Why speed up WordPress sites?

WordPress is a powerful CMS that has taken the world by storm, powering over 800 million websites—that’s more than 40% of the entire internet!

However, the very themes, plugins, and tools that enhance your site’s functionality (and help make WordPress so popular) can also slow down performance, leading to higher bounce rates, lower user retention, and poor search engine rankings.

Optimizing these elements is crucial when it comes to speeding up your WordPress site. Proper management of themes, images, plugins, and other content ensures a seamless user experience and better SEO.

It’s important to note that every content management system must load all related items, whether visible on the page or running in the background, before delivering the full experience to site visitors. Fast-loading speeds are essential here because slow pages frustrate visitors, leading them to leave your site before fully engaging with your content.

With that in mind, making sure your site loads quickly can significantly enhance visitor satisfaction and keep them on your site longer.

How to Speed Up WordPress Website

Use a CDN.

Another common cause of poor performance is real-world distance. Your pages will tend to load on devices that are farther away from your web server’s physical location. This specifically impacts international users and users in remote areas. Fortunately, you can lessen this effect with a Content Delivery Network, or CDN for short.

A CDN is a global collection of connected web servers. Each server stores a copy of your website’s JavaScript, CSS, and image files. When a user requests a page on your site, the server closest to the user sends these files to them. A CDN gives your website global reach and levels load speed for all visitors, near and far.

CDNs are easy to set up and manage on any WordPress site. Your hosting provider will likely offer a CDN service as part of your plan or as a paid integration, and your CDN takes care of all content delivery for you. Popular CDNs include Cloudflare and StackPath.

Install a WordPress caching plugin.

Often, WordPress performance issues can be chalked up to the way WordPress assembles web pages on the server side.

Every time a visitor requests a web page from a non-cached site, the PHP on your WordPress server has to retrieve all the relevant content from your WordPress database, assemble it into an HTML file, and send that file to the client. This method has its advantages, including saving server space and allowing for dynamic website content. But, it also takes more time and energy than sending a pre-written web page.

A caching plugin simplifies this entire process. It builds every HTML page on your site with PHP, then saves these full HTML pages which are sent to future visitors when requested. By skipping over the building process, your content reaches visitors more quickly.

As far as options go, we recommend WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache,WP Super Cache or SiteGround Optimizer. They are all popular and frequently updated.

The SiteGround Optimizer plugin, for instance, is completely free and comes packed with the most effective tools to optimize a WordPress site and significantly speed up its loading speed. Features include dynamic, file-based and object caching, image compression, frontend and environment optimizations, WebP optimizations, and more.

Reduce CSS and JavaScript file sizes.

CSS and JavaScript are fundamental to your site — they elevate your pages beyond walls of plain HTML. That said, these files need to be sent from your web server to a web browser every time a visitor loads a page. Therefore, the smaller you can make these files without affecting your site’s look and functionality, the faster your pages will load.

To do this, use a free WordPress plugin like Autoptimize that scans your CSS and JavaScript files, deletes unnecessary code (like spaces and comments), and shrinks down the files enough to load without lag.

For more details on how to optimize your JavaScript and CSS files, check out this great tutorial from Ahregs (which also gives some other solid recommendations for speeding up WordPress):

Optimize images.

Large images are another common culprit of slow WordPress websites. To further raise your site performance, reduce your image file sizes as much as possible without sacrificing quality. The goal is to save space but avoid making users squint to see your visuals.

You can compress image files with Photoshop or any other image editing software. You can also try a WordPress image optimization plugin like Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer .

Use a Lightweight Theme.

Like plugins, your active WordPress theme might be placing an unnecessary burden on your web server. Themes that are packed with high-quality images and effects might look cool, but they come at a cost. Fancy effects can require a lot of code, and many themes are programmed inefficiently, both of which inflate file sizes and slow your page performance.

Instead, pick a simple theme with only the necessary features for your pages. You can always add more effects later through plugins or custom CSS if you’d like. Our list of recommended WordPress themes is a great place to start your search.

Delete unused plugins.

Quality is better than quantity when it comes to WordPress plugins. Since each plugin is like a piece of mini-software on your website, too many running at once can negatively affect your site’s load times. Even if you’re not using a certain plugin, there’s a chance it’s doing unnecessary work in the background and consuming resources. It might be time to cut back.

Start by deactivating any plugins you’re certain you’ll never use again. Test your site after each deactivation, then delete these plugins after verifying that everything still works. Then, deactivate the plugins one-by-one to see which ones make a difference in speed. Consider finding lightweight alternatives to these plugins.

Use the latest version of PHP.

PHP is the scripting language that powers all WordPress websites. It’s a server-side language, meaning that its files are stored and executed on the web server that hosts your site. Like themes and plugins, PHP also releases occasional updates to run more efficiently, which in turn helps your pages load faster.

The latest stable version of PHP is PHP 7, released in 2015. PHP 7 is a major performance improvement over PHP 6, and there’s really no reason to not run your website on it. See our guide to PHP 7 in WordPress to learn how to check your site’s PHP version and update it manually.

You can also check your hosting site’s documentation or contact support to see which version of PHP you’re using. If it’s not PHP 7, ask your host to update your site’s version of PHP.