These 20 tips will help you speed up your Wordpress website and make it load faster. For more, please visit - https://workurious.com/

1. workurious.com
20 TIPS TO MAKE YOUR WORDPRESS
WEBSITE LOAD FASTER

2. 1. Know Your Website Load Speed
❖ To optimize a website for speed, first we should know the
current speed. Fortunately, we have some amazing tools
available. Using Google PageSpeed Insights you will know
your website’s performance rank and Google also suggests
what you should do to optimize your website further.
❖ Another great tool is Pingdom Website Speed Test, using
which you can check your website from different
geographical locations. It tells you performance grade, load
time, page size and suggests optimization steps for your
website.

3. 2. Image Optimization
❖ Before you upload images into your website, you may need to pause for
a minute. Images make your websites look attractive and over 65% of
visitors are attracted by images and themes of a website, but with these
images your website may become heavier to load fast.
❖ According to httparchive.org, images comprises 65% of a page’s total
weight; making images the biggest contributor to a page’s weight, and
equally so, to the slower load time. The good news is the images can be
optimized without losing its overall quality. There are WordPress
plugins available for image optimization that you can use:
❖ • EWWW Image Optimizer
❖ • Smush

4. 3. Update Your Website
❖ Websites, just like vehicles, require maintenance.
Updates to WordPress core, theme and plugins provide
fix to bugs, increases the overall security and add
features and functionality that would generally improve
the performance of your website, so it’s a good rule of
thumb to constantly keep your websites updated with
the latest upgrades available.

5. 4. Caching
❖ WordPress generates pages dynamically. This means your websites
pulls resources from the database, from third-party sites, from theme
files, and from image folders, just to get a single page generated.
Caching can make the biggest differences to your website’s loading
process because it creates copies of your web pages after they have been
generated and assembled by WordPress, reducing the loading time by
more than half.
❖ There are many caching plugins available, but these two dominate the
competition:
❖ • W3 Total Cache
❖ • WP Super Cache

6. 5. Lazy Loading
❖ If you don’t know, lazy loading is a process that stops
images on a web page to be loaded all at once. Instead,
images are only displayed as they become visible on
screen. Since images often make up the bulk of a web
page, your loading time can be affected by rendering
your images all at once. WordPress offers a whole lot
of lazy loading plugins to implement this.

7. 6. Content Delivery Network (CDN)
❖ CDN is basically a cluster of servers spread around the world used to store
copies of your website’s pages, files, images etc. This means that when a
visitor goes to your website, instead of having to load your website’s
information (pages, files images, etc.) from your server, the CDN will
provide the same information from the closest server to the visitor. With
this type of service, you know you can really boost your website’s speed.
❖ There are various CDNs around. CloudFlare and MaxCDN are good
content delivery networks. If you are using WP Engine, EverCache is in
their words:
❖ “WP Engine’s secret sauce that makes every WordPress site we host
incredibly fast, and ridiculously scalable.”

8. 7. Web hosting
❖ Web hosting plays an important role in rendering the speed
of a website, and herein lies the problem. The thing with
webhosting is equipment. The cheaper the services, the more
likely the chance you sharing a single server with lots of
customers, therefore your website might deliver much
slower than expected during peak hours. Another great
consideration is the location of your web hosting company, if
majority of your customers are within US, then it’s advisable
you get a web hosting company with servers within the
United States and not in Europe, Asia or elsewhere.

9. 8. Plugins Optimization
❖ Optimizing also goes for your plugins. Every plugin
update has new improvements and security fixes. So,
whenever you see a plugin update notification, act on it
and update your plugins.

10. 9. Trackbacks and Pingbacks
❖ If you are not aware, pingbacks and trackbacks are used
to notify other blogs you are linking to them or when
someone else is linking to your website’s content,
having pingbacks and trackbacks can be a nice thing,
but it really is not that relevant.
❖ Resources can be saved during page load by having
tracking turned off for your entire website, and this can
be done under WP-Admin > Settings > Discussion in
your WordPress frame backend.

11. 10. Server Requests
❖ Upon clicking a URL an HTTP requests is sent to the
server. Now you might have guessed correctly that the
more server requests your website has to make, the
slower the web pages load. So how do we reduce server
requests? Pingdom can provide a picture on where you
could save on server requests, it gives a breakdown of
server requests and how long the requests take to be
computed.

12. 11. Database Maintenance
❖ WordPress will get bloated by plugins, themes, and
other extensions over time, if left on its own. On top of
the list is Overhead, it’s a temporary disk space that
increases over time if it’s not cleared. Using plugins
like WP-Optimize would be an excellent tool to
optimize and maintain your database. You can take care
of this issue with just a few clicks.

13. 12. WordPress Framework
❖ Using WordPress themes with a lot of widgets, social
icons, dynamic elements, sliders and many more
elements can be eye catching. But if they have too many
elements and higher page sizes, then your web server
will definitely be taking a beating. Picking a theme that
uses a good framework, lightweight and non-memory
intensive for your website would greatly increase the
performance of the website.

14. 13. Organize Your Plugins
❖ Some believe the lesser plugins you use the faster your
website is, but that isn’t true as the WordPress frame can
support many plugins if they have the right codes.
However, the problem is finding the right plugins and
organizing them so you can see the ones that consume
space and determine if they are needed. You can get a
plugin organizer at Plugin Organizer.

15. 14. Code Compression
❖ Most bloggers aren’t coders and they really don’t
understand how the framework coding works.
However, when it comes to the subject of speed, you
might want to consider a solution for compressing your
website’s code and shave off irrelevant spaces that’s
being used up. Plugins like WordPress Gzip
Compression and WP Minify Fix have been known to
effectively shrink JavaScript, CSS and HTML codes.

16. 15. Viruses and Malware
❖ Monitor your websites for malware and viruses,
because after all the optimization and compressions, if
your core isn’t clean and is at risk, your websites would
load slower, so keeping your website clean of virus and
malware would surely improve the response time of
your pages.

17. 16. Ads
❖ Yes, ads generate income but you might want to
consider using text link ads in place of your image ads
where possible, lesser images faster loading time.

18. 17. Avatars and Gravatars
❖ Using gravatars for your users is cool, as people like
having their image on content, you may want to cache
your gravatars so as not to affect the performance of the
site, there are many plugins out there for this task but
FV Gravatar Cache is a good one.

19. 18. Excerpts and shortened posts
❖ Using excerpts on your home page instead of full posts
is an optional but a great way to reducing the load time
for your website. They provide a summary of your blog
post, There might be thoughts about what portion of the
article will be cut off, but implementing plugins like
Easy Custom Auto Excerpt simplifies the process by
automatically generating excerpt with some few clicks.

20. 19. Scripts
❖ Having JavaScript and CSS scripts are great but you
might want to consider putting them in the footer, also
external scripts should be addressed and the important
ones should be left while the ones you can live without
should be disabled, it is all about compromise and you
may want to uses the Pingdom tool to filter your
external scripts by size and know which can be
removed.

21. 20. Social Media Widgets
❖ Social media widgets are good, but you might want to
consider using static social media links, as most
bloggers do not take advantage of the networking
abilities codes provide and just use the social media link
to integrate our blog with our social media profile, if
you cannot code, plugins like Floating Social Bar, WP
MashSocial Widget would help in reducing the external
scripts the links call for.

22. In conclusion, general maintenance and monitoring of
your site should be foremost on your mind, some of the
plugins are install-and-forget but from time to time
check for updates and replace or remove redundant
plugins; clearing spam and comments too would help
increase the sites performance. Optimizing a WordPress
site enables it to load faster, which results in a better
conversion rate and ultimately revenue.

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