Want to make your WordPress website faster right now? Let’s do it!
So you run a WordPress website but are tired of it being too slow? Well, you are not alone. If your competitors have a faster website, it gives them an advantage in their search engine rankings. According to Google, having a faster website means better search engine optimization (SEO).
Now, to make your WordPress website faster, it is not always required to hire someone. Why? Because there is a lot you can do yourself. While it would still be a great idea to hire an expert, there is no harm in tinkering with things (with proper full-website backups in place, of course) if you are up for it. Below are a few suggestions you can try for yourself to make your WordPress website faster. This guide is ideal for both beginners and experts who have been managing WordPress for a long time. Let’s dive right in:
1. Fewer Plugins
This is an obvious one but something a lot of clients overlook. Regularly review all your installed plugins and remove any plugins you are not actively using. If you installed a plugin you needed only once, say, something like a database cleaner, or a one-time image optimization plugin, do not forget to remove it afterwards.
This is critical for the good health of your website. There is no rule of thumb for how many plugins you should have but our recommendation would be to keep it under 10.
2. Fewer Third-Party Scripts
This is an obvious one but something a lot of clients overlook. Regularly review all your installed plugins and remove any plugins you are not actively using. If you installed a plugin you needed only once, say, something like a database cleaner, or a one-time image optimization plugin, do not forget to remove it afterwards.
Another way would be to check if a widget or script allows ‘lazy loading’, which means it will load after the rest of the page has finished loading. This way, the impact on your website speed will be minimal.
3. Do Not Use More than One Analytics Script
There are tons of analytics tools out there such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Kissmetrics. It is easy to think that having multiple analytics tools installed might give you more accurate data. Now, this might give you more data to analyze your visitors and some tools may be more accurate than others, it will definitely impact your website page speed.
Ideally, avoid using more than one analytics script on your website. If you must test multiple, try to do it only temporarily, and once you have made a decision, remove unnecessary ones.
4. Keep your Website Secure and Block Bots
Keeping your website secure is critical because if it is not, bots and other automated tools are likely to attack your website. This will quickly use your server resources which should have been used for your potential clients and customers.
So install a good security plugin that is capable of blocking bots to avoid unnecessary load on your web hosting server. Wordfence is a great option and comes with a free plan too that should help you with this.
5. Use Smaller Images
One of the issues we see very frequently is clients using unoptimized images on their websites. It is important to make sure the image is smaller both in weight (kilobytes) as well as in dimensions (pixels).
Imagify and ShortPixel are two excellent plugins that you can use for automatically optimizing your images.
6. Use a Fast Theme
Using a fast, high-quality WordPress theme is crucial for a solid foundation of your website. If the theme itself is slow or contains tons of third-party scripts, improving your website page speed scores would be very hard. GeneratePress and Astra are super fast themes you can choose. We will be reviewing the fastest WordPress themes in depth in an upcoming blog. Bookmark our blog and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date.
7. Use Latest PHP version
Did you know, this simple change in your server settings and updating your PHP to the latest version can improve your website speed quite a lot. According to Kinsta’s PHP benchmarking tests, PHP 8.1 is 47 percent faster compared to PHP 8.0 which is a huge difference.
But it is important to note that upgrading PHP without proper testing can break your website and cause downtime. So make sure to either test on a Staging copy of your website or fully back up your website and upgrade at a time of minimum traffic.
Remember we said easy tips, weren’t these easy? There are tons of other factors too and advanced optimizations, such as optimized web hosting, updated PHP version, using properly configured CDN, and more. We will cover those in the upcoming articles. So bookmark our blog and Subscribe to our weekly newsletter in order to stay up to date and get the best tips delivered right to your inbox.
If you need help with advanced WordPress Speed Optimization, we would love to assist! Drop us a message here and let’s make your website fast like a rocket 🚀!
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