8 Steps to Optimize Your Wordpress Site for Speed

WordPress is one of the best content management systems (CMS) out today, but it’s not perfect. With lots of thousands of extensions and an easy-to-use interface, it’s not uncommon to see some sites running slowly.

Slow sites aren’t just a minor inconvenience for users, either. Just one second of delayed loading can reduce visitor satisfaction and repeat visits, and it can drive up your bounce rate. With Google using site speed as a ranking factor, it can even mess with your SEO.

Clearly, then, site speed must be taken into consideration when designing and maintaining your WordPress site. Here are 8 simple steps that every WordPress administrator or designer needs to take to keep their site fast!

Use High-Quality Hosting

A good-quality host and hosting plan may be one of the most important ways to improve your WordPress site speed.

Ideally, your hosting provider should offer a Virtual Private Server (VPS). This means that although you are sharing the same physical server as other users, resources are allocated (more or less) equally. This means that one or two busy (or poorly optimized) sites won’t slow down others on the same server.

Contrast VPS with “shared hosting”. On shared hosting, you may have the same 10s or 100s of people on a single server, but without the guarantee of equally shared resources. This means that one or two sites can hog the server’s CPU and RAM, slowing down all the other sites on that same server.

Dedicated hosting is just what it sounds like — you get your own private server. This is not usually necessary unless you’re expecting lots of traffic. It is certainly quite a bit more expensive than either of the other two options.

For most sites, VPS is the best balance of cost and performance. Shared hosting may be okay if you aren’t expecting much traffic or you have lots of sites. Dedicated hosting is pricey, and not worth the cost unless you have a high-traffic site.

When It Comes to Themes — Simpler is Better

While themes with a lot of bells and whistles can be appealing, try to pick the theme with the least complexity as a base to start. Lots of features can be great, but many times these features can slow down your site even if you don’t use them!

On the other hand, simple themes can always be expanded and customized by the thousands of available WordPress plugins. While the best theme is a personal decision, good starting points are always the WordPress default themes. These are the themes named after years: Twenty Sixteen, Twenty Fifteen, Twenty Fourteen, etc.

But there is the same problem with all Themes and Plugins, they slow you’re site. It’s wise to invest in a custom theme, that is programmed by experts.

Caching, Compression, and Minification — Oh My!

After hosting, using caching, compression, and minification is one of the best ways to improve your site speed for users!

Caching plugins take the raw data of your site and create static HTML files, which they then send to visitors. These static HTML files are quicker to send than requiring the server to process scripts for every visitor.

Compression plugins compress files by locating long patterns in code and replacing them with short strings. Most CSS and HTML files have lots of repeating text, and compression can have a drastic effect on these file sizes.

Minification makes the files themselves smaller, by stripping out unnecessary text before sending. The unnecessary text includes things like comments, indentations, and spaces, which computers don’t need.

All three of these attempt to reduce the amount of processing and data that the server has to send your the web browser. While some plugins only perform one or two of these tasks, make sure you have all three covered. One of the most popular WordPress caching plugins — W3 Total Cache — performs all three of these functions in one plugin.

Plugins and Widgets — Less is More

One of the greatest features of WordPress is the enormous breadth of plugins and extensions available. But keeping lots of unused plugins active can slow down your site! With this in mind, make sure to deactivate (but not uninstall) plugins that you are not using. Even if you will need it in the future, uninstall it if it’s not currently in use!

Additionally, make sure you enable plugins intelligently. For example, it’s generally not the best idea to enable a sharing widget on your homepage. Most people that share websites on social media or email are sharing particular articles or pages and not the homepage. Deactivating this on your homepage can give the most important page of your site a speed boost!

Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of computer servers that take static content (images, CSS files, etc.) and delivers it to users. CDN servers are located around the world so that a user will generally receive content from the server closest to them. Without a CDN, they would receive all the data from your main host (which may be several countries or continents away from some users).

There are lots of CDN providers available: Amazon Web Services, CacheFly, CloudFlare, and MaxCDN are some of the more popular and highly-rated services. Most CDN networks do have a monthly cost, but many have free tiers or trials available. So you can see what sort of performance boost a CDN will do for your site before you pay.

Optimize Your Images and Graphics

In addition to using a CDN for images, here are three other ways to optimize your images for site speed.

First — make sure to compress your images! Depending upon the initial image and file type, compressing an image can result in file sizes more than 50% smaller! It goes without saying, but this will have a massive impact on your speed.

Another image-related performance boost comes from using the correct image sizes. There are lots of different image sizes used in the average WordPress site and grabbing the correct size is important. An image that is too big wastes time and bandwidth, and resizing images can impact that quality and takes processing power.

Finally, delay loading of images further down the page until the user scrolls — this is called LazyLoad. By delaying the loading of images that are located “below the fold” you can speed up the perceived loading of your site. These images will be downloaded once the user scrolls down for them to be visible. This can also help mobile users since they will download less data if they don’t scroll down your page.

Keep Your Database Slim and Trim

The database for a WordPress site can, over the course of a few years (or even months with lots of users or posts), accumulate junk. Cleaning out this junk data can not only speed up your site, but it will also shrink the size of your database. This can be handy if you are getting ready to change hosts or migrate your site! Plugins like WP-DBManager and WP-Optim can do this optimization automatically, but it’s also possible to do it manually if you desire.

Another database optimizing tactic is to remove unnecessary revisions from your posts and pages. While it’s a good idea to keep one or two as a backup, by default WordPress saves every revision of a document, which can, over time, slow things down.

Keep Animations to a Minimum

While animated menus, expanding images, and sliders can make for nice-looking sites, make sure to put your users first. If any of these animations slow down your repeat visitors from getting to where they need to go, they are doing more harm than good.

Getting rid of these animations can speed up a user’s interactions (and may increase your conversions). Removing the Javascript behind the fancy animations can also speed up your site’s loading — two for one!

Final Thoughts

When it comes down to it, keeping a WordPress site fast isn’t difficult. Even if you don’t have much technical experience, there are only a few keys points to keep in mind. We covered an entire site — from host to database to images — in only eight steps!

Just remember to get a high-quality host and CDN, using caching, and then put your user’s experience first!