Thanks to its wide range of options, WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for creating websites. However, to ensure that your website runs quickly and efficiently, it is important to optimize it. A slow website negatively affects the position it will occupy in search engine results, visits, sales volume, etc. It is recommended that the loading speed of the website does not exceed 2 seconds, which is quite difficult to do for a WordPress website with many plugins. You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to find out the current state of your website’s performance
In this article, we’ll look at some ways to optimize your WordPress website to improve its speed and performance.
Choose a suitable hosting
Website speed optimization starts with choosing the right hosting. Cheap and low-quality hosting can negatively affect website performance, don’t go wrong if you choose one of these hosting providers that we have personally used and are satisfied with: SiteGround, Cloudways, WP Engine. You can read more about the possible types of hosting here.
Use caching plugins
Caching plugins are one of the most effective ways to improve WordPress website speed. Without these plugins, every time someone visits your website, content is generated dynamically, many requests are made to the database, etc. These plugins create a static version of the page and reduce the steps required to generate the page,
this results in faster load times and reduced server load. We recommend one of these plugins WP Rocket or Cache enabler.
Plugin optimization
Many WordPress website owners install a lot of plugins to increase website functionality. However, too many of them or the wrong choice can reduce the performance of the page. It is recommended to use only reliable and good plugins, the easiest way to make sure is to evaluate the plugins on the official website of WordPress, according to criteria such as the number of users, rating and how long it has been updated. It is also recommended to periodically review installed plugins and remove unnecessary ones.
Optimization of assets and asset loading
Gzip compression
Gzip is a file compression technology that allows you to reduce the amount of data on a website, thus increasing the loading speed. Gzip works by compressing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Images, Fonts, and all other files before sending them to the user’s browser, where it decompresses and displays the compressed files to the user. Gzip is one of the easiest and most effective methods that can be used to improve the loading speed of a website. Many caching plugins like WP Rocket and Cache Enabler offer the option to simply use Gzip by changing the settings. This can also be done by manually editing the server configuration file, in case of Apache server it will be .htaccess and in case of Nginx it will be nginx.conf.
Image optimization
Large images can be one of the main reasons why a WordPress website is slow. To solve this, it is important to optimize the images. You can do this with one of the online tools or use image optimization plugins. Some tested image optimization plugins include Smush, Imagify, and EWWW Image Optimizer. With their help, you can automatically optimize existing website images.
In addition to image optimization, it is recommended to use more modern image formats such as WebP, which provide high image quality with a smaller file size compared to image formats such as JPG and PNG. Most modern browsers support WebP images, but older browsers may not display them. To get around this, the WordPress plugin WebP Express is available, it generates a WebP version of the image in addition to JPG and PNG images. Browsers that don’t support WebP will display PNG and JPG images, but browsers that do will display WebP versions of images.
Asset optimization
To improve the loading speed of the website, it is essential to optimize the assets, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Fonts. These files are minimized by removing redundant information. CSS and Javascript files are grouped and combined into a single file, reducing the number of requests to the server.
Asset loading optimization
The idea of loading optimization is based on loading the most important assets first, so that the elements of the section that the user sees in the browser are loaded as quickly as possible. and the other sections that the user has not reached are loaded sequentially. The main three ways to do this are lazy loading of images, removing unused css and slow loading of JavaScript.
Some of the best asset and asset loading optimization plugins are WP Rocket and Autoptimize. Autoptimize can do almost everything, but it doesn’t have the ability to remove unused css, so you’ll need an additional paid solution, CriticalCSS, to use it.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
If your homepage is visited by users from all over the world, then a great way to improve loading speed is to use a CDN, or Content Delivery Network. CDN stores homepage assets (Images, Javascript, CSS, etc.) on servers located around the world. When a visitor arrives at your homepage, the browser will receive data from the nearest server, potentially reducing load times. Some good WordPress CDN solutions are CDN Enabler and Cloudflare.
Main conclusions
WordPress optimization is an essential process to ensure fast and efficient website operation. The main steps are choosing the right hosting, caching plugins, removing unnecessary plugins, Gzip compression, optimizing Images, Assets and their loading and CDN, if you go through all the steps, I guarantee that your website will be much faster. Most of these steps can be performed by the WP Rocket optimization plugin.
If you need help with home page optimization, feel free to contact us.
