How To Speed Up WordPress Websites
Over the last few days, I’d one of the toughest time in getting one of the websites up and running. I was working on a Exabytes Plesk VPS (which is freaking cool by the way). I even used Oxygen Builder (read my review here) which is by the far, the best bloat-free and fast loading website builder.
When I first loaded up the site, I was expecting it to load like blazing fast (VPS with 3 cores and 3GB RAM) but I was purely mistaken. I had overlooked that I was using an unmanaged VPS. At this point, I knew two things: I was spoilt by Kinsta and I need to seriously make my WordPress website faster.
In this article, I’m going to show you exactly how to speed up WordPress websites without coding skills—and how you can make your website load faster and making Google happy.
1. Use A Reliable WordPress Hosting For Faster Websites
The most important step is to use a reliable WordPress hosting. Taking this important step is by far the most effective way to speed up your WordPress site.
But, using a reliable WordPress hosting can really be costly. This site is powered by Kinsta hosting and I’m using Business 2 plan which costs $100 per month. There are also lower tiers WordPress hosting that you can also consider. Click here to check out the full list of Kinsta hosting pricing.
What if I’m on a tight budget but desperately in need of a reliable WordPress hosting?
The best option is to go for a shared WordPress hosting. Now, here’s what you need to know about shared WordPress hosting:
- There are many cheap WordPress hosting that costs under $5 a month
- There are many bad WordPress hosting companies
- There are only a few good WordPress hosting solutions
Using a cheap and bad WordPress hosting company is going to give you more headache than a peace of mind. You are bound to experience many downtimes, slow responsive website and almost no customer support.
But if you seriously in need of a cheap WordPress hosting solution, I recommend you to take a look at BlueHost. It is reliable, having multiple datacenters around the world and live chat support, you can easily save a few dollars each month until your website takes off with traffic.
2. Use A Cache Plugin To Optimize WordPress Loading Speed
Installing a cache plugin for WordPress is almost as important as choosing the right web hosting company. A cache plugin helps you to configure and optimize your WordPress site without needing you to go into the coding part.
Most cache plugin are created to ensure that website owners (that’s you) can easily configure the plugin without any hassle.
Here are some of the best cache plugins you should be using today:
- WP Super Cache
- WP Rocket (I personally recommend this)
- W3 Total Cache
- Swift Performance
If you are using a managed WordPress hosting solution, you can safely ignore this part because optimizations are often completed on server level.
3. Uninstall Unwanted Plugins To Reduce WordPress Bloat
Plugins are great but only if we use them correctly. Speeding up a WordPress site is all about reducing the database size.
Now, take a moment to look for unwanted plugins you had installed on your site.
Uninstalling unwanted plugins or plugins that had not been used is a great way to ensure that your website loads fast(er). Typically, here are some guidelines to help you decide if the plugin is worth removing from your wp-admin:
- The plugin was not used for over a month
- It is just an old plugin that no longer serve the purpose
- You left the plugin inactive in the plugin dashboard
4. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN) For Faster Loading Websites
CDN helps you to serve static files to your audience through the nearest datacenters to them. This helps you to speed up website loading speed and ultimately, giving a better experience to your website audience.
If you are just starting with blogging, Cloudflare is an excellent, free-to-use CDN service. Once you had signed up, change your nameservers to the ones given by Cloudflare and within 24 hours, your website will be running with its servers.
Do another check on the website loading speed and you will notice a nice bump in the loading speed.
5. Optimize Images And Speed Up WordPress Websites
A smaller size page loads multiple times faster than a large page. In this case, images play huge roles in the website loading speed. The more optimized the image is, the faster your website will load.
How do you optimize WordPress images correctly?
- 1Optimize images before uploading to WordPress (tools such as TinyPNG helps dramatically).
- 2Use proper image optimization plugin such as Imagify or Shortpixel
- 3Scale the image based on the right display size (instead of the largest size available)
Summary: Simple Tricks To Speed Up WordPress Websites
The process of speeding up a WordPress site takes some effort and the right strategies. However, it is important to note that a fast loading website doesn’t only give more weight to better rankings, it helps you to make your website audience happier.