How to Speed Up WordPress Site (Performance Optimization)

WordPress Speed Optimization: You need to speed up your WordPress site for faster page loading and better user experience. Check here the techniques to make WordPress faster.

Speed up WordPress

WordPress is a popular Content Management System (CMS) that the majority of websites use on the Internet.

WordPress is used to create websites, blogs, eCommerce and more.

A WordPress site uses codes, scripts, stylesheets(CSS), images, and text to display content in front of the users. If these resources load slowly then it will make a bad user experience and increase the bounce rate.

What are the major benefits of speeding up a WordPress site?

  • Faster page loading
  • Better user experience (UX)
  • Higher SERP ranking

Here we will guide you with some tested techniques to speed up your WordPress website.

Techniques to Speed Up WordPress

Get a Good WordPress Hosting

Hosting is the most important platform on which the whole website system depends. Choose a quality WordPress hosting that offers top-notch performance, security and support.

For the best performance and worry-free maintenance of your site, you can choose managed WordPress hosting providers like Rocket.net, Cloudways, Kinsta, etc.

Use the best DNS service

No doubt Cloudflare is one of the top DNS service providers worldwide. But, if you are using Litespeed server then you can choose QUIC’s DNS service.

You can perform a DNS speed test.

Use an Optimized WordPress Theme

WordPress theme plays a pivotal role in speeding up a WordPress site. There are popular and well-optimized themes like GeneratePress, Astra, Kadence, Hello Elementor, Divi, and Oxygen Builder are available in the market.

WordPress Code Optimization plugin

WordPress code optimization is very important to remove unnecessary codes and characters from loading in the front end. Using a code optimization plugin you can minimize or combine your site’s HTML code, Stylesheets(CSS) and Javascript(JS). These will help to speed up your webpage loading.

There are popular WordPress speed optimization plugins like FlyingPress, Perfmatters, WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, & Autoptimize available in the market to optimize your WordPress code.

WordPress Cache Plugin

Cache plays a big role in your WordPress speed-up process. A WordPress Cache plugin stores a copy of your pages and serves the user from the cache. It minimizes the number of requests to the actual database and helps in speeding up webpage delivery.

Some of the best WordPress cache plugins are FlyingPress, WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache etc.

Use the best WordPress CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) helps to server your website from the user’s nearest location which results in greater availability, speed, and faster delivery of your content.

Some of the best CDN you can use for WordPress websites are; Cloudflare, CloudFront, BunnyCDN, KeyCDN, Akamai, etc.

Cloudflare is one of the most popular CDNs with a wide geographical coverage. You can start for Free with Cloudflare also, some web hosting platforms offer Cloudflare Enterprise plans with the hosting plan.

Cloudflare Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress also known as Cloudflare APO works great for WordPress sites to speed up page loading.

Lower your TTFB Score

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is the time taken by the browser to receive the first byte of data from your website. A TTFB score under 200 ms is considered excellent and within 200 – 350 ms is considered as good.

You can use a TTFB Checker to check your site’s TTFB score.

You can improve your WordPress site’s TTFB score by using;

  • Good quality web hosting
  • Optimized theme
  • Speed Optimization plugin
  • Cache
  • CDN
  • Etc.

Avoid Layout Shifts

Layout shifts will create display issues for your WordPress site. Properly configuring the optimization plugin, stylesheet behaviour, and cache can help to solve Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) issues.

Read more – How to avoid Font and CLS issues after you make changes to WordPress site design and code

Use Object Cache

Object cache stores the database queries and serves it from the cache which helps to avoid constant database queries. The most demanding object caching solutions on the market are Redis and Memcached.

Offload media when needed

Offloading media helps to serve the resources, especially images from a different server than your website’s main server. This actually helps for large dynamic sites with a lot of resources.

Keep your WordPress secure

Sometimes hacked or malware-infected WordPress sites become slow to respond. In that case, you can scan your site thoroughly using any WordPress security plugins like Wordfence, Sucuri, or iThemes Security to detect and solve the issue. You should also keep your WordPress secure by regularly updating Core, Themes, and Plugins.

Speed Up WordPress: Things you should avoid 

Avoid using slow plugins

Slow plugins can make your WordPress page loading slow. You can use Query Monitor to check the plugins that are making slow queries to load a web page.

Delete unused plugins and themes

If you have deactivated a plugin and don’t need it anymore then you should delete the plugin to avoid any effect on your WordPress performance.

Clean up your Database

Regularly checking and cleaning up unnecessary data from the database is useful to speed up WordPress.

FAQ: Speed Up WordPress

How to speed up WordPress?

Using the best DNS service, hosting, Cache Plugin, CDN etc. can help you to improve the loading speed of WordPress.

Conclusion: WordPress Speed Optimization

Speeding up WordPress needs proper analysis and problem detection using the right tools. Follow the above guides to speed up your WordPress today.

Services to Speed Up your WordPress Site

WebRangoon’s WordPress Speed Optimization Service

The No. 1 WordPress Speed Optimization Service to get a higher SERP ranking, Better user experience (UX) & fast page loading. WebRangoon will help to improve the loading speed of a WordPress website by optimizing codes, scripts, stylesheets, images, databases and other resources.

My Experience: I have been doing WordPress optimization for decades. I have shared my expertise with you to speed up your WordPress site. I have also learned some cool tweaks from this WordPress Developer Guide and Toms’s article on Speed Up Slow WordPress Site. Best of luck for a faster WordPress.