7 Tips to Make Your Wordpress Website Load Faster

If your WordPress website doesn’t load quickly, you are losing potential customers. Your website should be aiming to load in under 2.5 seconds.

How fast your website loads matters. Slow loading times cause your potential customers to leave or “bounce” from your website.

The probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. Source

Think about the last time you came across a page that took forever to load. You probably didn’t stick around to see it finish loading and quickly went on to the next result.

How to Test Your Website Speed

Now you might be curious to see how your website performs. There are a few great free tools to test your website speed to get an idea of where you’re at.

Page Speed Insights

My personal favorite is PageSpeed Insights from Google. Along with a score for your website’s page performance, it offers additional insight into other important metrics like accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO).

GTMetrix

GTmetrix is another popular and well-known tool. Although it uses the same technology as PageSpeed Insights under the hood, it will load your website in a real browser, where Page Speed Insights uses a simulated browser.

Pingdom

One other tool is Pingdom from SolarWinds. It will give you a performance grade, page size, load time, and number of requests. However, I don’t find this tool to be as useful as the previous tools.

Tips to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

Now that you have an idea of how fast your website is, here are 8 tips to improve your website’s performance.

1. Reduce the Number Of Plugins

Listen, I know plugins can make adding new features to your website a breeze (and don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic plugins out there), but how many of them do you actually need?

The easiest thing you can do right now is to reduce the number of plugins you’re using. Not only do they slow down your website, but they also increase the risk of malware and exploits on your website. The only thing worse than a slow website is a website that no longer works.

There’s also a good chance one of the plugins you previously installed can do exactly what you need. Trust me, you do not need 17 slider plugins.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Can I do what I need without this plugin?
• Do I already have an existing plugin that has the feature I’m looking for?

2. Optimize Your Images

This tip will likely give you the biggest performance increase but will require more conscious work.

According to the HTTP Archive, images take up nearly 46% of the average page weight for WordPress websites. Source

Images are usually the biggest culprit in slowing down your website. Of course, you want to show off the amazing work you do, and images are practically a requirement for a good website. So don’t go and delete all your images only to speed up your website!

There are two ways you can optimize your images, and they should be used together to achieve the maximum benefit:

Shrinking Image Dimensions

When you upload images from your camera or from stock photo sites, they can be massive.

Even if the image on your website looks small, it isn’t necessarily a small size. Let me explain.

Your browser is quite smart and will resize the image to fit the specified dimensions on your website. So if you upload an image with the dimensions of 1920x1080, and the actual spot for the image on your website is only 854x480, the browser will resize the image to fit the space available.

Now this doesn’t mean that shrinking your images before uploading has no benefit. Your web browser still has to download the larger image, and then resize it. Why not save some precious time and shrink your image size ahead of time?

As a general rule of thumb, try and make sure the image size fits as close to the size on the web page as possible.

Reduce Image File Size

Reducing the file size of images is a very effective way to speed up your website. The way you do this is through a process called compression, which comes in two flavors:

• Lossless: Keeps the original image quality, but only provides a smaller reduction in file size
• Lossy: Provides the largest reduction in file size, but sacrifices some image quality

To keep things simple, I’d recommend using lossy compression as the loss in picture quality is often barely noticeable to the human eye.

If you’re curious to learn how to start compressing your images, this article is a great resource.

Image File Formats

Some file formats are better at reducing file sizes than others. Typically when you take a picture, the format will be JPEG or PNG. But there are other formats that are optimized for the web. Currently a well supported format is WebP which can reduce file sizes by (stat here)

You can use a free online tool like Squoosh to create a WebP version of your image before uploading to the media gallery.

3. Wait to Load Images That Aren’t Visible Yet

When someone visits your website, you likely have images on your page that won’t be visible until they scroll down further. And although those images aren’t visible yet, the browser is still loading those images.

Why not just wait until the user is about to see those images before loading them? That’s where the concept of “lazy loading” comes in.

Basically, you say to the user’s browser: ”Hey, no need to download these images yet. Have some patience and wait until the user should see them. Cool?”

Talk about an easy win!

4. Choose a Good and Reputable Theme

Not all WordPress themes are created equal. Many themes may look visually appealing, but under the surface there is a ton of bloat.

Here are some quick things to consider when picking a theme:

• Check the reviews
• Make sure the theme gets regular updates
• Make sure the theme works well on mobile devices
• Avoid general-purpose themes with a long list of features

5. Choose a Reliable Web Host

This one is more important than you might think. Sure you might be tempted to go with the cheapest hosting you can find, because who doesn’t like saving money? But do you understand the real cost? Cheap hosting can be the main culprit of your slow website. Spend time researching different hosting providers, and look for companies that:

• Have great reviews
• Provide 99.99% uptime or greater
• Offer good customer support

6. Update PHP

PHP is the programming language that powers WordPress. If your web host allows it, make sure you are using at least the latest supported version.

Each release of PHP includes many new features and fixes aimed at performance improvements. It’s like a free performance boost! Why wouldn’t you take advantage of this easy win?

7. Update WordPress

Okay, you should be doing this as part of your website maintenance anyway. But if you aren’t already doing it because it protects your website, you should also be doing it for the free performance enhancements! With each update of WordPress comes many fixes that will improve the speed of WordPress. This is another easy win for your website!

Conclusion

Your website’s speed matters. If you take the time to implement these strategies, you can significantly speed up your WordPress website. This will lead to better user engagement, higher search engine rankings, and ultimately, increased conversions.