieved the perfect 100% but also I achieved a perfect A+ grade from ssllabs.com.
1. Move to a high-performance hosting provider
A high-performance hosting provider is a company that offers a range of hosting services, including web hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers, with a focus on providing high levels of performance and reliability. These providers typically use high-end hardware and technologies to ensure that websites and applications hosted on their servers are able to handle large amounts of traffic and perform well under heavy loads. Some examples of high-performance hosting providers include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean, Vultr…etc.
Vultr provides the most value for money as well as the cheapest high-performance hosting among several hosting providers. They also provide a $100 signup credit when you signup to test their servers.
2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that are distributed around the globe. When a user requests your website, the CDN will serve the content from the server that is closest to their location. This can significantly reduce the load time for your website, especially for users who are far away from your server’s physical location.
Several popular CDN providers include Cloudflare, Akamai, and Amazon CloudFront. Most of these providers offer a free plan, so you can test out the service before committing to a paid plan. I used a free tier from Cloudflare to achieve the coveted perfect score of 100/100. The results can vary depending on the amount of static and dynamic content on your website. The more static content you have, the more effective CDN will be.
3. Minimize HTTP Requests
Each time a user visits your website, their browser needs to make a request to your server for every element on the page (such as images, scripts, and stylesheets). The more requests that need to be made, the longer it will take for the page to load.
To minimize the number of requests, you can:
- Merge multiple stylesheets into one
- Merge multiple scripts into one
- Use CSS sprites to combine multiple images into one
- Use lazy loading to only load images as they come into view
All these can be done using caching plugins.
4. Optimize Images
Images can take up a lot of space and can slow down your website if they are not optimized. There are several ways to optimize images, such as:
- Compressing images to reduce their file size
- Resizing images to the appropriate size
- Using the appropriate file format (such as JPEG for photographs and PNG for graphics)
You can use Photoshop or online tools like Kraken.io or TinyPNG to optimize your images. You can also use caching plugins or CDN that automatically optimizes images. At times they can cost money. I use the manual method and Cloudflare to do this job.
5. Use a Caching Plugin
Caching is the process of storing a version of your website’s pages and posts in the browser’s cache so that when a user returns to your website, their browser doesn’t need to request the content again. This can significantly reduce the load time for your website.
There are several caching plugins available for WordPress such as lightspeed cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and WP Rocket. These plugins will automatically create and store cached versions of your website’s pages and posts. I use LiteSpeed caching, which is free but exclusive to the LiteSpeed webserver. If you want to learn how to configure a WordPress website using the LiteSpeed server you can signup for this udemy course. I set up my website completeguide.in using this course by Mr Andre Eaton.
6. Use a Performance Optimization Plugin
Performance optimization plugins can help to improve the speed of your website by:
- Minifying your website’s code
- Combining multiple stylesheets and scripts into one
- Lazy loading of images and videos
- And more
Some popular performance optimization plugins for WordPress include Autoptimize and WP Optimize.
In conclusion, keep in mind that website speed is just one of many factors that search engines consider when determining your rankings, but it’s an important one.