10 Ways to Speed-up Your WordPress Site

10 Ways to Speed-up Your WordPress Site

Here are some top tips to help speed up your WordPress site, warning this process involves altering your theme and WordPress do not attempt this if your unclear on the workings of WordPress as you may damage your site in the process.

Anyway lets begin.

  1. Reduce your plugins

    You dont need a lot of plugins to make your site better they can be clunky and cause the speed to drop for your site, the solutions is to only pick plugins that are vital to your WordPress site and remove unnecessary plugins that you no longer use or need.

  2. Compress your images

    Always, always, always optimise your images before uploading to your WordPress site, there are several sites out there that compress your images online, Compress PNG or Compress JPG is an excellent tool for compressing your images or you can get a a plugin called WP-Smush which handles compressing images on your site and continues to compress any new images you upload.

  3. Resize your images

    Resize your images before uploading them to your WordPress site, if you intend to use an image to fill a 500px x 500px box then resize the image to 500px x 500px, as on several occasions we have spotted users uploading 3000px x 2000px images for a simple thumbnail, if you upload it at that size then your site will slow down, because it still needs to get that image.

  4. Compress your JS & CSS files

    Your CSS stylesheets and JS Scripts are a factor to the speed of your WordPress site but can also be its downfall. A lot of themes nowadays are compressing there stylesheets and script files to help improve the speed of your site. But older themes and some new themes come with there stylesheets uncompressed and can cause long load times for some sites. Compressing the CSS styles and JS files can be done via several caching plugins.

  5. Leverage browser caching

    Every time someone visit your site they cache it, meaning the browser takes a copy and stores it so that when you come back to the site later it loads quicker as it already has everything from the first visit.

    Browser caching is a set of rules in your .htaccess file that basically says for each of the file type cache for a length of time and then after an amount of time come back and get a fresh copy, by stating which file types have what caching time you decrease the time a page has to be refreshed and thus speed up the site load time.

  6. Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content

    This can be a bit temperamental at times, this basically means that you need to move some of your styles and scripts out of the header as this effects loadtime of the site, but be warned as some styles and scripts require to be in the header to set off other functions and scripts, I noticed that the llook of the site changed dramatically when I moved a style sheet into the footer, so its worth dfoing one by one then checking to make sure everything is good, last thing you want is to move them all to the footer and everything breaks.

  7. Check your theme

    When purchasing a theme its always best to pick a them thats responsive and fast, there are many themes that show off with fancy transitions and special effects but having too many special effects can slow the site down, as it has to load those special functions each time a user visits your page. Picking a simple and fast theme is always a good start. From a development point of view you can use Theme Check to check the theme for any bugs or problems.

  8. Define Memory to WordPress

    If you have done everything you can to speed up your WordPress site and its still running slowly then then the next thing you can do is define the memory usage in your WordPress wp-config.php file to do that you need to add the line

    Define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M');

    This tells WordPress how much memory it has to play with, refresh and it should be faster.

  9. Upgrade your hosting

    If your having issues with your site speed even when you’ve optimised the site to the best of it can be, then you can always talk to your hosting provider as most providers have upgradable packages for sites that have a lot of traffic and need more power to run.

  10. Page Speed Insights

    Google offer a terrific tool for helping you identify problems with your WordPress site, including what images need compressing, what style sheets and scripts need to be moved and other useful tips.

If you feel we’ve missed any vital tips then please let us know in the comments.