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How to Make WordPress Website Faster

Having a slow website can negatively impact your business. Research shows that even a 1-second delay in page load time can cause a 7% reduction in conversions. With WordPress powering over 43% of all websites globally, optimizing your WordPress site’s speed is crucial.

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll share my top tips to speed up your WordPress site. Whether you’re a beginner or advanced user, you’ll discover easy and advanced ways to boost site performance. Let’s dive in!

Why Website Speed Matters

Before jumping into speed optimization tips, let’s review why fast page load times should be a priority:

  • Enhances User Experience – Faster sites create happy visitors who stay longer and view more pages.
  • Boosts SEO Rankings – Google uses site speed as a ranking factor since 2014. Faster sites tend to rank higher.
  • Increases Conversions – As mentioned earlier, quicker load times can lift conversion rates by over 7%.
  • Saves Money – With fewer visitors bouncing, you save on marketing costs for driving traffic.

Clearly, improving website speed delivers tremendous upside for both visitors and your bottom line. Now let’s explore ways to accelerate your WordPress site.

Getting Started: Analyze Current Speed

Before making any changes, analyze your current site speed using free tools like Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights. This gives you a baseline to compare against later.

Some key metrics to check:

  • Page load time
  • Time to first byte
  • Requests
  • Page size
  • Critical file size

Tracking these web vitals over time shows if optimizations are working. Now let’s jump into ways to speed up WordPress.

Choose Fast Web Hosting

Your web hosting provider can dramatically impact WordPress performance. Here are hosting features that accelerate sites:

  • SSD Storage – Solid state drives deliver faster data retrieval vs traditional hard drives.
  • CDN – A content delivery network stores cache copies globally, reducing server requests.
  • Caching – Caches save rendered web pages to bypass CPU-heavy PHP processing.
  • Linux OS – Linux outperforms Windows for hosting WordPress sites.

Some fast, affordable hosts include SiteGround, Bluehost and WP Engine. Run speed tests to compare hosts when making a switch.

Optimize Your Database

The MySQL database that stores your WordPress site can bloat over time, slowing queries. Try these database optimizations:

  • Cleanup Database – Delete stale data like inactive users, spam comments and outdated post revisions.
  • Index Tables – Adding indexes to busy tables speeds up common queries.
  • Increase Memory – Give MySQL more RAM to perform queries faster.

Database management plugins like WP-Optimize automate cleanup and optimizations.

Enable Caching Plugins

Caching avoids heavy PHP processing and database queries by saving rendered web pages. Here are top caching plugins:

  • WP Rocket – A speed demon that minifies code, leverages browser caching and more.
  • W3 Total Cache – Fine-tune a multitude of caching types for whole pages, objects, databases and more.
  • WP Fastest Cache – Simple yet powerful caching for beginners. Just install and the plugin handles the rest.

Configure caching plugins carefully based on your hosting environment for best results.

Minify HTML, CSS & JavaScript

Minification removes unneeded spaces, comments and characters from code files, reducing their size for faster loading. Enable minification in your caching plugin or try plugins like Autoptimize.

Also leverage browser caching headers so resources load instantly from site visitors’ browsers on repeat visits.

Optimize Images

Images often account for most of a web page’s size. Make them faster-loading with these tips:

  • Resize Images – Don’t upload huge images. Resize them to exact display dimensions first.
  • Compress Images – Reduce file size without impacting visual quality using tools like TinyPNG.
  • Lazy Load Images – Only load images visible in the browser, accelerating initial load.
  • Serve Scaled Images – Upload large images, delivering automatically resized versions to match visitor device size. Saves storage space.

Image optimization plugins like EWWW and ShortPixel provide these optimizations.

Load JavaScript Asynchronously

By default, browsers load JavaScript sequentially, blocking other downloads until scripts complete. Solve this with async loading:

<script async src="script.js"></script>

Async allows parallel downloads, accelerating overall page load speed.

Reduce Plugins

Too many plugins can bog down WordPress performance. Audit your plugins, remove inactive ones, and find alternatives for inefficient plugins.

Also deactivate and stress test each plugin to isolate any that cause speed issues. Upgrade outdated plugins for speed and security fixes.

Choose a Fast Theme

A bloated theme slows down page rendering and deliverability even with caching enabled. Select a lightweight theme with clean code like GeneratePress, OceanWP or Astra.

Monitor Speed Improvements

After making changes, rerun speed tests with Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights. Compare metrics week-over-week and month-over-month. Speed optimization is an ongoing process.

For more granular monitoring, use analytics tools like Google Analytics Site Speed report. This tracks user-centric speed KPIs like page load time and first input delay.

Celebrate speed milestones with your marketing team. Faster load times means happier visitors who convert more often.

Keep Learning Optimization Tips

Hopefully this guide provided helpful tips to accelerate your WordPress site’s speed. But don’t stop here!

For more advanced optimizations, explore enabling HTTP/2, upgrading to PHP 7.4, implementing server-side caching, removing query strings from static resources, and integrating a CDN for third-party libraries.

The world of website performance improvement never ends. Monitor your metrics and keep researching ways to help your WordPress site load even faster over time. Your visitors will thank you by hanging around longer and taking more actions!

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