Best way to Boost your WordPress Performance and Speed

Best way to Boost your WordPress Performance and Speed. Increase our pageviews, Improve user experience to fast-loading pages, and help with your WP SEO. You are at the right place, we’ll share the most useful WP speed optimization tips to boost your WP speed and performance of websites.

Unlike the other resource which guides you about tools and tips to boost up your WP sites, this document is a comprehensive tool to WP performance optimization. 

We tried to discuss almost everything from what slows down your WP site, why it is important, and steps that you can take to improve your WP speed immediately

To make you understand in an easy way, we made a table of content which will help you to navigate by our guide to boost up your WP site

Best way to Boost your WordPress Performance and Speed

Contents Table

Basic Terms of WP Performance

• How to check WP site speed?
• Why speed is more important at the WP site?
• Why your WP website slow?
• Value of good WP hosting.

Speed up WP sites without coding

• Optimize images to speed up
• Install a WP Caching Plugin

Best Practices of WP Performance Optimization

• Optimize Background Processes of WP
• Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Always Keep your WP site Updated
• Use Excerpts on Archives and Homepage
• Do not upload Video/Audio Files Directly to WP
• Use Fastest Plugin
• Split Comments into Pages

Fine Tuning WP to Speed up (Advanced)

• Limit Post Revisions
• Split large Posts into pages
• Use Lazy Loading if required
• Lower External HTTP Requests
• Reduce Database Calls
• Use DNS Level Website Firewall
• Use Latest and updated PHP Version
• Disable Leeching and Hotlinking of your Content

Best way to Boost your WordPress Performance and Speed

Why it is important to boost your WordPress site?

We have researched and found from 2000 to 2016, an average visitor’s attention span has dropped from 12 sec to 7 seconds.

What would you say if you are in site owner shoes?

Every website owner has a very short time to show users your convince and content them to stay on your website.

A slow website means users will leave your site before it’s even loaded. As per the StrangeLoop case study which involved Google, Amazon and other big websites, a one-second delay in webpage load time can impact to 7% loss in conversions and a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction.

As has been noted Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines have already started tracking slower sites by pushing them down in the search results that mean lower traffic for slow websites.

 All I am saying, if you want huge traffic, revenue and subscriber your site, then you must make sure that your WP site should be FAST!

Best way to Boost your WordPress Performance and Speed

How can we check our WP site speed?

Starting every website owner thinks that their website is fine because it does not feel slow on their systems which is a big mistake.

When you visit your site frequently, modern time browser just like google chrome keep your site in the cache and prefetch it as soon as you begin to type a URL. That makes your site load instantly. However, a random user who is coming to your website for the very first time may not have the same experience. 

Even, users in different locations will have an entirely different experience. For this reason, we recommend that you check your site on speed test tools like Gtmetrix, Pingdom Tools and many more.

After you check your site at speed test tools, you might be a shock to see the result and you will know what is a good site speed which I should target for?

A perfect page load time comes in 2 seconds. However the faster you can make it, the better it is for your business.

Best way to Boost your WordPress Performance and Speed

Things that make your WP Website slow?

Most probably your speed test tool report will recommend multiple things for improvement. However, most of that technical recommendation would be hard to understand for beginners. 

To learn what makes your website slow is the key to improve performance and making smart and effective decisions.

A major reason to slow your WP sites are: 

WP Configuration:- If your WP website isn’t serving cached pages, then it will badly impact your server as a result of your site to be slow or crash completely. 

• Page Size:- To the size of the page mainly images are not optimized for the web.
• Web Hosting:- If your web hosting server isn’t configured properly it will also impact your website speed.
• External Scripts:- Outsider scripts like an advertisement, font loaders, and others may also have a bad impact on your site performance.
• Wrong plugins:- When you are using a bad coded plugin, then it can be the reason for a slow website.
• Now you have a better idea about the reason for the slow WP website, let’s have a look at how can we boost WP websites.

Value of great WP Hosting

WP hosting service plays a very important role in site performance. Big brands of shared hosting providers such as Siteground or Bluehost take the good responsibility to optimize your website for performance. 

However, in shared hosting, you share the resources of the server with many other customers as well which means if anyone of the sites gets huge traffic, then it will affect the entire performance of the server which means your website turns into slow performance.

On the other side, by using a managed WP hosting service you can get the most optimized server configurations to run WP.  Good WP hosting companies offer automatic WP updated, Automatic backups and advance security configurations to protect your website.

Best way to Boost your WordPress Performance and Speed

Easy steps to speed up WordPress (No coding)

As we know that doing modification into the website configuration can be a horrible thought for new people especially if you are not a tech background.

But do not worry you are not alone in the same pain. We have helped many WP users to improve their WP performance.

We’ll show you how you can boost your WP website with just some clicks even without coding.

Install a WP Caching Plugin 

WP pages are dynamic. It means they are built on the fly whenever anyone visits site pages or posts on the website.

To make your webpages, WP has to go through a process to search the required info, put them all together, and then show that to your visitors.

This job process takes many steps, and it can be a reason to slow down your site when you have huge traffic once.

That is the reason we recommended every WP site use a caching plugin that makes your WP site faster in between 3x to 5x.

Let me show how it works.

Instead of checking the entire page generation process each time, caching plugin makes a copy of the page at first load and then serves that cached to each user.

SiteGround Super Cacher

In the case of SiteGround platform then SignIn to hosting cPanel and enable SuperCacher in the section “Site improvement tools”

Once you enable, then you will have to install and activate the SG Optimizer plugin in WP to control or manage the setting of SuperCacher.

Bluehost Caching

In case, of Bluehost caching go to my Sites >> Performance section to make it ‘ON’ caching.

In case of managed WP hosting provider, you will not have caching plugin because it is built and turned on by default

Role of Image Optimization to Speed up

As has been noted that by using colored images makes users 80% more likely to go through your content.

However, if your images are not optimized properly then it can be a reason to slow down your website speed.

In the beginning, we recommend you to use only 2 images formats: PNG and JPEG

Best practices to optimize your WordPress performance

Once you have done with caching plugin and optimize your pictures, you will see that your website will start loading faster.

However, if you want to keep your site as fast as possible, you will have to do the below best practices.

These practices are not too much technical therefore you do not need to know any coding specialization. By doing those practices you can prevent the issue that makes your website slow.

Best way to Boost your WordPress Performance and Speed

Keep your WP website updated

WP is updated frequently. Each update will not offer only new exciting features however it will solve the security and bugs issue as well. Your plugins and WP theme may have regular updates as well.

Background Processes Optimization

Background processes in WP are a regular timed task that runs in the background of WP sites. Below are a few examples of background tasks which run on WP sites:

• WP Backup plugin jobs
• Crawlers and Search engines trying to get content.
• WP Cron tasks to check for updates.

Use Excerpts on posts and homepage

As has been noted WP shows the full content of each web page or posts on your website. It means your categories, homepage, posts, and tags will all load slower. 

Also, showing full content on the pages, makes a user feel pressurize to read the whole page to get the actual content. 

To fix those issues or to speed up your website you can use excerpts.

This is how you can set excerpt Setting>> Reading>> and select “For each article in a feed, show: Summary”

Break comments in Pages

Getting the list of comments on your posts is a great sign of and engaged people. However, it can impact your site speed because the loading of all comments will take time.

Don’t worry WP has a solution for this, just go to the option: Setting>> Discussion and check the box which is next to “Break comments into pages”

Do not upload Video/Audio files directly to WP

Hosting a big size files increase your backup on a large scale, and makes it tough to restore WP from backup.

Instead of doing this you should use video and audio hosting services such as Vimeo, YouTube, SoundCloud, DailyMotion, etc, and leave your hard work on them. They have enough bandwidth for the same task.

WP has an in-built video embed feature so that you need to just copy and paste your Audio and Videos URL directly into your post and it will embed automatically.

Best way to Boost your WordPress Performance and Speed

Use a Theme has good optimization for speed

When you are selecting a theme for your site, it is very important that you choose a theme that will have a great impact on your site speed.

There are some impressive-looking and beautiful theme but they might have poor coding which can slow down your website speed.

Use Plugins which is faster as much as possible

Below are some of the plugins which are far better than any other else.

• WPForms:- Faster and most friendly for beginner “Contact form plugin” for WP
• Envira Gallery:- We have checked and found among many of the plugins Envira Gallery is faster photo gallery plugin for WP
• Soliloquy:- Soliloquy is a great WP slider Plugin if you want to add sliders to the website to features and performance.

Less External HTTP Requests

When your plugins make more external requests then it also can be a reason to slow down your website. 

You can make those less by disabling styles and scripts or merging them into one file.

Let’s have a look at how it’s done 

Reduce to Database Calls

There are many poorly coded WP themes which ignore the WP standard policies. This can slow down your website. Even sometimes well-coded themes can have code which makes unnecessary calls to get basic info of your blog.

If you customize your website by using a child theme, then you will be able to replace unnecessary database calls with your specific requirements to make less unnecessary database calls.

WP Database Optimization

In order to great optimization of your database, you can use WP-Seep Plugin which allows you to clean your WP database by deleting things such as trashed posts, unused tags, revisions, etc 

Disable Leaching and Hotlinking of your content

If you are creating unique content or images for your WP website, then the sad fact is your content will probably be stolen in the future.

To fix this issue just add this code to your “.htaccess file” to block hotlinking of images from your WP site.

disable hotlinking of images with custom image options or forbidden.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?programmertricks.com [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]

RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

Note:- Do not forget to change wpbeginner.com with your domain.

Uses of Lazy Loading when required

When you add multiple images, videos embed, and photo galleries into your blog then it can be a reason to slow down your website.

Instead of loading the entire videos and images from the page, lazy loading downloads that material that’ll be appearing on the user’s computer. Lazy loading replaces all videos and image embeds with placeholder images.

Work with DNS Level Website Firewall

We recommend using the DNS level firewall such as Cloudflare. These firewalls block the malicious requests before they attack your site.

Resolve the SSL/HTTPS Errors without Plugin

If you are changing your website to SSL/HTTPS, then it is possible that you might run across some error.

You can fix this issue by installing a plugin such as Really Simple SSL. However, there is a problem with these plugins as well it catch-all URLs first then switches them to HTTPS before sending those to visitor’s browsers.

Always update your site with Latest PHP Version

PHP 7 is double faster than the previous version. We recommend to use it because most probably your website performance will boost by using PHP 7 version.

If you install and activate Version Info Plugin you will be able to see which PHP version is embedded into your website.

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