So you want to speed up your slow WordPress site and improve its speed and performance?
In this guide, I reveal how we reduced our website lead time to just 430 milliseconds! I’ll show you how to use free tools to gauge your site’s performance and 25 tips to speed up WordPress.
Many of the methods in this guide a free, some are a paid solution to an important problem. If you want your WordPress site to perform well in the search engines, increase visitors and become a website you can be proud of…then read on.
Why WordPress Website Speed Matters
You only get a small window of time to capture your reader’s attention before they hit the back button and are gone for good. You can have the best content in the world, but if your WordPress site loads slow and their expectations are not met, they may never get to see your website.
Visitors expect your website to load in 2 seconds or less, any longer and your bounce rate starts to increase dramatically, resulting in fewer pageviews, sales, and conversions.
What’s more, Google now uses page speed in it’s ranking algorithm. So if you want to stand any chance of performing well in Google and attracting the right kind of audience, you need to have a site that loads fast.
Why is WordPress so slow?
The primary causes of a slow WordPress website are:
Poor Web Hosting – TTFB (Time To First Bytes) is a big cause of a slow loading website.- Bloated Theme – Too many bells and whistles that are not being used are unnecessary and can increase load time.
- Too Many Plugins – More plugins doesn’t equal a better website, the opposite is actually true.
- Lack of Image Optimization – Large images not properly resized and compressed cause a large majority of the issues we find.
- External Scripts – JS and PHP files that have to be requested on each page load will have a big impact on your and page speed.
There are many other aspects that can cause WordPress to load slowly, now let’s move onto how to speed up your website and optimize its performance.
What Slows Down Your WordPress Website?
[lgc_column grid=”50″ tablet_grid=”50″ mobile_grid=”100″ last=”false”]2. The Best Hosting For WordPress
8. Lazy Load all Images/Videos/Iframes
9. Minify JavaScript and CSS files
[/lgc_column] [lgc_column grid=”50″ tablet_grid=”50″ mobile_grid=”100″ last=”true”]14. Disable WordPress Features
15. Reduce The Number of Plugins
18. Gravatars – To Use or Not To Use?
21. Defer Parsing Of JavaScript
23. Remove Query Strings From Static Resources
25. Fix Your Slowest Loading Pages
[/lgc_column]This guide is broken down into 25-easy to follow steps that will help you to improve your WordPress Website Speed in just a few hours. I have tried to place each step in the order that will deliver the biggest benefit/load time reduction.
The 5 primary causes for a slow WordPress website are:
- Web Hosting – Choosing the wrong web host can really slow down your website.
- Theme – Most themes are boated and full of unnecessary features.
- Plugins – There are a number of plugins you MUST avoid.
- WordPress Configuration – WordPress is a great CMS but can be optimized to serve pages faster.
- Page Size – The images, videos, and text you have on a webpage can be optimized for the web.
Just remember, if you stick to the core steps in this guide you will have a website that is faster than 99% of others online. You don’t need to spend all of your time chasing the elusive 100/100 score or an A+ on each tool in order to have a super optimized site.
Before we begin, there are two steps we need to take before performing any speed optimizing techniques, one of which will save you from potentially losing your website and all the hard work that’s gone into it.
Get Your Benchmark Scores
The first thing we need to do is to test our page speed to get our baseline scores so that we have a starting point. For this, we will use 2 free-to-use tools that can help us do just that in a matter of seconds.
Pingdom
First up, Pingdom. Enter the root of your website into Pingdom and click “Start Test”, in a few seconds you will have your baseline scores. Take a snapshot of these or write them down so we can compare once we’ve finished optimizing.
GTMetrix
Next up we’ll head over to GTMetrix and enter our URL again. If you’re running an SSL certificate (and you should be) ensure you use the correct prefix for your website’s URL (HTTPS:// and not HTTP://).
As you can see, whilst we’ve got some great PageSpeed and YSlow scores, our “Fully Loaded Time” is 2.4s. This, of course, can be improved, but sometimes it comes down to speed vs usability and we like to be able to create nice looking pages with page builders and a few other tools.
So removing them would completely change the user experience. You don’t have to sacrifice everything for fast loading times.
How To Test For Slow Hosting
As I mentioned earlier, one of the best ways to test for slow web hosting is to look at the time to first byte (TTFB). This can be done quickly and easily using Bitcatcha (free service). The lower your TTFB the better, as you can see from the image below, this website scores on A+ with some incredibly low numbers.
Backup Your Website
Before we dive in and make a bunch of changes to speed up your WordPress site, you will want to create a backup of your website files and its database. There are 2 methods of doing this:
Manual Method
Manually involves logging into the cPanel of your website, zipping and download the WordPress site files and then heading over to PHPMyAdmin and downloading a zip version of your database.
If you’re not familiar with the cPanel you may wish to jump to option 2 which is a quick and pain-free way to automate this process. If you like to get your hands dirty…here’s what you need to do.
Stage 1 – Backup the Website Files
- Log in to the cPanel of your website and head over to File Manager
- Navigate to the root of your website (typically /public_html)
- Select all files & folders and click on the compress option
- Choose “zip” archive and give your new compressed file a name
- Once compressed, download the new file to your local hard drive (if you cannot see it, you may need to hit the “reload’ icon)
Stage 2 – Database Backup
- Head back to your cPanel and look for the PHPMyAdmin shortcut and click it
- From the next screen locate your database on the left menu and select it
- Then click the ‘Export’ button on the top navigation menu
- Select the “Quick Export’ option and click the “Go” button
- This will download the database in .sql format to your local hard drive
That’s all there is to it.
Automated Method
There are several plugins you can use to backup your WordPress site and avoid losing your data. My recommended free option is UpDraftPlus and a premium option should you require support and a few additional options is BackupBuddy.
Personally, I don’t see the need to spend money on this step and if you can’t or would prefer not to backup WordPress manually then I’d stick with UpDraftPlus.
As you can see, UpDraftPlus keeps its user interface very simple and that can only be a good thing (it won’t slow down the backend of your WP site too much).
- All you need to do is hit the “Backup Now” button.
- A popup will appear confirming what you wish to backup (check both the files & database boxes).
- Optional: You can also set up your cloud storage solution via the settings page if you’d prefer (recommended).
Extra Step – Not required – Now we’ve got a backup of our website safe and secure on our hard drive there is just one small extra step I like to take here, and that is to upload those 2 files to the Cloud. My preference is Google Drive, but you could also use DropBox, OneDrive, Zoho Docs or any other reliable cloud storage service.
25 Tips for Improving WordPress Site Speed & Performance
1. Choose a Good Web Host
The number one factor when it comes to speeding up WordPress is the hosting provider you use. You can fix all of the on-site issues you may have, but if your host has slow servers, outdated technology, and their TTFB is high, you’ll never hit those fast loading speeds.
Which Hosting Companies to Avoid
There is one HUGE player in this area, which you should avoid and that is EIG (Endurance International Group). This company operates some of the largest providers you may have come across, namely Bluehost & HostGator.
With over 60 registered brands, EIG’s have grown their business primarily through acquisitions of other brands and as such is not the best choice when it comes to shared hosting.
The others are GoDaddy and 1&1 Ionos, who both have a big marketing budget and from personal experience, I wouldn’t choose them again. Also, evidence (below) suggests to avoid them too.
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