Do you want to speed up your WordPress site?

Fast loading pages improve user experience, increase page views and help you with WordPress SEO.

In this article, we will share the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips to improve WordPress effectiveness and speed up your website.

Unlike other "X Best WordPress Cache Plugins" lists or generic "X Tips for Accelerating WordPress" tutorials, this article is a comprehensive guide to WordPress performance optimization.

We've tried to cover everything, including why speed matters, what slows down a WordPress site, and actionable steps you can take to immediately improve your WordPress speed.

Why is speed important for your WordPress site?

Studies have shown that from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention span dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds.

What does this mean to you as a website owner?

You barely have time to show your content to users and convince them to stay on your site.

A slow site means that users may leave your site before it loads.

根據一項涉及亞馬遜、Google和其他大型網站的 StrangeLoop 案例研究，頁面載入時間延遲 1 秒可能會導致轉換率下降 7%、頁面瀏覽量減少 11%、客戶滿意度下降 16%。

最重要的是，Google和其他搜尋引擎已經開始透過將較慢的網站在搜尋結果中下移來懲罰較慢的網站，這意味著慢速網站的流量會減少。

In short, if you want more traffic, subscribers, and revenue to your website, then you must make your WordPress site faster!

How to check your WordPress site speed?

Often beginners think that their site is okay just because it doesn't feel slow on their computer. This is a huge mistake.

Because you visit your own website so often, modern browsers like Chrome store your website in a cache and automatically prefetch it when you start typing your address. This allows your site to load almost immediately.

However, the average user visiting your site for the first time may not have the same experience.

In fact, users in different geographic locations will have completely different experiences.

That's why we recommend that you use IsItWP'sWordPress Speed TestThe website speed can be tested with tools such as

It is a free online tool that allows you to test the speed of a website.

After running a site speed test, you may be wondering what is a good site speed that I should be aiming for?

A good page load time is no more than 2 seconds.

However, the faster you do it, the better. Improvements of a few milliseconds each can add up to cut the load time in half or even a full second.

What is causing your WordPress site to slow down?

Your speed test report may contain many suggestions for improvement. However, much of it is technical jargon, which can be difficult for beginners to understand.

Understanding what causes website slowdowns is key to improving performance and making smarter long-term decisions.

The main reason for the slowdown of WordPress site is:

• Virtual Host- When your web hosting server is not set up correctly, it may impair your site speed.
• WordPress Settings- If your WordPress site doesn't offer a cached page, it can overload your server, which can cause your site to slow down or crash altogether.
• Page Size- Mainly images that are not optimized for the network.
• undesirable plug-in- If you are using poorly coded plugins then it can significantly slow down your site.
• External Script- External scripts such as advertisements, font loaders, etc. can also have a huge impact on your site's performance.

Now that you know what slows down your WordPress site, let's see how you can speed up your WordPress site.

The Importance of Good WordPress Hosting

On shared hosting, you can share server resources with many other customers. This means that if your neighboring sites get a lot of traffic, it can affect the performance of the entire server, which can slow down your site.

On the other hand, using a hosted WordPress hosting service provides you with the most optimized server configuration to run WordPress. like ourselves, we use Cloudways hosting service, and the WordPress hosting company also provides automatic backups, automatic WordPress updates, and more advanced security configurations to protect your site.

Accelerate WordPress in one easy step (no coding required)

We know that changing the configuration of your website can be a scary idea for beginners, especially if you're not a tech geek.

But don't worry, you're not alone. We've helped thousands of WordPress users improve their WordPress performance.

We'll show you how to speed up your WordPress site in just a few clicks (no code required).

If you can click, then you can do it!

Install WordPress Cache Plugin

WordPress pages are "dynamic". This means that every time someone visits a post or page on your site, they are created instantly.

In order to build your page, WordPress must run a process to find the information it needs, combine it, and then display it to your users.

This process involves a lot of steps and it does slow down your website when you have multiple people accessing it at the same time.

That's why we recommend every WordPress site to use a cache plugin. Caching can increase the speed of your WordPress site from 2x to 5x.

This is how it works.

Instead of going through the entire page generation process each time, your caching plugin makes a copy of the page after the first load and then makes that cached version available to each subsequent user.

As you can see in the image above, when a user visits your WordPress site, your server retrieves information from the MySQL database and PHP files. It then composes all the content into HTML content and serves it to the user.

It's a long process, but you can skip a lot of it when you use a cache.

There are a number of excellent WordPress caching plugins available, but we recommend using WP Rocket (Advanced) orWP Super Cache(Free) Plug-ins.

Many WordPress hosting companies, such as Cloudways, also offer caching solutions.

Optimize images for speed

Graphics bring your content to life and help increase engagement. Researchers have found that using colorful visuals makes people 80% more likely to read your content.

However, if your images are not optimized, then they may do more harm than good. In fact, unoptimized images are one of the most common speed problems we see on beginner sites.

Before uploading photos directly from your phone or camera, we recommend that you use photo editing software to optimize your web images.

The original format of these photos may have a huge file size. However, according toImage File Formatand the one you selected in the editing softwareCompression methodYou can reduce the image size by up to 5 times.

At WPBeginner, we only use two image formats: JPEG and PNG.

Now you're probably wondering: what's the difference?

Uh-huh.PNGThe image format is uncompressed. When an image is compressed, it loses some information, so an uncompressed image will have higher quality and more detail. The disadvantage is that the files are larger and therefore take longer to load.

On the other hand.JPEG is a compressed file format that slightly reduces image quality, but at a much smaller size.

So how do we decide which image format to choose?

• If we have photos or images in many different colors, then we use JPEG.
• If it is a simpler image or we need a transparent image, then we use PNG.

Most of our images are JPEG.

Below is a chart comparing the file sizes and different compression tools we can use for the StrangeLoop image used above.

As you can see in the chart, the image format you use can have a huge impact on the performance of your website.

WordPress Performance Optimization Best Practices

After installing the caching plugin and optimizing your images, you will find that your website loads much faster.

However, if you do want to make your website as fast as possible, then you need to use the best practices listed below.

These tips are not too technical, so you don't need to know any code to implement them. But using them can prevent common problems that slow down websites.

Keep your WordPress site up to date

As a well-maintained open source project, WordPress is updated frequently. Each update not only provides new features, but also fixes security issues and bugs. Your WordPress themes and plugins may also be updated periodically.

As a website owner, it is your responsibility to keep your WordPress site, themes, and plugins up to date with the latest versions. Failure to do so may make your site slow and unreliable, and leave you vulnerable to security threats.

Optimize Back Office Processes

Background processes in WordPress are scheduled tasks that run in the background of a WordPress site. Here are some examples of background tasks that run on a WordPress site:

• WordPress Backup Plugin Tasks
• WordPress cron job publish scheduled posts
• WordPress cron job for checking for updates
• Search engines and other crawlers trying to get content

Tasks such as cron jobs for scheduled releases and updates have minimal impact on site performance.

However, other backend processes (such as backup plugins and excessive crawling by search engines) may slow down the site.

For the backup plugin, you need to make sure that your WordPress backup plugin only runs when your website traffic is low. You will also need to adjust the frequency of backups and the data that needs to be backed up.

For example, if you're creating full daily backups and only posting new content twice a week, then you'll need to make adjustments.

If you want more frequent backups (e.g. instant backups) then we recommend using a SaaS solution so that you don't overburden your server.

As for crawling, you need to pay close attention to the crawl reports in Google Search Console. Frequent crawls that end up with errors can cause your site to slow down or become unresponsive.

See our beginner's complete Google Search Console guide to learn how to adjust crawl speed.

Use of Excerpts on Home Page and Files

By default, WordPress displays the full content of each post on your home page and archives. This means that your home page, categories, tags and other archive pages will load slower.

Another disadvantage of displaying full articles on these pages is that users don't feel the need to visit the actual article. This reduces your overall viewership and the amount of time users spend on your site.

To speed up the loading time of the archive page, you can set the site to display an excerpt instead of the full content.

You can navigate toSettings" "Read", then select "For each article in the source, show: summary" instead of "full text".

For more details on the pros and cons of displaying summaries, see our post on Full Posts and Summaries (Excerpts) in WordPress Archive Pages.

Splitting comments into pages

Did you receive a lot of comments on your blog post? Congratulations! This is a great indicator of audience engagement.

The downside is that loading all these comments may affect the speed of the site.

WordPress provides a built-in solution for this. Simply go to"Settings." "Discussions."Then check the box next to the "Split the review into pages" option.

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Remember how we mentioned above that users in different geographic locations may experience different loading times on your site?

This is because the location of your web hosting server may affect the speed of your website.

For example, let's say your web hosting company's servers are located in the United States. Visitors from the US usually see faster loading times than visitors from India.

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help speed up load times for all visitors.

A CDN is a network of servers around the world. Each server stores "static" files that are used to make up your website.

These static files include unchanging files such as images, CSS and JavaScript, as opposed to the "dynamic" WordPress pages explained above.

When you use a CDN, every time a user visits your site, they get these static files from the server closest to them. Your own web hosting server is also faster because the CDN is doing a lot of the work.

You can see how it works in this infographic.

We recommend Sucuri,Bunny CDNor Cloudflare.

It works well with WordPress sites and complements your existing WordPress caching plugin for faster load times.

Do not upload audio/video files directly to WordPress.

you (plural)canUpload audio and video files directly to your WordPress site and it will automatically display them in the HTML5 player...

But you should never do that!

Hosting audio and video consumes your bandwidth. Your web hosting company may charge you overages and may even shut down your site altogether, even if your plan includes "unlimited" bandwidth.

Hosting large media files can also significantly increase the size of your backups and make it difficult to restore WordPress from your backups.

Instead, you should use an audio and video hosting service, such as YouTube,Vimeoand DailyMotion, SoundCloud, etc. and let them do the heavy lifting. They have enough bandwidth!

WordPress has a built-in video embedding feature, so you can copy and paste the URL of a video directly into your post and it will be embedded automatically.

Use the Speed Optimization theme

When choosing a theme for your site, be sure to pay special attention to speed optimization. Some beautiful and impressive themes are actually poorly coded and may slow down your site.

It's usually better to choose a simple theme than one full of complicated layouts, flashy animations and other unnecessary features. You can always add these features using quality WordPress plugins.

Use faster plug-ins

Whether your site needs it or not, poorly coded WordPress plugins often load too much content. This increases page load speed and slows down the site.

To help you choose the best plugins, we often publish a showcase of the best WordPress plugins selected by our experts. We pay special attention to ease of use, user experience, and most importantly, performance.

Here are our picks for some of the most common WordPress plugin categories.

• FluentForm - the fastest and most beginner-friendly contact form plugin for WordPress.
• All-in-one SEO - Powerful WordPress SEO plugin with special emphasis on website performance to help you get higher SEO rankings.
• MonsterInsights - The best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that won't slow down your site. It even includes the option to load gtag.js locally to speed up your Google Core Web Vitals score.
• Shared Counter-Social media plugin loaded with extra scripts, but not so elegant.Shared Counts is one of the fastest social media plugins for WordPress.
• SeedProd - Drag-and-drop WordPress page builder plugin that helps you build fast landing pages and customize your website theme.

In addition to our own recommendations, you can also run your own tests. Simply run a speed test before and after installing the plugin to compare its impact on performance.

Fine-tuning WordPress Speed (Advanced)

By using the WordPress optimization best practices and basic speed tips listed above, you should see a big improvement in your site's load times.

But every second counts. If you want to get as fast as possible, then you need to make more changes.

The following tips are more technical in nature and some of them require you to have modified your website files or have a basic understanding of PHP. You need to make sure you back up your site first just in case.

Splitting long posts into pages

Readers tend to prefer longer, more in-depth blog posts. Longer posts even tend to rank higher in search engines.

However, if you are posting a long article with a lot of images, it may affect your loading time.

Instead, consider splitting longer posts into multiple pages.

WordPress comes with built-in features to do just that.<!––nextpage––>Simply add tags to the articles you want to split to the next page. If you still want to split the article to the next page, do this again.

Reduce external HTTP requests

Many WordPress plugins and themes load various files from other websites. These files can include scripts, stylesheets, and images from external sources (e.g. Google, Facebook, analytics services, etc.).

Just use some of them. Many of these files are optimized to load as quickly as possible, so they are faster than hosting them on your own site.

However, if your plug-in makes a lot of these requests, it may slow down your site significantly.

Reduce database calls

Note: This step is more technical and requires basic knowledge of PHP and WordPress template files.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of poorly coded WordPress themes out there. They ignore WordPress standard practices and end up making direct database calls or making too many unnecessary requests to the database. This really slows down the server as it creates too much work for the server to do.

Even well-coded topics can contain code to make database calls just to get basic information about the blog.

Optimize WordPress Database

After using WordPress for a while, your database will contain a lot of information that you may no longer need. To improve performance, you can optimize your database to eliminate all unnecessary information.

This can be done byWP-Sweep plug-inEasy Management. It allows you to clean up your WordPress database by deleting spam posts, modifications, unused tags, and more. It also optimizes your database structure with just one click.

Restrictions on posting changes

Publishing amendments takes up space in the WordPress database. Some users believe that posting changes also affects some of the database queries that the plugin runs. If the plugin doesn't explicitly exclude late revisions, it may slow down your site through unnecessary searches.

You can easily limit the number of revisions WordPress reserves for each post. Simply add this code to your wp-config.php file.

1	define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 );

This code restricts WordPress to saving only the last 4 revisions of each post or page and automatically discards older revisions.

Disabled Content Stolen Chain

If you create high quality content on your WordPress site, the sad truth is that it will probably get stolen sooner or later.

One way this happens is that other sites serve your images directly from the URL on your site, rather than uploading them to their own servers. In effect, they are stealing your web hosting bandwidth without you getting any traffic.

Use delayed loading if needed

If you add many images, multiple video embeds and photo galleries to your blog posts, then your site can benefit from delayed loading.

Delayed loading does not load all images and videos immediately, but downloads only those visible on the user's screen. It replaces all other images and video embeds with placeholder images.

When a user scrolls down, your site loads the images that are now visible in the browser's viewing area. You can delay loading images, videos, and even WordPress comments and avatars.

For images, iframes and videos, you can use the WP Rocket plugin's delayed loading.

Using a DNS-Class Web Firewall

WordPress firewall plugins can help you block brute force attacks, hacking attacks, and malware. However, not all firewall plugins are created equal.

Some of these run on your site, which means that an attacker will be able to reach your web server before it is blocked. This is still good for security, but not optimal for performance.

That's why we recommend using a DNS-level firewall such as Sucuri orCloudflareThese firewalls block malicious requests even before they reach your site. These firewalls block malicious requests even before they reach your site.

Fix HTTPS/SSL errors without plug-ins

If you switch your site to HTTPS/SSL, then you may encounter mixed content errors.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to install a plugin like Really Simple SSL. However, the problem is that these plugins first capture all the URLs and then change them to HTTPS before sending them to the user's browser.

Use the latest PHP version

WordPress is primarily written in the PHP programming language. It is a server-side language, which means it is installed and runs on your hosting server.

All good WordPress hosting companies use the most stable version of PHP on their servers. However, your hosting company may be running a slightly older version of PHP.

The newer PHP 7 is twice as fast as its predecessor. This is a huge performance boost that your website must take advantage of.

You can install and enable version information byplugin to see which version of PHP your site is using.

Once activated, the plugin will display your PHP version in the footer area of your WordPress admin dashboard.

If your site is using a version lower than PHP 7, ask your hosting provider to update it for you. If they are unable to do so, it's time to find a new WordPress hosting company.