After reading this article, I promise that you can increase your WordPress website speed within 10 minutes. As a blogger or website owner, your first intention to succeed should be your users’ experience. To provide the best user’s experience, you definitely need to take care of WordPress website speed.
Website Speed and design. It is very important that you can not ignore when you are designing any theme with the right schema to rank better in Google.
Then,
1. What are the best WordPress theme?
Usually, people don’t know how to design a wordpress site. So he buys any theme or page builder and starts designing by watching the video.
The theme is very important to increase site speed. And a good structure, secure, lightweight, schema optimize theme helps to rank higher in google and gives your visitors a better user experience.
GeneratePress and Astra are the themes that I like and use personally. This site is build in GeneratePress Theme. Its’ theme file size is approx. 800kb. And I don’t find any such a small, lightweight, schema optimize theme like both of these on the internet.
2. Updating to Latest WordPress Version
The most important work of a site owner is that he should keep updated whenever it is available and take a backup before the update, without updation of theme, plugin, or wordpress itself site to become vulnerable.
One more mistake that new blogger makes is that they use theme or plugin from an unknown source. Don’t use this type of product; it may your website load time.
3. AMP Optimize Theme
Does your theme amp optimize or not? If it is, then install the AMP plugin on your site. And I can definitely say that your site speed in mobile device speed up instantly.
What is AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Page. In February 2016, Google Launches Accelerated Mobile Page open-source framework. This framework ensure faster speed in mobile device for creating better user experience.
The reason why AMP pages load instantly is because AMP restricts HTML/CSS and JavaScript, allowing faster rendering of mobile web pages. Unlike regular mobile pages, AMP pages are automatically cached by Google AMP Cache for faster load times on Google search.
The cheapest hosting provider, Hostinger.com, can make your site blazing fast. And GTMatrix and Page Speed Insight Score will be at least 95% in Mobile.
Limitation of AMP
- Use AMP optimizes theme, or your site may be misbehaving.
- Use only AMP optimize plugin, or your site may be misbehaving.
- GeneratePress is not an AMP optimize theme.
4. Better Web Hosting
Hosting is the number one reason for a slow website. To get rid of the slow website, you choose to host among Bluehost, Cloudways, WPX, Kinsta, A2hosting managed VPS hosting providers.
Also, You can learn how to manage the VPS server of DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS or Google Cloud. Always try to avoid shared hosting as there are so many backs draws apart from slow hosting.
In share hosting, one IP address hosts many sites, and those sites can do spamming, making it hard to rank your site in Google.
5. Type of Server Used Hosting Provider
OpenLiteSpeed, Nginx and Apache, generally one of these three servers use by different hosting providers. And the Apache is the slowest server in the world, and the maximum hosting provider uses that.
OpenLiteSpeed is the fastest server for WordPress and is used by Cloudways, WPX, A2hosting and Bluehost etc.
One share hosting provider, Hostinger, use OpenLiteSpeed server. If your budget is low, you can go for Hostinger.
6. Use of Caching Plugin
Previously I have tested so many cache plugins. Among them, I like LiteSpeed, Autoptimize, W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket. But the free plugin can’t remove render-blocking completely. And maximum speed score you can get from 80 to 85 out of 100 from google page speed insight.
WP Rocket is one of the most popular premium plugins on our list. Also, I tested Perfmatters, a cache plugin cheaper than WP rocket, but I didn’t get the expected result. I recommend going for WP Rocket.
W3 Total Cache and Autoptimze are the best free plugin, and you can see their download and active install more than a few million. W3 Total Cache comes with a premium version that will help you to touch 100 scores.
LiteSpeed is the best free plugin, in my opinion, but you will not be able to use with its’ full features, when your hosting server is not OpenLiteSpeed. It does not work fully on Apache and Nginx. LiteSpeed is a completely free plugin, and it can give you up to 95 scores in google page speed insight in the free version itself.
7. Use of CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A powerful CDN can make your site faster in all conditions. When your site getting international traffic, it has a must-have in your site.
What is CDN?
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. Companies like BunnyCDN, MaxCDN and Cloudflare install server in different countries around the world. When you add any of the CDN in your site, your site will be loaded from the nearest location of the visitors location.
Example: You have purchase a hosting server located in United States. And your site visitor coming from Japan/Australia and visitor have to travel a long distance to USA to see you site and load time will increase.
But when you add CDN and CDN provider has a server in Japan/Australia, then visitor has to travel less distance to see your site.
Almost every hosting provider says, they provide free CDN. In case your, hosting provider does not provide free CDN, you can add Bunny CDN and here is the 14 days trial link.
The best CDN is Bunny CDN and MaxCDN. BunnyCDN is a lot cheaper than any other CDN that would not cost more than 1 dollar in a month but makes your site a lot faster than ever by using it in every condition.
Optimizing images for Better Speed
Image impacts a lot. If you don’t optimize images correctly, the page size will increase, and that effect is huge.
Bloggers generally use Jeg & Png image format. If you use this type of format of image, these affect speed also. Google recommended image format is Webp, and you can easily convert your image to in this format.
Before converting any image to Webp, it is mandatory to compress the image first. Image can be compressed in two ways, automatic and manually.
Automatic image compression can do with a wordpress plugin like Semsh. The first problem is that you have limited conversion in the free version. And this type of plugin creates an extra load on your site.
Hence I always optimize images through Tinypng and Tinyjpg websites, then upload them to my server.
Compression is not the only solution; you have to convert images into Webp version to remove complete image issues from your site. One website that helps a lot in converting to Webp is Shortpixel. It also helps to load Webp files from their CDN, and it makes the site faster.
There are also many free plugins you can take into consideration to convert into Webp. Just search in the wordpress plugin section.
9. Split Long-Form Content
Long content helps in better ranking. It is very much true. But long irrelevant content can’t do the same things. On the contrary, it increases page site with images and content.
Hence, always try to create relevant content and don’t make your content in a spam content.
10. Enable Gzip Compression
Gzip is an advanced server-side compression. It compresses sites HTML, CSS and JS file lossless. Gzip makes a website faster in comparison to a non Gzip compress site.
To enable Gzip compression, you have to buy a premium plugin like WP Rocket or Perfmatters to your .htaccess file. Yes! You can add this code manually, but it may break your site.
When you are using wordpress, there comes many plugins to enable this. But more plugin means more resource and vulnerable.
If your using Vultr self manages to host then, you can add a simple code to enable GZIP on the Nginx file. But Gzip compression does not work on images file.
11. Others Way to Increase WordPress Website Speed
Null wordpress theme and plugin, you will find everywhere on the internet. These theme and plugin file comes with some additional file by which it cracks. And this type of file reduces site speed. There has a big chance of your site get hacked when it grows at a level.
GPL license theme and plugin is the same things that company provide, and few websites sell those theme and plugin.
Have you ever think before buying any of these types of files? Why does a company create a GPL license for their product? If they provide, have you get the same performance? Ignore this type of site, and files always use genuine themes and plugins from the source.
Database lefts an impact on site speed. But How? We create many posts, update, and delete a few of them in a certain time. All these works store in the database, and we need to clean them in a certain time interval.
But How can I do the cleaning? LiteSpeed cache plugin has an option to manage the database, but you can use WP-Optimize plugin in consideration.