If your website takes more than a few seconds to load, chances are people will click away before they even see your content. A slow website can frustrate users and hurt your search engine rankings.
But the good news is, there are many things that you can do to optimise your WordPress website. So today, we’ll be taking a look at my go-to methods for increasing a website’s loading speed.
These are not steps, nor are they in any particular order. But I recommend doing all of these.
1 – Optimising Images
Most often, images you upload to your website will be large in both dimensions and file size. This is especially the case if you downloaded them from a stock image website or directly upload photos taken from a phone or camera.
You can compress your .jpeg or .png images using online tools like TinyPNG (and I often do this). But it’s best to use newer image formats like .webp or .avif. These are compressed image formats, so when you convert an image to one of these formats, it’ll have a much smaller file size making it much faster to load.
The easiest way to have this taken care of for you is to use an image optimisation plugin. There are many out there that get the job done. You can try searching or try one of these:
- Imagify – This will automatically convert all of your uploaded images to WebP or AVIF.
- Image Optimizer by Elementor – If you’re an advanced user who uses Elementor to build your WordPress pages, this plugin should have better compatibility.
2 – Enable Caching
Every time a WordPress page loads, it performs so many calculations behind the scenes to put together the building blocks that make up the HTML webpage.
For example, it goes through the database and builds your navigation menu, then goes through the database again and builds the page content like the title, text paragraphs and images. And if you have a sidebar it has to figure out what goes in that. It’s the same with every section of your page.
So, there are plugins that can cache these pages (store a copy of the page that has already been built for repeated use in the future) for your visitors.
- AccelerateWP – If you got your WordPress website from WPZee, AccelerateWP is already enabled and working for you. It’s a premium WordPress optimisation plugin working on the hosting level to improve your website’s loading speed.
- W3 Total Cache – If AccelerateWP is not an option for you, this is my next go-to plugin for page caching. I recommend going through the wizard that it provides to optimise your website and enable all the options that it recommends.
Important: It’s best not to touch any other options in W3 Total Cache unless you know what you’re doing as any wrong settings can easily break your website.
3 – Reduce Plugins
As mentioned in the previous section, WordPress performs loads of calculations behind the scenes every time a page loads. And each plugin you add can contribute to adding more calculations for it to do. So it’s best to remove anything that’s non-essential.
- Audit your plugins list and deactivate and delete anything that you don’t need.
- Keep your plugins up to date. I recommend enabling automatic updates for all of them.
This section might seem counterintuitive to other sections where we recommend plugins to install to speed up your website. But it’s essential to find a balance and also figure out which plugins actually take up precious loading time versus those which could help.
4 – Use a Lightweight Theme
This is a topic you might have to do a bit of research about the theme you use on your own. Some WordPress themes can be really heavy and slow to load. So it’s best to always use a theme that is known to load fast and also be SEO friendly.
- Astra, Blocksy and GeneratePress – These are just a few examples of good lightweight themes. There are many more that you should be able to find with a simple search.
- Botiga – A good lightweight WooCommerce (e-commerce) theme that I have come across recently.
5 – Optimise Your Database
Over time, your WordPress database will fill up with post revisions, spam comments and temporary data. Cleaning up this unnecessary data can significantly improve the loading speed of your website. You can again use plugins to achieve this.
- AccelerateWP – Again, as with caching, AccelerateWP can clean up your database and it’s included for free with WPZee‘s WordPress hosting.
- Advanced Database Cleaner – You can use this plugin to delete unwanted data from the database. It also has a schedule function that can automate this process.
As a bonus, Redis Object Cache can also improve your database performance as it’ll cache the frequently used database queries making your WordPress websites feel more responsive.
This is enabled by default on all WPZee hosted WordPress websites. But it should be possible to enable it on most hosts with a plugin like W3 Total Cache.
6 – Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN stores copies of images and other files like .css and .js files (don’t worry if you don’t know what those are) in multiple servers around the world so that they can be served from the server closest to your website visitor each time a page loads.
BunnyCDN is a popular service that many people use. And most well known CDN services will provide their own WordPress plugin for you to easily set them up on your website. If not, AccelerateWP provides the option to configure any CDN service on your WordPress website.
7 – Keep Your Hosting in Check
You can do all of these optimisations to try and speed up your website. But if your hosting is slow, your website will be too. Most hosting providers, even the well known ones (or especially the well known ones) use overloaded shared servers with too many accounts which will be too slow no matter how many optimisations you do.
At WPZee, our WordPress Hosting is built for WordPress with speed and security in mind. Alongside AccelerateWP and Redis Object Cache, we run on high-performance servers with NVMe storage and Gigabit networking designed for fast response times and reliability. That means you spend less time fighting with performance issues and more time growing your site.
Final Thoughts
Speeding up your WordPress website doesn’t have to be complicated and it shouldn’t mean breaking your website, or especially your wallet in the process.
Start with the basics. Make sure all the images you upload are optimised, turn on caching by running the W3 Total Cache wizard, clean your database and remove unwanted plugins. Those steps alone should have a noticeable difference. Pair that with a fast, reliable host and your website should immediately become responsive and fast loading for all visitors.
As a reminder, if you want to skip the trial-and-error, WPZee’s WordPress Hosting comes included with all the premium optimisation tools along with being on fast, high-performance servers.
