The loading speed of a website is what determines how high it will appear in search results. This is what the quality of the user experience will depend on. This is what will allow you to bypass your competitors. And yes, this is not the entire list of advantages. So, how can you achieve high speed if your site is based on WordPress? Let's find out right now.
8 Ways to Boost Website Speed on WordPress
In fact, there are no universal recommendations for a 100% increase in website speed – you can try even more than we describe below, and not find one that would boost this indicator by tens of times (since the problem may be in something non-trivial). However, before turning to developers for help for complete code refactoring, it makes sense to try less resource-intensive methods. So, what are these methods? Let's start moving from the most obvious to the least obvious one.
1. Consider choosing a quality hosting
The performance of WordPress websites is largely determined by the hosting you choose – in particular, budget-friendly, shared servers usually provide work for a large number of sites at once, and a sudden increase in user load on at least one of them can be detrimental to the rest. In this regard, it is worth considering cloud hosting for WordPress with automatic scaling and load balancing from the very beginning. It is also important to find out whether the servers offered to you have SSD drives, as well as understand how much RAM is provided (at least 1 GB), what version of PHP is supported (preferably – from 8.x), and what additional options are present (specifically, CDN, caching, etc.).
2. Update the engine, themes, and plugins in time
Old versions of WordPress, themes, and plugins can make your website slower. Moreover, this exposes it to the risk of hacking. Therefore, do not forget to update them regularly (on WordPress this must be done manually), delete unused ones, and also monitor PHP updates on the server.
3. Use lightweight themes
Regardless of whether you use a free or paid theme, it may have excessive functionality that slows down the website or built-in page builders that reduce the loading speed by default. For example, there are a number of fairly universal themes that, as has already been tested, will not cause performance problems. These include GeneratePress, Astra, and Neve (please note that these are just three of the countless themes that work really fast, so you are free to use something else).
4. Optimize your images
In general, media files make up the bulk of the data on a page, so it's important to optimize them. To do this, use WebP instead of PNG and JPG, compress them (for example, via plugins like ShortPixel, Imagify, or Smush), and set up lazy loading so that they only load when they come into the user's view.
5. Set up caching
Caching is needed to store generated pages in the server's memory. There are several options: cloud-based, server-based, or based on WordPress plugins like WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or WP Super Cache. It is also acceptable to use several types of caching in combination.
6. Update your database
Over time, your website's database will fill up with unnecessary (outdated, duplicated, or excessive) data. To keep it lightweight, you'll need to get rid of autosaves, clean up spam comments and transit data, and use WP-Optimize or phpMyAdmin for tables.
7. Reduce your code
Minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML reduces the amount of data transferred, thereby speeding up the loading of web pages. This can be achieved effortlessly with plugins like Autoptimize and WP Rocket, disabling unnecessary scripts via Asset CleanUp, and by using HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 to load multiple files in parallel.
8. Enable a CDN
A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a network of physical servers distributed around the world. Using it ensures that your website content loads faster as it will be delivered from the location closest to a specific website visitor. For example, you should consider offerings from Cloudflare (with caching and DDoS protection), KeyCDN (another budget-friendly service with high data transfer speeds), and QUIC.cloud (an ideal choice for LiteSpeed servers).
Final Thoughts
Generally speaking, optimizing the speed of a WordPress website requires a comprehensive approach, but it's best to start with the first recommendation, gradually moving on to more sophisticated ones – from carefully choosing a hosting provider to enabling a CDN.
If none of the above approaches helped you, then you should definitely contact WordPress developers (preferably the ones who worked on your website) so that they can refactor the code and determine the cause of the low loading speed, if any. By the way, you can check the loading speed in such popular services as SE Ranking, WebPageTest, etc.
