How to Speed Up a WordPress Website
Pick a Suitable Hosting Plan For Your WordPress Website
Web hosting providers and plans highly influence site speed. Therefore, identifying your website’s needs is essential to choosing the right web hosting.
Some factors to consider when choosing a web hosting provider to upload or migrate a website are:
- Fast web server – influences the loading speed for all websites using the hosting provider. For example, Instead of creating a new request every time, LiteSpeed stores compressed cache files, optimizing your WordPress page speed.
- Include WordPress features – help specifically speed up WordPress websites. For instance,
- Reliable customer support – ensures that your web hosting won’t slow down your site. In addition, responsive customer support is essential to fix any issues right away, including downtime or slow loading time.
Once you’ve chosen a hosting provider, it’s time to select the most suitable plan for your WordPress site. In general, hosting providers offer a variety of hosting types for WordPress:
- Shared hosting. An entry-level type of hosting that supports multiple websites on the same server, sharing its resources.
- Cloud hosting. A premium type of hosting that offers dedicated resources from a network of multiple servers. It’s as simple to use as shared hosting.
- Virtual private server (VPS) hosting. A type of hosting that gives users root access and dedicated resources. It requires some technical expertise to set up and maintain.
- WordPress hosting. A type of shared hosting specifically designed for WordPress performance optimization and security.
Consider the amount of content you want to upload and your anticipated traffic in advance to get the best WordPress site performance. Ideally, the plan should have enough resources for daily use and leave a little headroom for unexpected high traffic spikes and upgrades.
While it’s only natural to want to save money when you can, hosting should be a top priority in your budget. It’s a fundamental investment that can help boost your site’s performance in general.
Choose the Closest Server Location
The location of your server determines how fast it can transfer and receive requests to load your website. The further the physical distance between you and the server, the longer it will take to receive and process a request. Choosing the right server location can reduce latency.
High latency slows down the website, which worsens the overall user experience. Websites with heavy content often have high latency, such as those with many images, animations, and videos.
Choose the server location closest to your target audience when signing up for a hosting plan.
Hostinger has 10 data centers in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Contact your hosting provider if you already own a website and would like to change your server location.
Use a Content Delivery Network
A CDN is a network of geographically distributed servers that work together to speed up the process of delivering websites to users’ browsers.
It’s the perfect solution for a global WordPress site with target audiences located in different locations. A CDN shortens the distance between the user and the server, significantly reducing latency and increasing your WordPress page speed.
A CDN works by saving copies of a website’s static content in the cache. When a user visits the website, the server closest to them will load the content, reducing the number of external HTTP requests.
WordPress works well with various CDN options. Some hosting providers offer CDN bundles with their plans.
Install a WordPress Caching Plugin
When making changes to your WordPress website, your content might not update automatically on the front-end. Users will often need to clear the cache to show the updates. However, web caching speeds up WordPress websites.
Therefore, WordPress caching plugins can help manage your cache better. The right tool and configurations can even significantly boost your site’s performance. One of the most popular WordPress caching plugins is LiteSpeed Cache.
Unlike other caching plugins, LiteSpeed directly integrates with the web server. It remembers entries and analyzes dependencies for more intelligent cache management.
In addition, LiteSpeed also offers object cache (LSMCD). It is a feature that improves website response time by up to 10% and greatly reduces the time it takes to retrieve query results.
To install LiteSpeed using ellohost, follow these steps:
- Click Overview under the WordPress section.
- Toggle the button next to LiteSpeed to the right.
- Lastly, enable Object cache for even better results.
Choose an Optimized WordPress Theme
The WordPress theme you use can influence your website’s speed. Choosing a well-optimized theme to speed up your WordPress site is essential.
Look out for the following criteria to choose a fast WordPress theme:
- Optimized code
- Lightweight
- Browser compatibility
- Mobile responsiveness
- AMP-ready
One WordPress theme that utilizes all these criteria is the Astra theme. It is built from the ground up to be lightning fast and easy to use while delivering the features and aesthetics we look for in a theme.
Use WordPress staging to test your theme speed. With WordPress staging, try out different themes before choosing one for your live website.
Optimize Images
Images are vital for a website’s aesthetics. They’re one of the best ways to attract attention, show off a product, or evoke a particular emotion.
However, large images can significantly contribute to a page’s size, slowing down the loading time. In fact, images made up around 45% of an average page’s total size.
Here are some tips to optimize images for WordPress sites:
- Make sure the file size is 500 KB or less. Before uploading any image, check its file size. In general, images larger than 500 KB load noticeably slower. Use a tool like TinyPNG to compress images.
- Use the recommended file format. Different image formats use different file compression methods. As a result, some file formats are more suitable for specific uses than others.
- Lazy load images. When WordPress lazy loading is enabled, images on a page will load on demand. This method improves site speed because the website doesn’t have to load all the images simultaneously and only when the user scrolls down to view them.
We recommend installing a WordPress plugin for speed optimization like WP Smush for a quick and straightforward image solution. WP Smush lets you compress and resize images in your WordPress media library in bulk and features lazy loading.
Uninstall Deactivated Plugins
A WordPress plugin helps extend the functionality of your site’s features and functionality. However, some plugins can be resource-intensive, taking a toll on the performance.
Deactivating a plugin is not enough because it’s still attached to your site. A WordPress plugin optimization trick is to delete unused plugins from your dashboard completely.
Fortunately, removing most plugins is simple. From your dashboard, go to Plugins, locate the deactivated plugin, and select Remove.
Inactive plugins may leave some leftover database queries and WordPress configuration, requiring extra steps to remove them completely. This situation is common with security or caching plugins.
Before you remove a deactivated plugin, check the plugin’s official documentation that covers how to uninstall it properly.
Use the Latest PHP Version
PHP is a scripting language that lets developers create dynamic, interactive websites. According to W3Techs, 78.4% of all websites use PHP with an identifiable server scripting language. The WordPress CMS and all websites built on it are written in PHP.
PHP has gone through constant updates since its first release, like any other software. Each new version of PHP introduces performance and security enhancements.
One key new feature of PHP 8.0 is the just-in-time (JIT) compilation. In simple terms, JIT lets PHP 8.0 compile a program into machine code immediately before execution. With tracing JIT compilation enabled, PHP 8.0 performance on WordPress is even faster.
Currently, WordPress supports PHP 7.3 or higher. Unfortunately, 32.38% of WordPress websites are still using a version of PHP that WordPress no longer supports.
If you’re still using an old version of PHP, you will be missing out on new features, performance improvements, and security patches. In addition to increasing your WordPress site’s speed, updating PHP will also ensure its overall security.
Update WordPress Core, Plugins, and Themes Regularly
By updating your WordPress site, you will ensure that your website always has the latest performance and security improvements.
WordPress attracts hackers who constantly look for security vulnerabilities as an open-source platform. As a result, keeping WordPress up-to-date is all the more critical.
Luckily, since WordPress 5.5, auto-updates for WordPress core, plugins, and themes can easily be enabled straight from the dashboard. That said, you still have the option to update them manually.
Update WordPress Core:
- Enable auto-updates for minor upgrades only for WordPress core, which we recommend for most users.
- If you want to enable major auto-updates, click Enable automatic updates for all new versions of WordPress.
Update WordPress Plugins:
- To update a plugin, log in to the dashboard and go to Plugins → Installed Plugins. Find the plugin you wish to update and select Update now.
- Alternatively, you can choose Enable auto-updates from the Automatic Updates column.
Update WordPress Themes:
- To update a theme, go to Appearance → Themes and click the theme you want to update. To manually update the theme, select Update now.
- Alternatively, you can also select Enable auto-updates.