5 Quick Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

So in this article, I’m going to share some quick tips to help you speed up your WordPress site. Fast loading websites can help in many ways such as better SEO rankings, better user experience, increase in leads, and more.

How To Check Your Current Speed

There are many free online tools to check your website speed but I always like to use IsItWP. It will analyze how fast your website loads and will provide more details on how you can boost your page speeds.

Now that you know how to check your current website speed, let’s look into how we can make your page load even faster.

Use a Well Coded WordPress Theme

If you’re new to WordPress, then you’ll most likely use a pre-coded WordPress Theme. WordPress has a very large community with a wide range of free and premium themes that are ready to use.

To access the large catalogue of themes, in your WordPress admin panel, go to Appearance > Themes from the navigation bar on the left.

Then select the ‘Add New’ button and this will take you to the WordPress catalogue of themes available for you to use.

There are so many themes to choose from which can get a little overwhelming. However, it’s important to note that you don’t want to use a bloated theme with features you may not use.

Before choosing a theme, make a list of the features you need and ones you can live without to ensure your making the right decision.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

To understand how a Content Delivery Network works, it’s important to know how your website is being served to your visitors.

When setting up your WordPress site, you would have had to signup to a web host and upload all your files to their server.

Now depending on your web host, their servers could be anywhere in the world.

If your web host has their servers in the UK, your visitors from the UK will generally see faster loading times to your visitors from the US.

A CDN is a network of servers that are across the whole world. It will distribute your files such as images, javascript files, and other static assets to these servers. So when your visitors from the states visit your site, the CDN will serve up the files from the server that is closest to them, therefore, giving them better load times for your website.

There are many CDN companies to use all with different prices and benefits however we recommend Cloudflare and Bunny CDN.

Optimize Images for Speed

Using images on your website is a great way to improve the user experience. Researchers have also found that using images makes people 80% more likely to read your content. However, images that have not been optimized can have a detrimental effect on your website due to an increase in page load times.

Optimizing your images is done by essentially reducing the size of your image file without reducing the overall image quality and modifying the way your site loads the images.

Lucky for you, there’s a plugin for everything! A very popular plugin for this is Smush. However, we do recommend optimizing images before you even upload your image file onto your server.

You can optimize your image by reducing the image dimensions to something more suitable for your website. This alone can drastically reduce the image file size.

You can also use apps like Photoshop to save your image file which will be more suitable for your website by selecting ‘Save > Save for Web’.

Use a Cache Plugin

Caching is the process of storing copies of your site files in a cache so that they can be accessed faster and easier.

There are a lot of plugins available to do this process for you, however, we recommend WP Super Cache.

Minify JS and CSS files

Minification is the process of removing unnecessary data in your site files such as redundant code, comments, etc, and is a very popular way to optimize your site for faster load times. Minified files will still work exactly the same way, it just uses less code as the unnecessary characters in that file have been removed.

We recommend using Fast Velocity Minify plugin. This Plugin will combine your CSS and JavaScript files so your servers deal with fewer requests.

WordPress is an amazing platform and has a huge community with so many resources available online.

I’ve outlined some ways to enhance your WordPress site to increase your site loads speed and I hope you found some value in this.

Also, check out our What makes a good website? post for other ways to improve your website.