Speed up Wordpress fast with only 9 simple steps

Do you want to speed up your WordPress? Fast loading website means increased customer experience, increased views and most importantly, improved SEO. In this article, we will share with you the most useful ways to improve WordPress performance and speed up!

Reasons to speed up WordPress and how to test website speed

1. Why is it important to speed up your WordPress website?

Research from scientists shows that between 2000 and 2016, the time spent focusing on a specific problem decreased from 12 seconds to 7 seconds. What does this mean for your website?

You will have very little time to show your readers or customers your content and convince them to continue reading your site.

A slow website causes your customers to leave before it even loads.

Many studies on major websites including Amazon, Google have shown that a website that loads slowly every 1 second reduces conversion rates by 7%, page views by 11%, and customer satisfaction by 16%. .

In addition, Google and other search engines have begun to penalize slow loading websites by giving their search rankings a deep drop in keyword search results.

In short, if you want more traffic, more customers, and more revenue from your website, you need to make your WordPress site even faster, speed up your website even better!

2. How to test WordPress speed?

Usually, beginners think that their website is not too slow because they don't feel slow when opening the website on their computer. This is a big mistake!

When you regularly visit your website, today's popular browsers like Chrome or Firefox automatically "cache" the website's cache on your computer and make it load immediately when you return to the page. next time.

But for ordinary users who never visit your website, their first experience will be completely different from yours.

In fact, users in different geographical locations will also have completely different experiences. That's why we recommend using a tool like Pingdom to test your WordPress speed.

This is a free tool for you to test your website speed from many locations around the world. After running a speed test of your website, you will wonder what is a good speed? Basically, a web page should take no more than 3 seconds to load the entire web page.

Causes of slow wordpress website WordPress speed up

1. Installing too many plugins

Plugins are extensions that add and complete the great features of WordPress. The abuse of too many plugins is also a cause of slower loading speed of wordpress website.

The installed plugin works by hooking into functions in the WordPress kernel. Hooking up so many functions causes WordPress to have to perform too many tasks before displaying the website's content.

2. Image is not optimized

Images are also a factor that greatly affects the loading speed of a website. If your images are not optimized, the website will slow down a lot.

3. Use old version plugins

The old plugin means that it has not been updated and has not been optimized, so its performance is not high. This is also the cause of slow loading website.

4. Use External Widgets WordPress speed up

Just like using plugins, using external Widgets can also make your website load slower. Unlike the default WordPress Widgets, these Widgets can use external resources so it will take time to load these additional content to display on the user's machine. If these Widgets are broken, the browser will still have to handle them until the timeout.

5. High traffic and too much data

This will obviously have a big impact on the loading speed of your website, and it can also cause the website to die on the server because it cannot promptly respond to requests at the same time. The hits are too high, resulting in not enough CPU and RAM to handle or too many connections. This often happens with large websites. WordPress running slow is inevitable when traffic is too high.

6. DDos/Botnet Attack

This is also a sudden increase in traffic, but this is intentional behavior and is played by other competitors.

7. Using too low a WordPress version

Each WordPress update is a patch for the WordPress system. Old WordPress is always looking for hidden security flaws that the developer may not even know about. There are also parts that are not optimized, that's why WordPress always gives new updates, and every time in the Change log of the development team, we see a mention of Performance ie the performance of WordPress.

8. Theme has not been optimized

This is also one of the main reasons why WordPress websites load slowly. With unoptimized themes, your theme may contain malicious code or use things that consume system resources like jQuery, images, etc. We recommend using as little jQuery as possible, which greatly speeds up WordPress.

Instructions on how to speed up WordPress to optimize website speed

Step 1: Test WordPress site speed

Before starting to speed up wordpress you need to know about the state of your WordPress site. Testing your site speed is not only a formality but it can also save you trouble later if your site is already running at optimal speed. There are many useful tools that allow you to evaluate the performance of your website. We also have a tutorial on testing website speed using GTMetrix. It provides a lot of useful information for speed optimization by comparing the results of Google Page Speed Insights and YSlow. Finally, if you want to test your site against other sites use Pingdom.

Step 2: Remove unnecessary plugins/themes to speed up WordPress

Adding new features to a website to keep it modern and relevant is a common practice for webmasters. On WordPress, this is done through the installation of additional plugins and themes. Sometimes, new plugins have features that replace other plugins, over time making some plugins no longer really necessary.

An excessive number of plugins, especially outdated versions, can hinder WordPress performance. As a general rule, to speed up wordpress, the first thing you need to do is remove or at least disable those unnecessary plugins Ideally, your site should have only the important plugins that match the features characteristic only. Make sure you go through the tutorial on installing and removing plugins.

Step 3: Minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Minification is one of the most useful techniques if you want to speed up WordPress. It tries to reduce the size of script files as well as terminal files (HTML, CSS, JS) by removing unnecessary characters such as spaces and comments. As a result, the files will be reduced in size but the functionality will remain unchanged.

Some plugins help you do this like Autoptimize, W3 Total Cache.

Step 4: Enable GZip compression

In addition to minimizing the size of files, you can also benefit from a special form of compression called Gzip. Basically, whenever someone visits your website, the resources (files) from your server will be found and downloaded. The larger the resources, the more time it takes to download to the visitor's machine. By enabling Gzip compression, you can significantly reduce the size of these resources and speed up the loading process of WordPress, which in turn also helps in speeding up wordpress.

To check if your website has Gzip compression enabled, use checkgzipcompression.com. If not enabled, add the following code to your .htaccess file to enable this feature:

You can also refer to our detailed guide on Gzip compression at this link. Plugins like WP-Rocket can also automatically enable Gzip compression on your website.

Step 5: Optimize the image

Due to the "static" nature of images, the use of high-resolution images greatly affects the bandwidth of your website. This doesn't mean you have to give up high-quality images in favor of low-quality images for optimal speed. There are many ways to optimize the images on your website. The Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin provides the most convenient way for your website to reach optimal speed without losing image quality.

Step 6: Divide the long post into pages

Another buzzword that you may come across when looking for ways to optimize WordPress is pagination. It simply refers to breaking large pieces of content into smaller pieces. These sections can then be displayed page-by-page as separate pages.

Pagination is often used for the comments section of a web page, where thousands of comments can be loaded at the same time, congesting bandwidth. You can easily enable pagination in the WordPress comments section – just navigate to Settings > Discussions. Here, you can define the maximum number of comments per page. A balanced arrangement is a good thing because visitors won't want to keep clicking to go to the next page.

In addition to the comments section, pagination can also help you separate a post/page into separate web pages. This can be very useful for long articles because users are less likely to get overwhelmed at first glance. Post paging can be enabled by adding to the text version of the article. At this point, WordPress will automatically detect and activate it for you.

Step 7: Upgrade PHP version to speed up WordPress

This is one of the lesser known tricks. However, it has the strongest effects. Moving from PHP 5 to PHP 7 offers many practical benefits. WordPress 2x performance boost on PHP 7 compared to PHP 5, able to handle 112% requests/sec. Furthermore, WordPress will also benefit from PHP 7's memory optimization resulting in a 30-50% performance increase. That's why PHP 7 is default on all Shared Hosting plans and gives WordPress over 5x performance boost.

However, it's important to keep in mind that PHP 7 lacks backwards compatibility. This means that you will not be able to use some plugins/themes, including those that run well on PHP 5. To check if your website currently contains such plugins/themes use the tool. compatibility checker (PHP Compatibility Checker) for WordPress.

Step 8: Use Caching Plugins

Caching is a well-known mechanism to offload some of the burden on the web server. Basically, caching engines store frequently used information on the visitor's machine (browser, memory) so that the browser doesn't have to get this information repeatedly from the server. Caching can significantly improve website performance and is therefore one of the most important techniques for performing performance tuning for WordPress.

There are many WordPress plugins that perform different types of caching including WP-Rocket and W3 Total Cache. You can also refer to the WP Super Cache tutorial to enable caching for WordPress.

Step 9: Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)

With internet speeds increasing day by day, it's sometimes easy to forget that websites are on physical servers far from your location. At this point, the gap can be so large that it adversely affects the response time. Most websites deal with this through a content delivery network (CDN).

When you enable a CDN on a website, the visitor's browser no longer has to reload all the pages from the web server, instead some static pages are forced to be hosted in data centers near the location. of more visitors. This reduces the total number of requests handled by the web server, thus improving WordPress performance.

There are many choices for a CDN. The most popular include CloudFlare and MaxCDN. We have also provided detailed instructions on setting up CloudFlare for your WordPress site.

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Speed up Wordpress fast with only 9 simple steps

Reasons to speed up WordPress and how to test website speed