15 Powerful Ways to Speed Up WordPress Website [Updated]

How to speed up WordPress website is seriously a big topic these days. However, there are numerous ways you can speed up your WordPress website.

Also, a fast loading website can surely help you to get a lot more visitors, more page views, and less bounce rate.

Therefore, the intent is here to list numerous ways to increase WordPress website speed.

Why we Need a Fast Loading Website?

Everyone loves fast loading website including Google. As soon as user land on your website, the speed is the major factor that will decide that the user will bounce back or not.

Take it as yourself, you’ll be not visiting a website that is taking too much to load.

Same way, A fast loading website can attract more visitors and more leads and sales.

1. Good Speed = More Visitors + More Sales.
2. Less Bounce Rate.
3. Better Search Engine Ranking
4. More Conversions + More Revenue.
5. Great Email List.
6. Boost in SEO.

Facts and Report:

In a report by Neil Patel.

• 73% of users experience slow loading websites.
• 51% of mobile users found a website with an error.
• 47% of visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds.
• 1 second of delay can decrease sales up to 7%.

Average Loading Speed of WordPress Website?

As the report says, an average website to gain more visitors and leads, a website should load in between 1-3 seconds.

2 seconds is good enough. However, the faster your website is, the better it will perform.

How to Test WordPress Website Speed?

There are different websites that you can use to test the speed of your WordPress website. I would recommend below websites:

1. GTMetrix
2. Pingdom
3. Google PageSpeed

You’ll just need to enter the URL of the webpage and hit the button. Then analyse the report.

What Cause Website Low Speed?

There can be different reasons and all you can find by doing a speed test and analysing the waterfall model. You’ll see various suggestions and improvement that you can apply to your website.

But sometimes it is hard to read for a beginner. Therefore, let us see some of the common reasons

• Hosting Server: If your server is not properly configured or its location is not appropriate to your user then website speed may vary.
• WordPress Caching: Try to serve cached page to your users rather than loading each resource every time from the origin.
• Page Size: Try to keep your webpage size small. Especially images and videos.
• Too Many Plugins: Keep fewer and highly rated plugin on your website.
• Scripts: Implementing Ads or any other external script such as Fonts can also harm your website speed.

But don’t worry. Let’s fix that.

Below I have shared 15 powerful ways that will help you to learn how to increase WordPress website speed. Below is the quick overview

• Quality Web Hosting
• Fast WordPress Theme
• Optimize Images
• Use CDN
• Use Cache Plugin
• Remove Unnecessary Plugins
• Optimize Database
• Use AMP
• Avoid External Scripts
• Lazy Load Images
• Upgrade WordPress Version
• Split Comments
• Avoid Large Files
• Kill Background Process
• Minify JS, CSS

1 Quality Web Hosting

For hosting any WordPress website, you must need a quality web hosting and it also plays an important role in the speed of your website.

A good web hosting like Bluehost and Siteground adds an extra measure in terms of website performance.

I am using Bluehost from the past 2 years and didn’t notice any downtime till now.

Read full review of Bluehost here.

• Buy Bluehost Hosting (58% Off + FREE Domain + SSL)
• Buy a2Hosting Hosting (63% Off +SSL)

2: Fast WordPress Theme

Using a lightweight theme is a major factor of your website speed. Always select a theme from a trusted source.

A good theme leads to nicely written code which avoids bad scripts that can cause harm to your website performance.

For beginners, you can go with FREE WordPress themes and later on switch to premium themes like Divi, Genesis, and GeneratePress.

Read: Best WordPress Themes (FREE+PREMIUM)

3: Optimise Image

Images are the biggest reason people avoid and their website stuck on the loading bar. Optimizing your Website Images are very crucial.

If you’re using too many images then always choose an image according to your website width and try to keep the size less than 100KB(if possible).

You can use online image compressors for compressing images without losing quality.

4: Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

I already discussed Content Delivery Network and if your audience is global then you should never avoid using a CDN.

Basically, a CDN keeps an exact copy of your website in the static form at there different server location and serve those static files to your audience without hitting the origin server.

In this way, your website will be loaded faster and you’ll get a boost in website speed.

Also, there are are many different factors CDN can help you out. Cloudflare is the best CDN available till now in the market for FREE.

5: Use Cache Plugin to speed up WordPress

Plugins add extra functionality to your WordPress website and for caching your website you should use Cache Plugin which can result in faster loading of a website.

There are many different Cache Plugins you can try:

• W3Total Cache
• WP Super Cache
• WP Rocket (Paid)

Simply install and activate any of the above Cache Plugin and your website will start loading fast.

6: Uninstall Unnecessary Plugins

As I told, Plugins add extra functionality but not all do. Always avoid installing too many plugins.

Plugins from untrusted sources can contain malicious code and may hamper your website performance.

Trust me, I am using only 10-12 plugins on all of my websites.

7: Use Database Optimizer

Optimizing your website database and table are also very important and most of the people ignore this fact.

I am using Wp-Optimize plugin, which helps me to optimize:

• Database tables.
• Post Revisions.
• Trashed Post and Comments

8: Use AMP to speed up WordPress on Mobiles

AMP(Accelerated Mobile Pages) plugins can help you to get a light version of your website for Mobile.

You can’t ignore the fact that 58% of Google searches come from Mobile devices and it is very important to load website faster on Mobile.

9: Keep Less Scripts

If you’re using Adsense or Popups Forms then for sure you’re having too many scripts that execute on the page load. Removing such scripts helps you to speed up WordPress website.

Keep as much fewer scripts you can use on the page load and try to implement ads or popup forms during the page scroll.

Too many scripts can lead to a slow website.

10: Add LazyLoad to Images

What does LazyLoading of Images means?

It means that images of your blog post will load asynchronously. That means when the content is fully loaded, only then images will be loaded while scrolling of the webpage.

If a user doesn’t scroll the webpage, then images placed at the bottom won’t be loaded.

For lazy loading images, you can use Wp-Lazy-Load or Jetpack Lazy Load.

11: Keep WordPress Up-to-Date

WordPress comes with many different updates and bug fixes every month. Also, try to keep WordPress and its components updated.

For example, WordPress core, plugins and PHP version.

PHP 7 is two times faster than its previous versions. Always ask your hosting provider for the version or updates.

12: Splits Comments into Pages

If you’re thousands of comments. Congratulation! It is a big sign of audience engagement but then you should always split your comments into pages because having all comment on a single page may increase the page size.

WordPress comes with the in-built option of splitting comment into pages.

Go to Settings -> Discussion and check the box  “Break comments into pages” option.

13: Avoid Uploading Large Files

As we discussed, how images with large size can slow down your website. Similarly, try to ignore uploading large size images, videos, and GIF on your blog post.

While embedding videos into your blog post or landing page, you can try with Youtube Video Preview.

14: Kill Background Process

Several plugins load external files from other websites such as Fonts, styling CSS, images etc.

Some of them are optimized but some can slow down your WordPress website significantly.

Avoid external HTTP request in order to get a fast load of the website.

15: Minify JS and CSS to speed up WordPress

Last but not least, Minifying JS and CSS calls or combining them into one can improve site loading speed.

You can use a plugin like AutoOptimize to achieve Minify of JS and CSS.

Final Words:

As we discussed the best ways to speed up WordPress website. I would like to repeat that optimizing your website is a very big factor to improve user experience.

Try to optimize for both Mobile and Desktop. Use AMP, CDN and Cache plugins.

Implement the above suggestion and do let me know your ways to speed up WordPress website.