How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site and Improve Your Google Ranking – 2022 Guide

Speed and efficiency are essential in the digital space, and the failure to Speed Up Your WordPress Site can have adverse consequences. Running a slow-loading website will throttle traffic to your site, causing a bottleneck, leading to a drastically reduced bottom line. This is why you need to be proactive in addressing such issues to decrease loading times in WordPress; below are a few tips to help you achieve better results.

WordPress Site Speed

WordPress, the powerful, customizable content creation tool, has been a revelation to millions of content creators worldwide, with over a 75millions websites to date. Customizable options such as plugins, themes, and various media tools tend to slow things down. Fortunately, there are ways to help improve your site speed enabling site visitors to enjoy your page’s whole intended experience.

Why Is Site Speed Important?

Consumers expect web pages to load fast. And 40% of web users reported that they would stop visiting a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. This is why it is essential to have a fast loading WordPress site. Failure to do so will result in lost earnings. To make matters worse, since 2018, Google has included page speeds in SEO rankings; this means potential visitors will have difficulty finding your WordPress site. With your SEO ranking negatively affected, your site will suffer certain death. So it’s time to Speed Up Your WordPress Site.

To Speed Up Your WordPress Site Is Even More Important for Mobile

Google prioritizes faster mobile sites, and this is very important because one in five Americans consider themselves as ‘mobile-only internet users. If you do not optimize your site for mobile usage, you would have deprived your site of one-fifth of web browsers. So If you’re concerned about your mobile site’s loading times are not up to standard, it is worth your time to look into using modern WordPress themes.

How Fast Should a Site Load?

So, you might be asking yourself just how fast my site should be loading? The recognized best practice is to keep your loading times around the three seconds mark or less. Any longer than that, the probability of a user leaving goes up. You can for example use the power of MonsterInsights Site Speed Report to test your website.

How To Decrease Page Loading Times and To Speed Up Your WordPress Site?

Now that you understand the importance of cutting the loading times of your WordPress site, here are a variety of simple tactics you can use:

1- Run a Site Speed Diagnosis

Identifying how fast your website loads should be the next step towards improving site efficiency. Tracking site speed is recommended if you add a plugin or make some other changes to your site and want to see how those changes affect loading times.

To evaluate loading times, consider using a WPEngine Speed Tool. After you insert the URL of your site, you will be emailed a custom overview of how quickly your site loads and detailed tips to speed it up.

2- Delete Unused Plugins and Themes

Constantly keeping your WordPress plugins and themes up to date is essential, but you should permanently remove unused plugins to maintain a fast site. New plugins and themes present security vulnerabilities; they may also undermine the efficiency of the WordPress platform.

To uninstall the unused plugin, you will need to deactivate it first. Then you can go to the list of disabled plugins and remove the plugins you no longer want

3- Clean Up Your Media Library

It is normal to eventually have pictures that are no longer used on your site. It would help if you considered eliminating unused media to free up space.

To delete unused media automatically, you can use a plugin such as Media Cleaner.

4- Clean Up Your Database To Speed Up Your WordPress Site

Left unchecked, your WordPress database can accumulate unnecessary junk. This needless clutter will slow down your site. With frequent clean-ups, you can reduce the size of your database for faster loading.

If you are technically gifted, you can clean up your database manually using phpMyAdmin.

If you’re not technically gifted, downloading a plugin to accomplish this mission is a better way to go. WP-Sweep and Advanced Database Cleaner are both safe bets to broom through the database and get rid of old revisions, spam messages, MySQL requests, and more.

5- Remove Render-Blocking Javascript and CSS

The critical function of JavaScript is to perform complex operations on a website page. Unfortunately, these features can slow downloading speeds. They do not need to be loaded before your site’s content, and styles are fully loaded. And using plugins such as WP Critical CSS can delay this JavaScript, making your site load quicker.

6- Minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

CSS, HTML, and other source code files will grow over time, causing your site to slow down to a crawl. This can be remedied by minimizing the code to give your site added speed and efficiency. By minimizing, the backend of your site into a lean and efficient site, the speed gains will be significant. This strategy works by reducing the file size of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files and by removing redundant characters such as spaces, line breaks, and comments. This should result in a reduction in data transfer, which should allow your files to run faster and your web pages to load faster.

It is possible to minimize code with a range of plugins, such as Autoptimize, a popular free plugin.

7- Optimize Images

Images are vital to keeping a site user interested. Although your site can have a lot of lovely imagery, it’s a wise option to optimize these photos for quick page load times. There are many ways you can optimize your files, including compressing images, inserting old text and titles, and creating a sitemap file.

8- Lazy-Load Long Pages

Lazy loading is a huge time-saver for one-page sites and sites with a long home page. it refers to the process of loading elements lower down on your page only when the visitor scrolls down to see them. This allows your site to start rendering faster by not loading all of your long page’s content at once. BJ Lazy Load is a popular plugin for this purpose.

9- Limit Comments Per Page

While it’s great to have so many people read your blog posts, many comments can slow down page load time. It’s a good idea to divide the comment section into pages to reduce the time it takes to load.

10- Minimize Redirects to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

Although redirects have their uses, unnecessary redirects such as 301 redirects and redirect chains can cause significant delays. It’s best if you keep your server’s additional information requests to a minimum.

11- Minimize Post-Revision Revisions

Post revisions keep track of every content change you make indefinitely, which can slow down your site. You can choose to limit the number of revisions per post to speed up your site.

Use an FTP client to open the wp-config.php file and add this line of code to limit the number of post revisions:

define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 );

In this example, 4 means there will be four revisions created per post.

12- Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Pingbacks and trackbacks may not be familiar to you, but they are considered a legacy feature by some. Even so, it’s still a good idea to turn them off since they can affect page speed.

Go to Settings -> Discussion and uncheck “Allow link notifications from other blogs…” and this will disable the pingbacks and trackbacks.

13- Run the Latest Version of PHP

Running the latest version of PHP will increase the speed of your site considerably. To determine if your site is ready to switch to the newest PHP environment, try using WP Engine’s PHP Compatibility Checker plugin.

14- Choose a Fast, Lightweight Theme

If you didn’t know, not all WordPress themes are created equal, with some written better than others. If your site takes too long to load, it’s pointless to have a beautiful UI template.

Rather than going for a feature-rich theme (which requires a ton of code to be loaded any time anyone visits your site), go for a minimalist approach and use a theme that includes the bare essentials.

15- Use a CDN

The content you deliver should be lightning-fast regardless of where the user is located. However, this is not always possible. When it comes to content delivery, distance can cause delays, which is where a content delivery network (CDN) comes in handy.

With a CDN, your site uses a server that is closest to your visitors, thus reducing page load times. Depending on their location, users will receive static content and files from the data center. Since the static content is already ready to go, instead of demanding a large amount of HTTP at once, this will help minimize additional HTTP requests.

16- Leverage Browser Caching

With your web server set up with HTTP headers to determine a cache expiration period, it also sets up browser directives for how long the web page should be cached in the visitor’s browser. This instructs your visitor’s browser to import your website’s elements (such as CSS, JavaScript, and images) from their local disk rather than from the internet. Since the browser can make fewer network connections, as a result, the web page will load faster for them.

It’s also essential to have an expiration date in your HTTP headers so that the browser knows when to fetch resources from the network as if they were fresh rather than from their local computer.

17- Move to a Dedicated Server

It is worth considering hosting your site on a dedicated server if you anticipate high traffic. A shared server may be problematic when uptime is critical, resulting in slower loading times. Whilst shared hosting is inexpensive, sharing a server with others can cause CPU and RAM clogging. As with shared resources, if another site consumes all of the server’s bandwidth, you’ll have a slow-running site/server with the possibility of downtime.

It’s worth investing in a hosting package that gives you access to all of a single server’s services to ensure your site has the best possible uptime.

18- Consider Your Hosting Infrastructure

The WordPress hosting provider you choose can have a significant positive effect on site speed. It may be necessary to use managed hosting for a faster WordPress website, depending on the technology and resources allocated to your account.

Conclusion

Internet users now expect websites to load quickly and seamlessly. As technological advancements improve, there are more options available to help web administrators to improve the overall browsing experience on their sites. We hope the above tips will speed up your WordPress site, resulting in more site visitors and increased revenue. 

So for more WordPress, free step-by-step tutorials visit our dedicated WordPress Tutorials section (You can find more tutorials like How To Fix The WordPress White Screen Of Death) and check our WordPress hosting providers guide if you are still looking for a host to start your blog.