How to Speed up Your WordPress Website

The first thing you need to do is get your WordPress updated…

It’s quite obvious but I’m stressing it in case some foolish person! (read Gandalf style) does not yet have a regular WordPress update process. Don’t let this go to waste. As soon as a WordPress update is available (remember that it warns you with a yellow sign when you log in as a manager), take it out.

Not only should you always have your WordPress updated, but also the Plugins you are using. Remember that Plugins are also updated.

Simply look at your Plugin section and you will see a number indicating which Plugins are out of date. Or if you go to the ‘Plugins’ section, you will see the Plugins for which there is a new update marked in red.

The blog’s load time is one of the most important factors in ranking from an SEO perspective and also a fast loading blog provides a better user experience. When it comes to the WordPress website, there are many things that will help us improve the loading time of our website. Starting with selecting a good web host, using the right caching mechanism, using a correctly coded theme, and many other settings can be made from our end to speed up a WordPress blog.

Here I’ll share some of those tips that will help any WordPress blog to improve loading time, and after applying these tips, your WordPress blog will load much faster. Before implementing any of these tips, I recommend that you review your WordPress blog’s current load time. There are many tools online, and my favorites are GTmetrix, tools.pingdom, and many more. So, once you’ve tested your WordPress site’s load time, it’s time to make changes and see the noticeable difference.

All other settings in this list will be on the setting of your existing site.

But despite all those adjustments, you can’t avoid this fact:

Your site will still be as fast as the engine that powers it. You can make your site faster with the following tips, but you can’t make it faster without quality hosting that works below it.

So what does performance-oriented hosting do?

First of all, you definitely want a host that offers PHP 7+. PHP 7 offers massive performance improvements over previous versions of PHP 5 that many hosts are still running.

A managed quality WordPress host should offer PHP 7, as well as a lot of other performance settings to help your WordPress site load faster, such as server level caching and more.

At the end of the budget, SiteGround and InMotion Hosting offer fast loading managed WordPress plans. And as your site grows, Kinsta and WP Engine offer quality solutions.

Any of the above hosting companies should be able to run Elementor, but if you choose another option, these are the specifications you should look for to maximize Elementor’s performance:

  • PHP 7+
  • MySQL 5.6+
  • 64MB WordPress memory minimum. Ideally 128MB +
  • Be sure to check out the complete list of hosting plans on SoftwareFinder

According to the HTTP file, images comprise approximately 50% of the file size of an average page. Because images contribute greatly to the file size of your page, you can get similar performance improvements simply by optimizing your images.

There are two main parts to optimizing the images you use on your WordPress site.

First, there are the actual dimensions of the image. If your theme only displays images up to 800 px wide (a fairly normal value), it doesn’t make any sense to load 3,000 px more images on your site (excluding images of heroes or photography sites and the like). Even on retinal screens, that’s just a waste of space!

So, step #1 is to resize the actual dimensions of the images on your site to the maximum width that fits your theme.

The next part of the puzzle is compression. Compression takes your already resized images and reduces them further. There are two main types of compression:

Lossy – large file size reductions, but also some loss of quality.
Non-loss – smaller file size reductions, but also loss of quality.
Depending on the importance of the image quality for your content, you can choose between the two methods of compression. Most sites can safely use lossy compression.

To automatically resize and compress the images you upload to your WordPress site, you have several quality plug-in options:

ShortPixel – bills you based on the number of images you optimize. There are no size restrictions. Free up to 100 images per month.
Imagify – bills you based on the amount of MB you optimize. No restrictions on the number of images. Free up to 25MB per month.
Spectacular image compression and optimization – 100% free, but only for lossless compression. The free version also has a 1MB file size limit.

Use the Disabler add-on to disable unwanted things

Publishing reviews (whenever you save a draft on your WP board, it consumes more load on your WP databases) can degrade the load time of your WP site. Use the disabling plugin to disable later revisions OR you can manually disable publishing revisions on your WP site Go to wp-config.php, paste the following code

Use WP Database Manager

As I said earlier in the publication, your site’s load time is greatly affected by your databases. You must have control over your databases to optimize properly, repair whenever possible to speed up your WP sites. The WP-DB Manager add-on will allow you to optimize the database, repair the database, backup the database, restore the database, delete the backup databases, delete/empty the tables and execute selected queries.

I recommend that you use this add-on once every 15 days on a busy WordPress blog, and it will help you optimize your database. My favorite part of this add-on is (Delete/delete database tables); this will be very useful.

Last but not least, use fewer add-ons

No matter how much you like an add-on, don’t use it unless it’s EXTREMELY useful to your readers, not you! Try using custom code instead of the add-on. For example, to add buttons for sharing on social networks, you can use custom code instead of an add-on like Digg-Digg.

You can use the P3 add-on performance profiler plug-in to check the loading time of your add-on. Add-ons that take a long time to load can be replaced with a similar add-on. When I ran the test last time, I found that the Jetpack add-on adds too much time to the loading time of my WordPress blog. I disabled some Jetpack modules and it improved the speed of my WordPress website significantly.

Now, once you have implemented WordPress previously Acceleration Tips Blog, run your site’s load speed test again and compare it to the previous load time. If you see a significant drop in your blog’s load time, share this guide on Facebook & Google plus.

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