How to increase WordPress website speed? This is the question that often runs in every WordPress user’s mind. And it should be because it’s your website’s speed that enforces your audience to stay on your website.

WordPress is considered as the best platform to create a website for your business but there is one flaw with WordPress which might let your expectations down.

Do you know without taking the right precaution you might end up with the sluggish Website? Because users always prefer to browse websites that have better page loading speed.

This is not only a hassle that your customers are facing will cause you to lose customers and subscribers. There are numerous online tools available which provide detailed insight on your site’s speed performance.

In this article, I’ll cover all the best ways that I have found to consistently speed up your WordPress website.

But first, let’s talk about why speed is that much important for your WordPress site and how you can measure the speed of your website.

Why Speed is Important for Your WordPress Site?

We live in an era of speed and you will agree no one is happy with a slow website. If your website is slow, no visitor will spend more than three seconds on your website.

This is the main cause of poor search ranking, rising bounce rates, and decreased conversions. Today users expect faster loading times and your website needs to live up to all those expectations.

Speed matters a lot especially when it comes to loading time.

If your WordPress website is sluggish and forces your users to wait for a few seconds, it will show a negative impact on your website and they will lose patience and leave your website.

Suggested Read: – Top Reasons Why Your Website Traffic is Going Down

How to Check Your WordPress Website Speed?

Many of you think that your website is fine because it doesn’t feel slow on your computer. But this is the immense mistake done by most of the individuals.

You frequently visit your website on modern browsers like chrome store. Your website is already in the cache and automatically prefetch it when you start typing the address.

This makes your site load instantly and you will never observe the speed issue.

But when other users in different geographical locations will have a completely different experience.

That is the reason you should test your website speed using the tool like IsItWP, Gtmetrix, and Pingdom. These are the FREE tools that allow you to test the speed of your website.

A good page load time is a minimum of two seconds. After analyzing the speed of your WordPress site you will get to know how slow your site is.

And you should start thinking about how to improve your WordPress site speed and can take some crucial steps.

How to Increase WordPress Website Speed and Performance?

#1 Choose A Good Web Host

A reputable web host is the most important key component of every successful website. It keeps your website’s performance high so that you can improve your SEO and can increase sales of your site.

There are diverse types of WordPress hosting options available such as VPS, Dedicated, Free, Shared and managed WordPress hosting.

Several factors need to be considered before choosing any hosting plan for your website. No matter economical and attractive it seems you should keep your eyes open before making any decision.

Choosing the right hosting services for your WordPress website is essential because your website health relies on it. SiteGround, Bluehost, HostGator, GreenGeeks, DreamHost are some of the popular names for providing the top class hosting services to their clients.

But how you’ll get to know which one is best for your WordPress site. Well, there are five most important factors of hosting which you should keep in mind.

Server Requirements

Whatever you choose for hosting services you choose, it should meet WordPress’s latest server requirements. (MySQL 5.6,+ PHP 7.3+, HTTPS support, and Nginx or Apache)

Speed

Your site should be loaded within two seconds and if your WordPress site loads slower than this, you should change your host.

Uptime

Uptime is the most essential factor in choosing a web host. If your hosting time is below 99.95%, you need to change it.

Customer Support

Your chosen web host should help you with WordPress related issues through 24/7 live chat.

Pricing

Choose affordable services without compromising the performance and the pricing should be upfront and fair.

#2 Use A Fast Theme/Framework

The speed of your WordPress website also plays a vital role to generate traffic on your website. You can make money from your website if you have great traffic.

Conversion doesn’t always mean a sale, sometimes it’s subscribing to your mail clicking on an advertisement. Everyone wants a high conversion rate but it cannot be possible if your website’s speed is slow.

Do you know your WordPress themes makes a huge impact on your website’s speed? If you have chosen a WordPress theme which is slow then your website will run as a sailing speed.

Don’t ever let this happen to your website. If you want more people to stay on your site and make a sale of subscribing, you will need a faster website with better performance.

For this, you need to choose the theme which is fast so that you’ll never face the bounce rate issue on your WordPress website.

#3 Use A Responsive Design

Responsive design is another crucial part of your WordPress which you need to give focus on. It is an important part to increase the speed of your WordPress site but simply purchasing a responsive theme is not enough.

Your website needs to make use of responsive design. It allows you to have one website that dynamically changes depending on how it’s being used.

So that your desktop and mobile users will be looking at the same website on different devices without any problem.

This is what Google actually prefers because it loads faster and you will gain massive SEO advantage.

Suggested Read: – What is Responsive Website Design? And Why Your Website Needs It?

#4 Install a WordPress Caching Plugin

It is one of the most popular ways to increase the speed of your website. WordPress plugins are useful, but there are some of the best plugins that fall under the catching category.

Because they significantly improve the page loading time and boost the performance of your website. The caching plugin is free and easy to use and available on WordPress.org.

Caching plugins will store the final view of your website for any future visitors which means that your WordPress site won’t need to generate it for every person who is just viewing the website.

This data includes HTML, JS and CSS code, fonts, flash files and images.

#5 Optimize Images for Speed

It is a fact that images need more space than text or CSS and this makes the bulk of a page. This comes with the result that your site got heavy and take more time to load.

So to speed up your WordPress site you need to learn how to make images as small as possible without losing the quality of the site or compression.

But there was a time when people used to compress the images before even upload them. For example, in photoshop you can use the Save for Web Option but you cannot compress the images to the maximum with this.

TinyPNG, Optimizilla, Kraken.io, ImageRecycle, CompressNow, Online Image Optimizer, etc are some of the image optimizer tools which will get you much better results for image optimization.

These tools will automatically compress your images when you add them to your WordPress website.

#6 Don’t Upload Audio/Video Files Directly to WordPress

Audio, video, and images make your website rich. By adding videos to your site certainly adds value to your content and increase the likelihood of your website that audiences would react to it.

But I would never suggest you to directly upload audio/video to your WordPress website. Because directly audio/video uploading will cost you high.

And your hosting companies could charge you overage fees and they might even shut down your website.

WordPress has an inbuilt video embed feature with this you can directly copy and paste your video’s URL into your post and it will embed automatically.

Suggested Read: – How To Embed Tik Tok Videos Inside WordPress

#7 Try a CDN to Speed Up WordPress

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network that delivers web content to end users as per their geographic location.

By using this content delivery network, the requested website content will be delivered to the end-user more speedily. CDN will use a server that is closest to users to deliver the files they have requested.

If you use CDN for your WordPress website, you’ll save a lot of bandwidth and significantly improve your website speed and page load time.

You can also store your CSS and JavaScript files, videos, images, PDFs and other types of uploaded content.

It’s worth to use CDN for your website because it comes with numerous benefits especially if you use a lot of bandwidth.

So if you have a large site and have a lot of visitors, a CDN is the best thing to have.

Suggested Read: – 3 Best CDN For WordPress to Boost Up Your Website’s Speed

#8 Enable Gzip Compression

Gzip is a file format and a software application that is used for file compression and decompression. And WordPress GZIp compression is the process of reducing the size of your site files, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

It is a mashup of computer languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and is used by all modern websites.

Enabling GZIp compression in WordPress site can reduce website load time by over 300%.

For sites, WordPress GZIp compression is the equivalent of file compression which can do wonders to the performance of your site especially when it comes to enhancing your website page load time.

#9 Keep Your WordPress Site Updated

Each version of WordPress comes with new features, bug fixes and more. They make your website run more effectively and prevent it from slowing down.

It’s not only speed that increases with the update but also protects your website from many security issues.

Every time with the latest version of WordPress, you need to be sure that all plugins and themes are fixed properly.

It is a fact that nothing will slow you down more than a compromised website. So you need to keep your WordPress website timely updated.

Suggested Read: – How to Backup WordPress Site [Step-by-Step Guide]

#10 Optimize WordPress Database

WordPress heavily relies on its database and each action performed in WordPress is connected indirectly or directly with its database.

From plugins to themes and posts to comments everything uses the database to perform its desired functionalities.

Over time, tables inside your WordPress database might create junk and clutter which occupies memory and can be the cause of performance issues.

That is the reason it requires frequent WordPress database optimization and cleanup to keep your site working smoothly.

#11 Reduce Database Calls

Reducing database calls on your website can help you speed things up on your site. Most of the websites run on a content management system these days.

And all these rely on a database back-end to store your site content and you can easily speed them up by implementing caching.

If a visitor requests a page, your CMS will use a database call to drag that information.

You can store this information to a file so that the next visitor won’t need to wait for the server to ask the database for the same information.

#12 Reduce Spam – Speed Up WordPress

It is another hurdle that you need to deal with increasing the performance of your WordPress website. Spam comments cover a significant space in your database.

You need to set up the pre-installed Akismet plugin to catch those comments and prevent them stay longer on your website.

It is very easy to set up Akismet in your site, all you need to do is to register to an Akismet API key on the Akismet site by using your WordPress.com account.

And the next Akismet will check the box in Akismet settings that say “Auto-delete spam is submitted on a post more than a month old”.

Final Words

Speed matter a lot for the success of any website. In this article, I have tried to explain everything which helps you to get the answer, How to Increase WordPress Website Speed.

The slow speed of the site influences the bounce rate, search engine rankings conversion rate and more. Even mere seconds can make a huge difference.

But thankfully there are solutions to deal with this issue. The techniques that I have described in this article are effective and will help you speed up your WordPress website.