Do you want to speed up your WordPress website?
Yes, you have landed on the right page. People are looking for reliable ways to speed up a WordPress website easily. There are different ways to speed up WordPress websites — from complicated to easy ones.
Why Speed Up WordPress Website?
There could be many possible reasons anyone wants to speed up a WordPress-powered website. We have listed some of the most common reasons to speed up a WordPress website.
- Search Engines Love Fast Loading Sites: Search engines like Google and Bing love to have fast-loading websites. So if you want to perform better on SERP (search engine result pages), make sure your website loads fast.
- Fast Loading Site Reduces Bounce Rates: Various studies show that visitors bounce off if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load. To keep your visitors on your WordPress sites, ensure it’s loading fast.
- Fast Loading Page Results Better Conversions: For online stores, if a product page loads fast, there are possible chances of having better conversion rates. If you’re running an eCommerce store, make sure your product pages are loading fast.
How to Check A WordPress Website Loading Time?
First of all, you need to analyze the current loading time of your WordPress site. Just a reminder, page load speed depends on many factors, and it varies from page to page.
When we talk about measuring a website’s speed, we keep the homepage of a website as a benchmark. So we calculate the page loading time of a WordPress website to measure how fast it loads.
You can use the following tools to test your website loading speed.
As of now, you have the current loading time of your website. Now it’s time to utilize the listed ways to speed up a WordPress website.
List Of The 12+ Ways to Speed Up a WordPress Website In 2024
You can easily follow the ways listed below to increase your WordPress website speed.
1. Choose A Fast Website Hosting (Managed WordPress Hosting)
Web hosting plays a crucial role in the website loading speed of a WordPress website. Often, users get started with shared hosting, which offers unlimited space and bandwidth, domains, etc. The thing is, that increases your website loading speed. The shared hosting leads to delivering good loading time on-peak hours; however, sometimes it’s not that feasible.
We suggest getting started with a managed WordPress hosting provider like WPX Hosting, Kinsta, SiteGround, or WP Engine. All these offer reliable and fast WordPress hosting. If we have to pick one, we will go with WPX Hosting — it’s the world’s fastest WordPress hosting provider.
2. Responsive & Lightweight Theme
WordPress themes play an important role in your website loading speed. A WordPress theme comes with many dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, etc. You need to make sure that you use a lightweight theme on your WordPress site. You can use various responsive themes available such as — Astra Pro, GeneratePress, and so on. Also, if you’re using any WordPress page builder, we suggest getting started with reliable WordPress page builders only, such as Elementor Pro.
3. Compressing The Images
All websites have loads and loads of images, so we need to compress the size of these images. The more images a page, the more the page load time will be. Somehow if you manually optimize images for your WordPress, it’s going to take ages. So we suggest getting started with WordPress image compression like WP Smush, Optimal.
4. Used advanced Caching Mechanism
For advanced caching mechanisms, you can use various caching plugins. For our site, Kickass MasterMinds, we use the W3 Total Cache plugin. Yes, this plugin has been there for a while, and it’s a reliable caching plugin for WordPress. You can install the plugin on your website and then configure it easily.
5. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Your site can get visitors from all over the world and from different locations. The site loading speed will differ depending on the location of a visitor. This is where a CDN (content delivery network) comes into play. The thing is, CDN keeps a copy of your website in different places and data centers. The CDN will provide the result once a visitor tries to access your website from a particular location. You can try using CDN providers like Cloudflare.
6. Just Cleanup WordPress Database
This is one of the most crucial steps to speeding up a WordPress website. Yes, you need to delete the unwanted data from the database. Once you reduce the size of the database, it will help reduce the size of your WordPress website backup. Make sure to delete the spam comments, old drafts, and other useless things from the draft. Once you do all this cleanup, it will reduce your database’s size and the web files.
7. Uninstall/Deactivate Unwanted WordPress Plugins
If you’re somehow keeping some buggy and unwanted plugins on your WordPress website — it will add junk to your web files. What’s more, it will also increase the size of your backup. It is better to deactivate and uninstall the unused plugins. If you find a plugin is buggy and hindering website load time, you can look for its alternatives. Anyways, remember you need to uninstall and deactivate unwanted plugins on your site.
8. Disable the Trackbacks and Pingbacks
If you don’t know what Pingbacks and Trackbacks stand for, let us guide you. The thing is, Pingbacks and Trackbacks are the two core components that alert when your blog or page receives any link. If you’re keeping pingbacks and trackbacks, it will also put a load on your server resources. Make sure to disable the Pingbacks and Trackbacks. Navigate to WP-Admin >> Settings >> Discussion. You need to deselect the given option — Allow Link Notification for Other Blogs.
9. Clean-up Your Media Library
We all know, we use media files within our blog posts and pages. Over time, your media library has lots and lots of images and files. To add some more space, you need to remove the unused media. If you’re looking to remove the unused Media manually, you can make use of other plugins available. Else you can navigate Add Media>> Media Library and then easily attach and delete all those files that are not in use.
10. Lazy Load Long Pages
If you have a website with a long page or a single page website, you need to use lazy load. The Lazy load module mainly prevents the elements lower down right on your page from loading until the user scrolls down. If you enable the lazy load module on long pages of your WordPress website.
11. Reduce Redirects
For many website users, redirects have some use. However, some redirects like 301 and redirect chains can make things slow. It’s always recommended to reduce the number of additional info requests your servers take. Make sure you reduce the redirects on your WordPress website.
12. Limit External Scripts
External scripts are the code file which is used by your websites but doesn’t store on your web server. These are very common scripts with third-party analytics and plugins such as Crazy Egg and Google Analytics. There are so many WordPress themes that also depend on external scripts to load CSS files, Java Scripts, and many more. The external scripts are not always a bad thing. You need slightly a couple on the site to use the tool which you want.
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Conclusion:
So these are legit ways to speed up your WordPress website easily in 2024. You can implement all the ways listed above to make your website load fast. However, we recommend backing your WordPress website before making any of these changes.
Now over to you — what’s your WordPress website loading time? Feel free to share in the comments section below.
