Simple WordPress Tweaks to Make Your Website Faster

Improve the speed of your website in 9 easy steps

A slow-loading WordPress website is one of the main causes of increased bounce rate and lost visitors. The average user expects your WordPress website to load in less than three seconds. Having a faster-loading website correlates directly with an increase in sales, conversions and user engagement. There are a lot of things you can do to make your website faster, but here are some simple tweaks you can make with WordPress.

  • Install a caching plugin

    A caching plugin is a piece of code that acts as an intermediary between your website and the web server. It stores incoming requests and responses so they don’t have to be generated every time someone asks for them. This saves bandwidth and makes your site faster than it would be without a caching plugin installed.

    There are many different types of WordPress caching plugins, but if you’re looking for something simple and free, we recommend WP Fastest Cache(downloadable here).

  • Run a website speed test with tools like Pingdom or GTMetrix

    A website speed test will allow you to perform a test on the speed and performance of your website. You can then confirm these results by comparing them to other companies in your market area.

    There are many tools for performing website speed tests, but we recommend Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix. These tools help you determine if there are issues with load times, page load times and other factors that can slow down the overall performance of your site.

    If you discover that there are issues with the way your site loads, take steps to improve those areas as soon as possible, as slow load times can hurt the user experience and lead to low conversion rates!

  • Optimize images

    If you use WordPress, there are a few plugins that can help you optimize your images. WP Smush is one of the most popular options. The plugin works by reducing and compressing the image files you upload from your computer when writing posts or pages on your site. This reduces the file size, which in turn makes them load faster than when they were larger versions, so no one has to wait for those large images to be downloaded onto their devices before they can view them!

    Resize images as needed so they are not too big or too small for whatever purpose they serve on each page.
    * Convert all JPEGs to WebP format (if possible).

  • Remove unnecessary plugins and themes

    If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, chances are you have several plugins and themes installed on your website. You may have even installed them in the past. But now that you want to make WordPress faster again, it’s time to consider removing all plugins and themes that are no longer used on your site.

    This is because any plugin or theme can add more code than is needed to load into each page load on your website. In fact, if all these pieces were included on every page load (or even just half), it would slow down how fast those pages loaded in most browsers-and thus make users less likely to stay engaged with what’s happening on the site!

  • Minimize JavaScript and CSS files

    Minimizing your JavaScript and CSS files can help you reduce the size of your website, which will make it load faster. We recommend using a minification plugin like WP Rocket or Autoptimize.

    Caching plugins can dramatically improve page load speed by storing static content in a server-side cache, so it doesn’t have to be generated again every time someone visits your site.

  • Enable compression

    Compression is the process of reducing the size of a file by removing unnecessary or redundant information. This can significantly reduce the size of your site’s images, CSS and JavaScript files.

    This will make your website load faster for users with a slow internet connection. Users with a fast Internet connection may not notice much difference in speed when compression is enabled, because their browser is able to retrieve content from the cache faster than users with a slow connection – but enabling compression has its advantages too!

  • Use a CDN for images, CSS and JavaScript files

    A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that stores your website’s files. If you use a CDN, visitors to your site will download the files from the closest server, reducing latency and increasing speed.

    We recommend using a CDN to store images, CSS and JavaScript on sites where those resources do not change often or are not essential to the visitor experience. For example, if you have an image gallery on your site with 6 images that never change but take several seconds to load due to their size, we recommend using a CDN to reduce the page load time by having those 6 large images stored on another server closer to the end user and not on yours.

  • Clean up your database

    As a general rule, you should clean up your database from time to time. It’s not something most people think about, but it can have a huge impact on performance.

    • Remove spam comments from your WordPress website.
    • Delete old revisions of posts and pages.
  • Deactivate pingbacks and trackbacks

    Pingbacks and trackbacks let other sites link to your content, but they can also slow down your site. Disabling them will make your website faster in two ways:

    • They don’t need to be loaded when someone visits your page, so turning them off saves bandwidth.
    • The server does not need to process the pingback or trackback request for every link on the page.

Now you should have a good understanding of how to speed up your WordPress website. If for some reason you don’t have time to make these changes yourself, you can always hire Bohnenn Webdesign to do it.

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