Last Updated on March 31, 2024 by Rick Darlinton
If you are looking for efficient solutions online to speed up WordPress site, I hope this article can be helpful to you. These are some simple solutions i ever used to speed up my WordPress site and made the site load faster by 2-3 seconds. All of these solutions are free and easy to use without any technical skills. Let’s get started and check how you can speed up your WordPress site as well
How to check your WordPress site speed?
First of all, you may need to know how to check whether your WordPress site is loading slowly or not. PageSpeed insight tool from Google and Gtmetrix tool can help you check site speed. Just enter your site URL in these online site speed tools and they will show how long it takes to fully load your website or pages. For example, this is the speed test result from Gtmetrix for my website.
8 ways to speed up WordPress site
These are a total of 8 simple ways i ever used after researching online and they are useful to speed up WordPress sites. You can also take them a try and they are also likely to make your site load much faster than ever before.
1. Check and reduce loading requests using DevTools
When you visit a website page, the total of page loading requests decides how long it takes to fully load the page. These requests usually include the page content document, CSS, javascript, script, gif, font, images, texts, HTML and more. The more loading requests, the longer time it takes to load the page. So, you should know what types of requests exist and how long it takes to load these requests. To check this, you can use google’s Chrome DevTools. The Google Chrome Devtools will let you know the total of page requests, each file size, and how long it takes to load the page. To access DevTools in Chrome, follow the steps below
- Enter your site URL in Chrome and enter the page
- Then press Ctrl+Shift+J to enter the Chrome DevTools
- Next, select the Network as shown below
- After that, you can refresh the page again and then check the total of page requests, file size and loading time.
You can check what types of loading files are large and take a long time to load. After that, just check whether you can remove those unnecessary files or requests. For example, if some unnecessary WordPress plugins may be very large and affect the loading speed, please just uninstall them immediately.
2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The Content Delivery Network or CDN is made up of servers all around the world. The reason why you should use CDN is that it can speed up the site page loading time. Usually, the closer the site visitors are to the hosting server is, the faster the page loads when visitors visit the site. For example, if your site hosting server is in Germany, the users from Germany will find your site runs faster than those in Australia. However, Content Network Delivery can help fix this issue and CDN is also helpful to improve site security. One of the popular CND services is Cloudflare. It is very simple to connect Cloudflare to your WordPress site. You can visit the Cloudflare site and register an account and then follow the instructions to finish the process.
3. Use caching such as WP-Optimize
I ever used many different caching plugins to speed up the WordPress site including some paid plugins but finally, i selected the WP-Optimize which is free to use. You can install it from WordPress and then activate it. After activating it, you can check some changes in terms of site speed using Gtmetrix as said.
WP-Optimize has many powerful features to speed up a WordPress site. You can use it to minify CSS, javascript, or HTML files, enable page caching, compress images automatically, optimize site database, and more.
4. Uninstall unnecessary plugins
This is one of the most efficient solutions to speed up WordPress site by uninstalling some unnecessary WordPress plugins. If you install so many plugins, it will severely affect site speed performance because it causes more page loading requests. As said earlier, you could use chrome Devtools to check what types of plugins take a long time to load and then uninstall them if they are not useful
5. Update WordPress PHP and database regularly
Keep the latest WordPress PHP version if possible. The new updates of the WordPress PHP version can also help speed up site speed and improve your site security. The solutions may vary on the different hosting servers you use. But you can contact your hosting service company and let them help you update WordPress PHP or you can check some tutorials online based on the hosting server you are using. For example, if you use Bluehost, you can update WordPress by going to Update PHP. Go to Bluehost cpanl> advanced>software>phpMultiPHP Manager
6. Reduce the number of images on the homepage
Sometimes, you may add so many images or videos on your home page, which may affect the site loading. To check this, just use the Chrome Devtools to know whether there are so many requests of images when users visit your home page. You can reduce the images and then find out if it can speed up WordPress site
7. Use a good theme
The theme you use for your WordPress site can affect the site speed directly. You can right-click the mouse on your site and then check how many lines of source codes there are. If the source codes are so large, it will affect the site speed. When you select a theme, it is advisable to check the theme source codes and file size.
8. Compress the images
Please keep in mind that large images are likely to affect the site speed. Therefore, please use some online tools such as Tinypng to compress the images without reducing the image quality. It is advisable to keep each file image within 150-200KB.
Related Posts