20 Easy Ways to Speed Up WordPress Site in 2023

Want to speed up wordpress site?

To speed up a WordPress site shouldn’t be a great challenge these days because there are lots of SEO tools out there you can’t start using right now for free to speed up your WordPress website.

It’s very important to speed up your WordPress website to increase your user experience and SEO benefits.

There are lots of small businesses and new bloggers out who struggle with how to increase their WordPress site speed which will benefit their businesses and users.

The thing is that, if you’re one of these people, you have nothing to worry about.

Why? Because you’re in the right place to solve your WordPress site speed for once and for all.

All information am going to share with you in this article is very effective and tested.

It is 100% working.

Giant search engines like Google prioritise website speed as one of their ranking factors.

What this means is that they favour fast loading websites that slow websites when it comes to article racking on the search result pages.

It also enhances your user experience.

No one like to wait for 8-20 seconds for your website to open. At least 2-4 seconds is enough.

There are lots of other competitors out there competing with you.

So if you don’t like to lose your potential customers or readers then, you have to read this article from a-z in order to know how to speed your WordPress site speed now.

Why do fast websites win the battle of the ranking most time?

It adds a lot of benefits to your website as I said earlier.

So let’s consider some of the reasons it always wins below.

#1 Customer experience

No one like to wait for 8-20 seconds for your website to open. At least 2-4 seconds is enough.

The better experience your customers get on your website, it’ll increase their retuning and recommendation rate of your site to their family and friends.

It was a fellow web designer that recommended Astra themes and plugins to me.

Then I was struggling to Identify a light starter template to use for the project I was doing at that time and gave him a call, man do you know about any starter template I can use for a real estate project?

His reply was YES, You should install the Astra starter theme & plugin and you’ll love it.

That’s how I got to know about the famous WordPress website maker called Astra.

Since then I’m one of the biggest fans of Astra with over 1,653,898+ Astra Lovers!

Google is also focusing on suggesting the best content to its users.

#2 Competition

It grants you a good edge over your competitors.

When customers are leaving the slow loading website, they are coming to yours and if your contents or products are good, you have tied them forever.

#3 Google ranking for speed

According to Astra, your WordPress site’s page load times have a huge effect on your site.

Slow load times increase your bounce rates, decrease your conversion rates, and just generally lead to a poor user experience. You can read more about the report on this page on their website. 

Google is said to prioritize speed when it comes to ranking search results, giving fast sites an advantage over sites that take longer to load.

So how do you know whether you have a slow or fast loading website?

This question lead’s to our next subheading.

How to measure website speed

In order to speed up your WordPress site, you first need to understand your site’s current page load times and what to work on.

You can use GTmetrix or Google Pagespeed to scan your website and it’ll give you accurate details of your website speed and what to work on to improve your website speed.

It’s pretty easy to do that with anyone the tool mentioned above but for the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll use GTmetrix to achieve that.

Firstly, head over to GTmetrix.com, and a page like this one below will open, input your site URL in the Analyze box and hit “Test your site”.

After you have pasted in the URL of your website there and hit the button on the right, it’ll give you a result like the one below;

That was the result of Astra’s theme.

People that use it for their website would likely get the same result.

Even this website you’re on reading this article is powered by Astra Theme and plugins.

Check the result of my e-commerce site Fingashopping.com below;

If you scroll down, you’ll see more detailed results, along with some suggestions for improving each metric.

You can expand each of those issues there and fix them.

By that, you’ll have a very lighter website that loads less than a second.

How to speed up WordPress

I have been telling you a lot of stories before now let’s dive into the real reason why we’re here in the first place.

Our ultimate aim is to master how to speed up the WordPress website.

Here are the best possible ways to speed up your WordPress website.

So let’s begin…

#1 Use a reliable host

The first thing to consider if you want to build a high-performing website that loads incredibly fast is web hosting.

Dealing with low-performing web hosting is like handing over your website to the river to flow it backwards.

It’ll cost your business a lot of harm than you could imagine.

But if you get your hands on the right web hosting company for your website, it’ll automatically increase the time loading of your site, SEO and user experience.

This means more conversions, leads and sales.

Here is the best web hosting for your WordPress website.

Below you will find the best and fastest web hosting company you advise to use for your website.

a. Rocket.net – Best for high performing website

The e-commerce site that I consulted the analysis of it and share the screenshot with you above is running on this server.

Ever since I started using it now there’s nothing like my server is down or customer message me to complain about it.

Unlike one of my blogs, readers complained a lot before I move it to HostGator.

So if you’re planning to make a high-performing website then Rocket.Net is the way to go.

#2 Kinsta – Best for high performing business and enterprise

Kinsta serves thousands of clients from 128 countries around the globe.

Working with kinsta would guarantee your WordPress 99.9-100% uptime which is amazing.

What does this mean?

It means you don’t have to worry about your website downtime, slow loading and any kind of technology-related issues.

You can go to this page now to learn more about Kinsta Now.

#3 Nexcess -Best for e-commerce, small business and enterprise

Nexcess is a premium hosting company that focuses only on high-performing businesses and entrepreneurs that are ready to take their business to the next level.

They know what it takes to scale and grow business online fast.

So hosting a website with them is like having a solid team of experts and business gurus at your side. Learn more!

Still, need more options of high-performing WordPress hosting to choose from?

Read this: 6 Cheapest Managed WordPress Hosting Review, Prices, Pros And Cons.

That’s all about web hosting, a good web hosting optimizes your website for speed and SEO.

#2 Use a fast WordPress theme

One of the foundations of owning a high-performing WordPress website is the theme you used for your site.

In this tutorial, we’re trying to educate you on the very possible ways to speed up your wordpress site that’s why we’re telling you the truth now that choosing the right theme for your website will accelerate your site speed.

A theme like Astra is the best option for any bloggers or small businesses that want to create a website that will impact their business positively.

As you can see below, Astra has high performing Templates waiting for you to start using them right away.

That’s Astra analyzing results from GTmetrix.

Is that not Awesome?

Get Start With Astra Free Now

#3 Use very few plugins.

Plugins add more features to your website which is pretty cool right but they can also impose danger to your site.

Using too many plugins is like using stone to block a moving vehicle.

And you know what it means, it slows down your site speed.

Affect your users’ experience and the SEO of your website.

So choose very few that give you what you want and keep your website light and clean for your users.

#4 Optimize images (size and dimensions)

Images contribute a lot to how your page will be loading and how fast it should be.

Images make up a huge percentage of a website’s page size.

So you have to upload images in small sizes in order to have a great page loading for your customers.

How can you achieve this? It’ll lead us to the next point.

#5 Install Image Optimization Plugin

To optimize this manually require a lot of work and you might display blur images to your audience and customers.

So to do this there’re a lot of plugins available in the WordPress.org marketplace there for you to start using right now for free.

The one and using currently does help me optimize my pages automatically. You can take a look at the screenshot below and see how it is pretty easy to optimize your page and Images.

#6 Install a Page Optimization Plugin

Like I said earlier you can use plugins like Autoptimize, Smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images, Imagify etc.

We’re using Autoptimize on this site currently and it really helps us optimize images, JS, CSS, and more.

You can take a look at the screenshot below to understand what am talking about.

#7 Use Lazy Loading

Most people thought that activating this feature on Jetpack or Autoptimize would prevent their images not displaying properly but that’s not true.

It’ll give your user a better experience and increase your site loading exponentially.

A lot of sites you are visiting on the web are using this method to speed up their website loading time.

If you’re using Autoptimize or Jetpack, all you have to do is to the setting of any one of them you’re using and navigate to the image section and active it that’s all.

#8 Use the latest PHP version

Using the outdated version of PHP can cause your website a lot harm more than you can think.

So it’s advisable to keep your website up-to-date with every latest version of PHP released by the WordPress team.

PHP is the programming language used to code wordpress, so using the outdated version of it can slow down your site.

How can you update your site PHP to the latest version?

If you host your site on the Cpanel server, all you have to do is to log in to your cpanel account and navigate to MultiPHP Manager and follow the instruction to update your PHP.

#9 Keep Your WordPress Websites Up to Date

Also, don’t let your WordPress and plugins remain out of date.

They’ll also impact your website loading time.

#10 Install and activate a Cache plugin

Install cache plugin LiteSpeed Cache, Wp Cache or their competitors to accelerate your website users’ experience.

This plugin will let the browser install a version of your site on the user browser so that the next time they’re loading your site it’ll load that version to them instead of start loading it afresh.

#11 Host video/audio offsite

This is very important, they’ll slow your site loading time and give your users a bad experience.

So first upload your video on YouTube or their competitors and get it embedded on your website.

#12 Use a Light Sitebuilder

This is pretty important also. Some page builders can add too much bloat to your site, causing it to run more slowly.

We recommend you should use Elementor or Gutenberg, as they’re the best page builders available on the market right now.

If you don’t go with Elementor, you should go for Gutenberg site builder since it is the “default” version of WordPress and is installed regardless of whether you use it or not, it is better to stick with it.

#13 Use a CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.

A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.

The popularity of CDN services continues to grow, and today the majority of web traffic is served through CDNs, including traffic from major sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.

A properly configured CDN may also help protect websites against some common malicious attacks, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks.

So it’ll add tons of benefits to your business. Their lots of CDN providers out there that you can start using right away on your site.

But if your use Managed WordPress hosting like Rocket.net or Kinsta for your website there’s no need for you to source for CDN provider anymore.

You can take a look at this screenshot below and see how CDN can optimize your website.

#14 Minify CSS and JavaScript

These scrips can slow down your website, it is advisable you use plugins like Autoptimize or the WP Super Minify plugin to help you minify these scrips automatically.

If you have one of those plugins above installed on your website there would be no need to do this manually.

It would execute it for you seamlessly and effortlessly.

#15 Enable GZIP compression

GzZIP is a file format and software application used for file compression and decompression.

The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and intended for use by GNU.

Enable GZIP compression would help compress very files on your media library and make your site lite and fast.

#16 Leverage browser caching

Like I said earlier, browser caching is the best way to render fast loading website to your audience.

There’re lots of free Caching plugins in the WordPress marketplace there you can start using for free.

#17 Delete unused plugins

Don’t keep any unused plugins on your plugin list.

Whether you use them or not they will still occupy some space on your website. This would impact the speed of your site negatively, so instead of keeping them free them up.

#18 Minimize external scripts and HTTP requests

The more external HTTP requests your site makes, the slower your performance will be.

There are many different ways to reduce the amount, but a few ways are to remove unused plugins, and themes and use scripts and HTTP minifyers.

#18 Optimize the WordPress database

In order to manually optimize your WordPress site, you will first have to access PHPMyAdmin via your hosting provider.

You will have to log in to cPanel, then open the PHPMyAdmin tool, and navigate to Databases. 

Then select the database you would like to optimize. 

Then select Check All to optimize all tables. Read more about this process on this page on the Astra site.

#19 Delete unused files.

In case you have some unused images or draft articles on your backend you should delete them because they are consuming space and contribute to your website loading struggles.

#20 Clean your Trash.

Delete every content you have in your trash.

Avoid having tons of stuff in your trash, it is still the same as having them on your site.

They’re still on your server and it’ll try to load them too which contributes to the loading time of your website.

Conclusion

To speed up WordPress site shouldn’t be a problem for you any longer if you have read this post from the beginning till this point.

As I mentioned earlier using a fast theme like Astra and high-performing web hosting will impact your site performance massively.

So everything is up to you on how to optimize your website to render the speed it can to your users and if you still want to learn more on this topic you can do so on this page at the Astra site.

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