We all know speed is crucial on the web. The faster your websites load, the more time people are willing to spend on it. It’s a human nature, so there’s no argueing with this. So, how to speed up WordPress sites, possibly without paying a fortune for a hosting account?
You’ll find tips in this post about why speed is important, as well as actionable steps you can (and should) take to improve it. Don’t forget: the more time visitors spend on your sites, the higher your opportunity to earn or spread the word. It’s that simple.
Table of contents
Since this post is bound to be really long, here’s a little help for you to be able to find relevant information easier.
Why it is important to speed up WordPress sites
By default, WordPress is relatively slow. It’s not that it’s bad or anything, but it’s a dynamic system. This means every page you see on WordPress is dynamically created right in front of your eyes fom the database. This takes some time, of course, compared to static websites built on pure HTML. It is what gives WordPress its broad usability.
Different studies, both on- and offline, show that in the period from 2000 to 2020, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to mere 7 seconds.
What does this mean for you and me as website owners?
Basically, you and I have very little time to show users our content and more importantly, to convince them to stay on your website and browse on. Which is the base of everything we do online, really, since without visitors we might as well be doing something else.
A slow website always means that users will potentially (and probably) leave your website before it even loads in its entirety. It is absolutely mandatory to speed up WordPress sites to the max extent possible.
According to a StrangeLoop case study that involved Amazon, Google, and other larger sites, a short 1 second delay in page load time can lead to as much as 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. There you have it.
If you prefer to hear it in dollars: supposed your site brings in 100,000$/day, this tiny little second can mean you’re loosing over 2.5 million dollars yearly. Unfortunately, neither your nor mine sites bring in that kind of money, but you get the point. Even if you’re only making 100$ per day, there’s still over 2,500$ lost per year. Which is a shame to throw away, as far as I’m concerned.
So let’s do our best to make visitors’ experience as enjoyable and fast as possible.
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How to check the speed of your website
and how to evaluate it?
Many people, newbies before all, believe that theit website seem slow on their computer only. Because of their sh**y internet connection, they say. And they could not be more wrong.
All modern browsers store just about every website you visit in a secret place called browser cache. This all happens localy, so these cached files are actually stored on your computer. And this is where your browser reads them from, so thinking your internet connection is to blame is very very bad. If your website seems slow, it is slow. Period.
Additionally, speed of your browsing can depend on the visitor’s location, but that’s mostly out of your hands.
There’s a number of websites that give you information about your website speed. Most notably, you should use three.
Pingdom
Pingdom is a free online tool that gives you some insights about how your website responds to the requests on the web. They also offer paid premium accounts, which – amongst ather things – remove the testing limits, but it’s more than enough for the basic overview.
The rule of thumb is that a good website loads in under 2 seconds.
But the faster you can make it, the better – a millisecond here and there could easily bring you another half a second improvement, which, as we already agreed, is great.
GTMetrix
Similarly, GTMetrix is another free website where you can test your website. It’s a bit less important, maybe, because the algorhytms they use are more focused on their own hosting, but still it’s more than capable of giving you valuable insights.
Additionally to Pingdom you get many different data which you can use for work or simply ignore, whatever you wish.
Pagespeed Insights
Delivered by Google, this is arguably the most important test page. It focuses on website’s mobile experience, so it’s very valuable these days. Moreover, it’s based on Google’s algorhytms and the way this test sees your website is more or less the way Google itself will se it.
Whichever of the three you prefer, remember they’re not all-mighty. Use them as-is, before all, they should serve you to check your progress as you optimize your websites. Do not believe every figure they give you as if it was 100% true, after all, they’re all just web services also. Still, doing your best to speed up WordPress websites and get the best possible results with these is really a no-brainer.
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What is it that slows down your WordPress sites?
Every testing software you will us will give you a set of recommendations that you can use to improve your site’s speed. These range from basic reports to overly detailed ones, but the main areas usually are:
- Hosting: your hosting is one of the most important things that affects the speed of the website. Most of us use shared hosting, meaning we’ve signed up for a plan where the provider gives us some space on his servers to put our sites on. There’s nothing bad about this concept, but as with everything there are differences here, too. Some hosts are not optimised for WordPress, simply. And this can mean a big difference in the way WordPress system behaves.
- WordPress configuration: one of the most important things is to enable caching on every site you own. If you don’t, WordPress will always serve full pages, which can bring your virtual server on its knees, possibly even crashing your website completely.
- Images: these days, photographs from smart phones can easily grow to a few MB of size. Which is no problem for the phone, but it is a problem for your website. Serving a page that contains a few images this big can be a real pain, and we strongly recommend you take a good look at this problem. Images can be resized and optimized before uploading, using a graphics software like Photoshop, or after uploading, using specific plugins. In any case, you can bring your 5MB file down to mere 300kB easily, and you really should do it.
- Bad plugins: poorly coded plugins or plugins that request too much from the server can significantly slow down your website.
- External scripts: if your website uses a lot of scripts that are hosted elsewhere on the web, then you are bound to have speeed problems. Each call of the script goes and fetches it from another continent, and voila. It takes time.
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So how to speed up your WordPress sites?
There are a number of things you can do to shorten the time needed for your WordPress site to load faster. Here are just a few.
- Hosting: get a good hosting. Now, I know this is easy to say and sometimes harder to do. Because, you know, quality hosting will cost you a bit more. But believe me, the difference you’ll pay for a good hosting really means almost nothing compared to what you’ll be able to gain in terms of more traffic and higher conversion rates on your website. As far as my experience goes, I’ve had great results with Namecheap, for instance, especially the Managed WordPress Hosting.
- WordPress configuration: one of the most important things is to enable caching on every site you own. If you don’t, WordPress will always serve full pages, which can bring your website server on its knees, possibly even crashing your website completely from time to time. Again, there are many options. So far, I’ve been able to get the best results by using LiteSpeed server hosting and using the LiteSpeed Cache. This is connected with the above option of course, and does not work on other servers. In such case, caching plugins like WP SUper Cache or W3 Total Cache are mandatory. You can expect even more from plugins like Viper Cache, but they’ll cost you a few bucks. Still, it’s worth every penny.
- Premium themes: there are many free WordPress themes online, and many are really good and suitable for lots of things. But they’re free for a reson usually, and this shows in the code optimization first. To get the best results, don’t be afraid to invest some dollars into a premium theme like Divi that includes speed optimizations and have a huge user community.
- Images: take good care about your image sizes. Do not upload images straight from your phone, as they can be very big. In principle, images should be below 200kB in order to be acceptable. You can use free optimization plugins, and better – you can start using the “next-gen” formats such as .webp. Since this format is not supported on all browsers, plus you won’t be able to do it by hand, use a plugin like EWWW Image Optimizer. It can do it for you, and your site will start loading .webp images instead of .jpg and .png that you’ve uploaded. It can also optimize images by recompressing them and changing dimensions to whatever you set as maximum.
- Bad plugins: get rid of the plugins that cause you problems. Use only the essential plugins that you are really using, or use premium plugins. Again, they’ll cost something, but you will gain a lot.
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