14 Ways to Improve the Performance of Your WordPress Site

If you are looking for wp tips to improve the performance of your WordPress site, this blog post is for you. The 14 wp tips will help speed up your website and make it more responsive. Some of the wp tips discussed in this article are free and some require a small investment. Regardless, if you want to make sure that your visitors can access your site quickly with no glitches, they all have their benefits!

Decrease the number of plugins

This is the quickest way to speed up your site. If you have too many wp plugins, it slows down your site.

In the admin interface of WordPress, choose Plugins -> Installed Plugins and click on Disable next to each plugin that is not being used or has been recently updated.

How To disable a wp plugin:

-Click on Deactivate Plugin in the top right corner of a wp plugin’s page from within the wp dashboard.

Use a CDN to serve static assets

Always use CDN for serving static assets. They serve the files like CSS /javascript /images closest to your visitor. There are many CDN providers to choose from and I prefer to use AWS CloudFront, which has a lot of features other than a basic CDN service.

You can use any CDN of your choice and configure it to boost your website’s performance.

Optimize your images for size, quality, and color

Always optimize your images for size, quality, and color. Images that are huge in dimensions or have a pixel density that is too high will slow down the loading of your website and significantly increase bandwidth usage.

Giving priority to these three factors can help you save costs on hosting space as well!

-Resize images before uploading them with a WP plugin like Image Optimizer which saves up to 80% and it’s free.

-Use wp plugins like ShortPixel which allows compression of large image sizes without compromising the image’s quality by more than 25%. It has paid plans from $3.99 per month if you want full access.

Replace large videos with GIFs or short clips

Another great way to boost your site’s performance is to replace large videos with GIFs or short clips. For instance, if your site has a video that is more than 100Mb in size then replace it with an animated GIF or short clip.

This will help you save loads of bandwidth for the visitor and significantly improve performance on mobile devices where data traffic can be expensive to download over EDGE/GPRS connections as well!

Alternatively, you can upload your videos to YouTube and share the link on your site which saves a lot of bandwidth and boosts your performance.

Reduce the number of scripts that load on each page by bundling them together

To reduce the number of scripts that load on each page, you can bundle them together. This will not only help improve your WordPress site performance but also improves user experience by preventing those annoying “loading…” screens from appearing and let visitors know they are still connected to a website or web app. Bundling scripts is as easy as running wp_enqueue_script() with an array for dependencies when loading jQuery plugins and libraries:

Check for broken links in posts and pages before publishing them

Before publishing any content, it’s a good idea to check for broken links by using wp_check_links(). The wp_check_links() function checks all of the URLs in your posts and pages and returns an array with each URL that returned as “broken.” This way you can edit or remove those URLs before publishing so they are not published on your site.

You can manually check the broken links as well and update those in pages. A broken link can reduce your site’s speed significantly, so try to remove them completely from your site.

GTMetrix is a great tool where you can find the broken links of your site and fix those.

Remove render-blocking JavaScript with asynchronous loaders

Remove render-blocking JavaScript with asynchronous loaders.

JavaScript files can slow down your site’s performance by blocking the rendering of the page while they are being downloaded and executed in a browser tab. If you have scripts that aren’t needed until after all content on a page has loaded, then use an async attribute to defer loading those scripts until just before their execution is required by adding this line: “async src=”//example/scriptfile””. This will allow any other script tags below it to continue executing without delay as soon as possible; meanwhile, the file specified should download in parallel with everything else.

Install a caching plugin for your site

Install caching plugins on your site, which can improve the speed and performance of your WordPress site. wp Rocket plugin is a nice option to consider. wp Rocket will cache your entire website for you, which means that every time someone visits your site they are served the cached copy of its pages instead of having WordPress generate them again from scratch–saving precious CPU cycles and bandwidth. wp Rocket caches content on an individual page basis, too, so it won’t grab any more than it needs to in order to keep visitors from seeing old data.

Use Google’s page speed insights tool

This tool can help you to improve your site’s speed by giving you insights and suggestions on ways to improve. wp Rocket can’t do everything for you, but analyzing your site in this tool is a great place to start when it comes to improving the speed of your WordPress-powered website.

Also, this is a free tool from Google which is really a handy tool for those who want to improve site speed dramatically.

Enable Gzip compression for all files

Gzip compression can help to reduce the size of files and enable your site to load faster. WP Rocket can do this for you automatically if enabled in the wp-config.php file

By default, WordPress uses Gzip compression on all HTML pages it generates but may not gzip other types of content such as images or CSS stylesheets (unless instructed by a plugin).

Third-party plugins like WP Rocket or W3T Total cache can apply the Gzip compression for the images, CSS, and JavaScript files using the “.htaccess” file.

Store files in the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive)

Store files in the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive) instead of hosting them on your own server. This way, your visitors do not need to download files from the server. This reduces the load from your server and reduces the number of requests as well.

You can use WordPress plugins like “WP Offload Media Lite” to store your page files into S3 or DropBox and render them directly from the cloud. This will not only reduce the load from the server but also can speed up by using the CDN service of the CLoud provider.

A video created on how to store WordPress files in Amazon S3 is shown here.

Run periodic checks for malware, spyware, or viruses

Malware, spyware, or viruses can slow down your website speed by changing the content of your website, slowing down its performance, and using your server’s power. You can use wp-cli to periodically check for malware by running wp cli scan with a script like below:

$ wp-cli scan --url=yourdomain.com

Alternatively, you can install the WordFence plugin that will automatically run periodic checks for malware or viruses and let you know if they have found anything malicious on the site.

Avoid using Flash if possible

Flash can slow down page loads significantly, so it’s worth avoiding if you can. If it is unavoidable, try disabling Flash entirely and only using HTML-based animations on your site to avoid slowing the page load time down even more.

Use Cloudflare

Use Cloudflare as the DNS manager. it is not only a fast CDN but also has inbuilt malware protection and health monitoring of your site thanks to their web application firewall (WAF) feature which proactively monitors website traffic from potential threats on the internet or internally with WAFrules that you can set up manually yourself. this will automatically run periodic checks for malware or viruses and let you know if they have found anything malicious on the site.

I created a video on how to move your domain to Cloudflare which is available here.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions )

What are the top 5 tips to improve WordPress website speed?

-Optimize your images. Use “webp” instead of PNG

-Compress your CSS and JavaScript files

-Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to deliver static assets from around the world

-Use a good hosting company and make sure the server is fast

-Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files with tools like WP-Minify

-Install an auto-optimization plugin on WordPress for additional optimization features such as caching plugins, minification plugins, concatenation of scripts and stylesheets, etc.

-Monitor site speed using Google PageSpeed Insights or similar tool to identify problem areas in need of improvement

How can I speed up my WordPress site without a plugin?

-Test your site speed with Google PageSpeed InsightsReduce the number of plugins you have installed on your site.

-Optimize images for better load times.

-Use a CDN to deliver static content closer to visitors’ geographical location.

-Monitor the server load by installing monitoring software on the server such as Munin, Cacti, or Nagios

-Make sure that all of your theme’s scripts are loaded in the footer.

-Reduce the amount of JavaScript being loaded with each page visit, by only including scripts necessary for each individual post or page.

Can the deactivated plugins slow down a WP website?

-Yes, deactivated plugins can slow down your WP website

-If you are using an outdated version of PHP, update it as soon as possible

-Delete all deactivated plugins to speed up the performance of a site.

Conclusion

Here are 14 ways to improve the performance of your WordPress site. We hope this post was helpful! Let us know in the comments below which tip you found most valuable and if there’s anything else that we should have included on our list.

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