15 Ways to Optimize and Speed Up Your WordPress Site

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How to speed up WordPress? WordPress is a great platform to create a website for your business. However, one disadvantage it has is that it can be very slow. If you are not careful, you can end up with a lazy website. This is a hassle for repeat guests and will cost you supporters and customers. In this short post, I'll cover most of the perfect ways I've found to reliably speed up WordPress.

How to speed up WordPress?

The content of the article:

• 1. Choose a good hosting
• 2. WordPress hosting powered by WP Engine
• 3. Start with a solid theme/framework
• 4. Use a good cache plugin
• 5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• 6. Optimize images (automatically)
• 7. Optimize your home page for fast loading
• 8. Optimize Your WordPress Database
• 9. Disable hotlinking and stealing your content
• 10. Add an Expiration Header to Static Resources
• 11. Customize the Gravatar Image
• 12. Add LazyLoad to your image
• 13. Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
• 14. Replace PHP with Static HTML if Necessary
• 15. Using CloudFlare

1. Choose a good hosting

Shared hosting might seem like a good deal at first (“Unlimited page views!”). It comes at another cost: surprisingly slow site speeds and frequent downtime.

If you're planning on distributing important content, you're doing yourself a favor by running your WordPress site on shared hosting.

Worrying about your site going down after getting one major component is enough to reap the first benefits: don't be a victim, host your resources on the right host. This will speed up WordPress, even at the foundation stage.

2. WordPress hosting powered by WP Engine

All in all, support is an option that is absolutely essential for hosting. Get it from the person who found the solution to the most difficult situation. Go ahead and go to the WP Engine landing page, check out their offerings and you'll be glad you did.

3. Start with a solid theme/framework

You may be surprised by this, but twenty-five "systems" (also known as the default WP theme) is lightweight and very fast.

This is because they keep the "guts" basic; bloated systems, on the other hand, slow down your site due to many components that you will never use.

In my experience, the fastest premium framework is, of course, Thesis Theme Framework. Its performance is much lower than the base WordPress theme because it does not require modifications.

It's an incomprehensibly powerful system that won't let you down with a bunch of plugins or tweaks. Implement theme-appropriate improvements and avoid bloat!

4. Use a good cache plugin

WordPress plugins are certainly very valuable, but the best part is that they fall into the reserved category because they drastically improve page load times, and the best part is that every plugin on WP.org is free and easy to use.

My best long term choice without exception is W3 Total Cache, I wouldn't prescribe or use other storage modules, it has most of the components you need and is pretty much easy to install and use.

5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Most of your favorite big sites take advantage of this, and you won't be shocked if you use WordPress for your online presence (as I'm sure most of my users do). Some of the popular weblogs (like Copyblogger) use a CDN.

Basically, a CDN or content delivery arrangement takes all of your static entries on your website (CSS, Javascript, images, etc.) and gives your guests the ability to download them as quickly as possible by hosting the files on a server.

6. Optimize images (automatically)

There is an image optimizer called Smush.it that drastically reduces the size of an image post without losing quality. In any case, if you're anything like me, it's torture and extremely tedious to optimize every single image.

Luckily, there's a great free WP-SmushIt plugin that makes this process natural for most images when you transfer them. There is no reason not to implement it.

7. Optimize your home page for fast loading

It's not entirely accurate, but there are a few simple things you can do to make sure your landing pages load quickly, which is probably the most important part of your website because people will visit it often.

You can do the following:

• Show selection instead of full post.
• Reduce the number of posts per page (you may be fine with a value between 5-7)
• Remove nonsensical generic widgets from landing pages (only include them in posts).
• Remove dormant plugins and gadgets that you won't use.
• Keep content small! Viewers want content, not 8,000 widgets on a landing page.

8. Optimize Your WordPress Database

I'm definitely getting quite a bit of value from "optimization" in this post!

It must be extremely repetitive, time-consuming manual work or…

Basically you can use the WP-Optimize module which I use on my site.

This module gives you only one basic task: to optimize your databases (spam, patched, drafts, spreadsheets, etc.) to reduce their queries and clean up junk.

9. Disable hotlinking and stealing your content

Hotlinking is a "robbery" in data transfer. This happens when different guidebooks link to images on your website from their articles, gradually increasing your server stack.

This may include more people "wiping" your posts or your website (especially images) becoming more famous, which is a must if you create custom images for your website.

10. Add an Expiration Header to Static Resources

The Expires header is a way of indicating that the period of time is long enough that clients (programs) do not need to re-fetch any static content (such as css documents, javascript, images, etc.).

11. Customize the Gravatar Image

You will see that the default Gravatar image on this site is set to… well, nothing.

It's not a fancy solution, I do it because it doesn't really mean anything, it's usually a silly Gravatar logo or some other crap that increases the page stack. Some sites even block them on web pages, and there are barriers for everyone.

12. Add LazyLoad to your image

LazyLoad is a method that pushes images onto an overlay stack (i.e., only images visible in the guest window), after which alternate images begin to stack up as the viewer looks down, just before they appear.

Not only will this make your page load faster, but it will also save your transfer speed by posting less information for customers who won't be viewing your page any further.

13. Disable pingbacks and trackbacks

Of course, WordPress connects to various weblogs that provide pingbacks and quotes.

Every time another blogger notices you, they update the post with suggestions for your site. Removing it won't break the backlinks to your site, it will only break the settings that put a lot of load on your site. Thereby helping you speed up your WordPress site.

14. Replace PHP with Static HTML if Necessary

It's a small improvement, but it definitely cuts down on running time, as you're in a rush to combine page stack speed, so I'm including it.

15. Using CloudFlare

This is similar to the area above about using a CDN, but I'm so attached to CloudFlare that I decided to include it here regardless.

To be honest, CloudFlare along with the W3 Total Cache module mentioned above is a really powerful combination (they go together) that can speed up WordPress incredibly powerfully as well as the security of your site.

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