Website loading time is very crucial in order to retain the traffic. A single second increase or decrease in loading time will result in a very different amount of traffic. In this guide, I will explain how to speed up a WordPress site to the maximum so you can improve your website speed.
Having a quick site is not just an option nowadays. It is essential to have a fast loading website in the modern age. You must worry about the speed of your website if you want to improve on many factors as I will explain now.
Before I do so, please check out this article about error establishing a database connection. If you ever faced this, you know how much painful it can be! If not, just bookmark it. One day , you might need it.
The importance of website speed
The speed of your website is important and it is the tasks that must be carried out every time you develop a website. The User experience of your website largely depends on the speed.
Amazon calculated that for every second of extra load, it would lose 1.6 trillion Dollars in sales in a year.
But in addition to the losses of conversions, it also may lead to a bad user experience due to the crashes and 500 internal server errors in WordPress if the site is not properly optimized.
Speed is a positioning factor and Google penalizes slow sites . So, I hope you now have an idea about the importance of a website speed.
In this guide I will teach you everything you need to know to optimize the speed of WordPress and make it ultra fast.
Why does WordPress become slow?
There might be many reasons for having a slow website but there are basically 4 reasons why WordPress site becomes slow:
- Your hosting is not adequate: when using a quality web hosting you can see the speed of all the technology you use.
- You have a bad quality WordPress Theme: if you use a theme that has many CSS or JS scripts and is poorly optimized, it will slow down your WordPress.
- You use plugins that are too heavy: having many plugins is not bad (but not recommended if you can do work without plugin), as long as these do not make an exaggerated consumption of resources.
- You have many external scripts: if the problem is not internal, it will be external because you too many external call of scripts.
With a slow WordPress website, it makes it almost impossible to work with the admin panel.
It will also consume many more server resources, no matter if you have few or many visits.
How to speed up a WordPress site
Before I start writing about how to speed up a WordPress site, I would like to focus on how to measure the WordPress or any Website speed. Let’s begin:
The first task of any optimization is to do a loading time test AKA speed test of your WordPress website.
For this speed test, I recommend you to use GTMetrix :
Put the URL of your website and click on the analyze button .
The result will be something like the following:
![How to speed up a WordPress site [updated]](/blog-media/how-to-speed-up-a-wordpress-site/GTMatix-stat.png "How to speed up a WordPress site [updated]")
I recommend that your website meet the following requirements:
- The loading time is less than 2 seconds.
- The weight of the website is less than 1 MB ( Size of the web page) .
- Have less than 100 requests .
- The Time To First Byte or TTFB is less than 200ms. This is the first data that appears in the Waterfall tab.
I do not recommend that you analyze your website with PageSpeed , or take their recommendations seriously.
Optimize your web hosting/ Choose a performance optimized web host
No matter what optimization you do on your website, if you have a bad host, nothing will improve the experience of the user. So the first thing that I would like to focus is on the web hosting.
Switch to a quality hosting
If you want to make your website ultra-fast, the first thing you need is a good web hosting.
There may be a bestial performance difference between different web hosts.
You must search for a hosting that is specific to WordPress and also have:
- SSD hard drives.
- Gzip compression.
- PHP 7
- Http2 technology.
- Own CDN.
There are many hosting companies on the Internet and I have tried many.
Soon I will update a blog on my recommended web hosting companies.
Activate Gzip compression
Gzip is a technology that compresses the files of a website making them to weigh less and take less time to load.
It should come with all the web hosting company but for some reasons, sometime it might be missing. Or it might be there, but not activated.
You can detect if your hosting has it activated with the this tool .
If you use Cpanel ,you can activate Gzip compression in the Software / Services section called Optimize website .
Activate it by choosing the Compress all content option .
If you have no knowledge about how to do it, you can contact your hosting and they will activate it.
Or if you are an advanced user, you may like to do it through the htaccess file with the following code.
# Enable Gzip compression
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
Upgrade WordPress to PHP 7
WordPress is a content management system programmed with PHP, that is what it needs to work properly.
To have better performance and consume less resources you need to always have the latest version. But keep in mind that as long as all the plugins and themes are compatible, you are good to go with the latest version.
If you still do not have the latest PHP version, I recommend upgrading WordPress to PHP 7 .
Once you have verified that all your plugins and themes are compatible, you can activate it.
To do it in Cpanel just go the the software section then either PHP version manager/ Multi PHP version ( the one that your host shows) .
Just check the option or select from the dropdown ( the one that your host provides to select PHP version) to PHP 7 versions.
Header compatibility issue fixation – Accept header encoding
When activating Gzip, there may be some incompatibility with some users.
To fix it, we add the following compatibility code to the htaccess.
<FilesMatch ". (Js | css | xml | gz) $">
Header append Vary: Accept-EncodingDeactivate the Entity tags (ETags)
Let’s say that what we are going to do is deactivate a check made by browsers and slow down the loading of the web.
Then we add the following to the htaccess .
Header unset ETag
FileETag None
Enable Keep Alive
Don’t become dizzy seeing alive! Let’s break down the technical terms into clear English.With this settings, the connections to your website are accelerated, because those that are already open are used.
The same instruction goest, put the code into the htaccess file.
Header set Connection keep-alive
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Selim Rana
The BdThemes team builds WordPress plugins trusted by 3M+ users worldwide. We write about web accessibility, WCAG compliance, and inclusive design.