The first step in making your website a revenue machine for your business, is to ensure it is actually competitive and by today’s standards, that means having it load under 3 seconds.

In fact, more than half of all your visitors will abandon your website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. On top of that, Google prioritizes websites that are better optimized and load faster than those that are not.

The demographic that’s most prone to this problem? WordPress users. More than 33% of all websites are based on WordPress and while it’s super user-friendly and quick to set up, the number of bad plugins, configurations, and themes out there can make load times super slow.

Thankfully, it’s not too hard to improve the load times of your WordPress website. This is your definitive WordPress optimization guide  with 20 ways to get your website to load faster.

How To Check Your Load Speed

Before you can improve your load speeds, you need to know your current position. There are a number of free online tools to check website load times. Here are some of them:

• gtmetrix.com
• Isitwp.com
• Pingdom.com

All of these websites essentially do the same thing. They load your website from a location of your choice, test your website’s load speed, and create a detailed report. This report includes a grade and what elements of your website are slowing it down.

Now that you’ve got a base value, you can start taking steps to improve load speeds and accurately measure speeds. We’ve got a total of 20 steps for you!

1. Update Your WordPress Site

WordPress is an incredibly large platform and is the sum of millions of small parts. In order to ensure all these parts work together nicely, WordPress has frequent updates that improve performance, increase security, fix bugs, and add new features.

Usually, you’ll see 3 types of updates: plugins, themes, and WordPress core. It’s important that you keep all three elements of your website always updated.

If all three types of updates are available, we recommend updating first you plugins, then your theme, and then the WordPress core.

2. Optimize your images

Images are often the main cause behind slow load times and just a few images can significantly increase load times. Images on WordPress are often way bigger than they have to be and are also in .PNG format which is an uncompressed format.

WordPress images should be in the .JPG format, which is a compressed image format. By using a plugin like reSmushit or EWWW Image Optimizer, you can resize and compress multiple images on a page in just a few clicks.

This will not only improve load speeds but also reduce disk usage.

3. Install a WordPress caching plugin to reduce load times 2-5x

Every time someone visits your website, WordPress creates your webpages using the information it has about your website. What that means is WordPress doesn’t store entire pages of your website but rather just the code behind it. This can, of course, be quite slow.

By using a WordPress caching plugin, you can serve pre-saved pages of your website directly to your visitors instead of creating new ones from scratch, increasing load times nearly 5x! WP Rocket is a great paid caching plugin while WP Super Cache is a free alternative.

4. Limit Background Processes

WordPress manages and continues a lot of its tasks in the background that you generally won’t see on the dashboard but that do have an impact on the loading times. There are different types of background processes like

• WordPress cron jobs that scan for updates and publish scheduled posts
• Web crawlers and bots from search engines that scan your web pages to index them on search engines like Google

And others like backup plugin tasks. While most background tasks will not impact your website’s load times too much, certain processes like web crawlers can take up significant processing power during peak business hours.

In order to minimize this impact, schedule posts and schedule backups during off-hours. You can also use Google Search Console to see how many of the crawls end in error – more errors mean less performance and can also indicate an underlying problem.

5. Use Audio/Video Hosting Services like Youtube and SoundCloud

Having great video and audio content on your website will definitely improve engagement and the overall quality of your site but there’s one thing you need to remember – don’t upload audio/video files directly to WordPress.

Uploading your audio/video files directly to your WordPress website is counter-intuitive for multiple reasons. For instance, you will consume more of your bandwidth and disk space, both of which can increase your hosting fees.

WordPress will also not compress your files automatically which makes not only the website load slower but will also make the audio/video file load slower.

A better alternative would be to upload your audio/video files on platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, Dailymotion, etc. and then embed the files onto your WordPress page by simply copying and pasting the URL into a page.

6. Use Excerpts on Homepage Instead of Full Articles

Many WordPress users tend to post entire articles and blog posts on their homepage and archive pages instead of using excerpts. Publishing your articles and blog posts on the homepage in their entirety means it takes longer for the homepage to load (your visitor will have to load the categories, tags, text, and possibly images of all the blog pages).

Posting entire pages on the homepages also mean your visitor is not motivated to explore other sections of your site, reducing time spent on the website, which is a crucial metric used to measure website success.

Instead, use excerpts for your homepage and archive page. To do this, go to Settings, Reading and select “For each article in a feed, show: Summary.”

7.   Break Comments into Pages

Getting a lot of comments is great! But having all of those comments on a single page is not. If you have too many comments, split them into separate pages by going into Settings, Discussion, and selecting Break Comments into Pages tab.

8.  Use Optimized Plugins

Apart from the theme, the other big part of a WordPress website is the plugins and just like themes, plugins too, have an impact on the load times of your website. Faster plugins will result in a faster website.

So try to find plugins that are optimized, have good reviews and receive regular updates. A few good examples of such plugins include WPForms, soliloquy, Envira gallery, and Shared Counts.

9.   Use an Optimized Theme

WordPress is an open-source project which means you can find thousands of beautiful themes, but unfortunately, not all themes are made equal. In fact, many of these themes will be poorly coded, have tons of technical debt, and ultimately increase load times for your website. And this may be truer for themes that have more visual elements and extra functionality.

The best way to avoid these performance issues is to use a theme that’s already optimized for fast load times. You can find such themes on StudioPress, Themify, CSSIgniter, and ThemeForest by Envato.

10. Use A Lazy Loading Plugin

Lazy loading works by loading media only when it is on the visitor’s screen. This method is useful for long blogs with lots of images.

Lazy loading on images, videos, and iframes can be enabled on a page simply by installing the Lazy Load by WP Rocket plugin.

11. Invest in a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN or Content Delivery Network is a network of servers spread out across the world that store your website on their geographically different servers and the server closest to the visitor will serve the webpages.

For instance, your server might be located in New York but if a large chunk of your total visitors comes from the UK, it might be a good idea to invest in a good CDN as the CDN will significantly reduce load time for distant users.

Some of the popular and trusted CDNs include StackPath CDN and CloudFlare.

12. Enable Gzip Compression

Gzip is a method where the server compresses your webpages and then sends them to the visitor’s browsers. The decreased transfer size means the visitor will receive files faster which will result in faster load times.

Modern browsers all have in-built functionality to handle gzip compression which means you should definitely enable gzip compression.

You can enable gzip compression by going into your server setting. If you have cPanel, you can find this under the Optimize tab.

13. Remove Unneeded and Obsolete Plugins

WordPress has made it very easy to install and activate plugins and it’s easy to get carried away when many of these plugins provide additional functionality. But it’s important that you do not let your WordPress get bloated with old and unused plugins as every plugin increases the load time a little and that can have a real snowball effect.

So regularly check the Installed Plugins tab and remove any of the plugins that have become obsolete.

14. Optimize WordPress Database

As you build and update your WordPress website, the database continues to grow. However, with time, the database can be littered with files that are no longer necessary to your website (for instance, unused tags. Categories, revisions, drafts, etc).

Removing these files will also help in improving the load speeds of your WordPress website.

Though you can do this manually, a much faster way of doing this would be to use a plugin like WP-Sweep which can be used to delete files and optimize your database.

15. Reduce Post Revisions

Revisions take up space and clutter your WordPress database unnecessarily. In order to keep your website in its most optimized state, you want to limit the number of post revisions you make.

An easy of limiting post revisions in WordPress is to the following this line of code to your wp-config.php file:

define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 );

16.  Remove Unnecessary JS or CSS files

More JS and CSS files mean more elements for the visitor to download. And in some cases, many of these JS and CSS files are completely unnecessary. By removing them, you can improve your load times.

The easiest way to get rid of obsolete JS and CSS files to use a plugin called WP Asset CleanUp.

17. Disable Hotlinking

Hotlinking is when another website directly links to your images by posting the direct URL of the image as it is stored on your server. This means when someone views an image that’s hotlinked to your website, your servers are picking up the tab for someone else.

To disable hotlinking and potentially stop content theft, add the following code to the .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?example.com [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]

RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

18. Manually Fix HTTPS/SSL Errors

Plugins like Really Simple SSL fix HTTPS/SSLs errors by caching all the web pages and then serving the webpages to the server – adding a slight delay.

To avoid this delay, users should manually fix their HTTPS/SSL errors.

19. Limit External HTTP Requests

HTTP requests for files like stylesheets, scripts, images, etc. These requests are typically made by external sources like analytics services, Facebook, Google, etc.

Another thing that makes these requests are plugins and while analytical services like Google are optimized to not impact load times, plugins may or may not be.

This means if a plugin is making a lot of HTTP requests, your website’s load times will suffer. How to reduce these requests? Well, one way would be to reduce the number of scripts (disabling plugins that use these scripts) or merging these scripts into one.

20. Updated WordPress PHP Version

PHP is a server-side language and WordPress is based on this language which means your entire website along with the core code is stored on your hosts’ network. WordPress releases new PHP versions that improve performance and fix bugs.

In order to get max performance, you should always be running the latest PHP version.

Wrapping up…

Website load times have a big impact on not just search engine rankings but also overall user experience and by following some of the things mentioned in this WordPress optimization guide, you can significantly improve your load times and in turn, your traffic and conversions!