Develop a lightning-fast online experience through the WordPress speed optimization tips, strategies, and resources found in this detailed performance guide.
A one-second delay in mobile load times can hurt your mobile conversion rate by 20%. Meanwhile, customers who have a bad mobile online experience are 62% less likely to buy from you in the future.
Your WordPress website speed can make or break the user experience (UX). After all, no one wants to wait for pages to load.
With WordPress speed optimization strategies, you can provide users with a lightning-fast experience. Without it, you could lose customers and potential business.
Speed things up! Learn how to improve your website speed with these 13 WordPress performance tips. These tips will keep visitors happy and exploring, helping you boost leads and conversions.
Table of Contents
- Run a Site Speed Diagnosis
- Remove Unnecessary Themes and Plugins
- Declutter the Database
- Clean Up Your Media
- Minify Source Code Files
- Remove Render-Blocking Javascript and CSS
- Use Lazy-Load
- Start Optimizing Images
- Reduce Redirects, Revisions, and Comments
- Use a CDN and Run PHP
- Utilize Caching
- Reconsider Your Hosting
- Find a Dedicated Server
1. Run a Site Speed Diagnosis
Before you start making changes to your website, it helps to understand what’s affecting your WordPress website speed. You can run a site speed diagnosis to find out.
You can use plugins and tools like WP Engine Speed Tool to get started. Once you enter your URL, you’ll receive a custom analysis.
The report will determine how fast your site loads. It can also provide a few recommendations to help reduce page load time lags.
2. Remove Unnecessary Themes and Plugins
Your site speed diagnosis might indicate you have unused themes and plugins on your site.
First, make sure the theme and plugins you’re using are up-to-date. Using a previous versiohn might cause a lag. Your plugins and theme might fail to communicate.
Next, remove any plugins you’re not using from your library.
Look at your plugins, too. Deactivate and remove any plugins you’re no longer using.
Removing unwanted themes and plugins can protect your website from any potential vulnerabilities. It can improve your WordPress performance, too.
3. Declutter the Database
When was the last time you took a look at your WordPress database? Over time, the database can start gathering clutter. That clutter could increase your database’s size, causing WordPress page loading delays.
You can use phpMyAdmin to clean up your database manually.
If you’re inexperienced using your database, use a plugin instead. For example, Advanced Database Cleaner and WP-Sweep can both help. These plugins will remove:
- Spam comments
- Old revisions
- MySQL queries
Cleaning out the clutter will keep your WordPress website speed at its best.
4. Clean Up Your Media
Now that your themes, plugins, and database are cleaned up, let’s look at your media library. Have you accumulated old images over the years? You can remove unused data to free up space on your site.
Consider using a plugin like Media Cleaner. This plugin will tell you which files are no longer used on your site. Then, you can manually remove the images you don’t want to keep.
You can also improve your media library by:
- Resizing your images
- Using JPG files instead of PNGs
- Deleting duplicate images and files
Cleaning out your media library can help with WordPress speed optimization and keep you organized.
5. Minify Source Code Files
Files like HTML and CSS can start to build up across your website. Unfortunately, source files can impact your WordPress page loading times. You can minify these files on the backend of your website.
Minifying these source files will remove unnecessary characters to reduce how much data is transferred. The files will run quicker, allowing the pages to load faster, too.
You can use plugins to minify your source code files and speed up your side.
6. Remove Render-Blocking Javascript and CSS
After running your WordPress website speed diagnosis, you might see something about “render-blocking JavaScript.”
JavaScript performs specific actions on each web page. For example, you can use it to prompt a popup to appear. You don’t need these actions to load until the content finishes loading first.
You can use a Defer JavaScript Parsing tool to delay when certain elements load.
7. Use Lazy-Load
Longer pages get 638% more conversions than shorter ones. Unfortunately, longer pages can also take longer to load.
You can use Lazy Loading to keep elements at the bottom of the page from loading until the visitor scrolls down. That way, the page doesn’t load all at once. Lazy Loading can help reduce page load time delays on your site.
8. Start Optimizing Images
Images can take up a lot of space across your website. Of course, you need imagery to engage and attract potential leads. Optimizing your images can reduce file sizes to improve your WordPress website speed.
Consider using a plugin like Smush to compress your images.
Make sure to add image alt text and titles to your images for search engine optimization (SEO). Otherwise, create an image sitemap for your site.
9. Reduce Redirects, Revisions, and Comments
Use a plugin to remove as many redirects as you can from your site. In addition to impacting load times, redirects can also impact the UX.
You can also limit how many revisions you can make each post to improve load times.
Add a limit to how many comments can appear per page, too. Limiting comments can reduce memory consumption.
10. Use a CDN and Run PHP
A content delivery network (CDN) can boost your website’s load times. Your site will use a server that’s closest to the site visitor. This can reduce external HTTP requests to speed up load times.
Run the latest version of PHP on your site as well.
11. Utilize Caching
Use browser caching to tell the visitor’s browser to download elements of your site. Caching reduces how many network connections the browser needs to make. Fewer connections mean faster speeds!
12. Reconsider Your Hosting
Your hosting infrastructure can impact your WordPress speed optimization, too. Managed hosting can improve your WordPress performance by serving more cached pages.
13. Find a Dedicated Server
Are you generating a lot of traffic? Consider choosing a dedicated server. Sharing a server can clog the CPU and RAM.
Pages can lag as a result.
A new hosting plan will ensure no one else uses the server’s bandwidth.
A Need for Speed: 13 WordPress Speed Optimization Tips for Success
Make sure your WordPress website is running at its best (and fastest speeds)! With WordPress speed optimization, you can improve the UX and UI on your site. Visitors will stay longer, helping you boost leads and conversions.
By investing in your website, you could improve your ROI.
Need help improving your WordPress website speed? We’re here to help.
Schedule a website performance boost with our team to get started.