There are many things we can do to improve WordPress performance and speed, change hosting, theme, modify the .htaccess file, etc.
But in this post, we are not going to dig deep into everything we could do to make WordPress load faster and perform very well. We are only going to focus on quick and easy modifications that we can all carry out from our control panel.
Check the current performance of your website
Before starting to optimize your WordPress, you must know exactly where you are. To do this, we recommend that you use Pingdom, aHrefs or SemRush.
It is a very reliable tool with which you can analyze:
- The level of performance of your website.
- How many queries does the database make?
- The total weight of the page.
- The time it takes to load.
When Pingdom shows you these results, it also tells you what percentage of the websites it has analyzed are faster than yours. This will give you an idea of whether you are above or below the average.
Please write down the results to compare them with what you will get after applying these tips.
So in this post, we are going to talk about eight tips:
- Update everything, the sooner, the better
- Limit and control the use of plugins as much as possible
- Use a good cache plugin
- Optimize images
- Optimize HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Optimize the home page
- Clean up spam and database
- Use a Lazy load plugin
1. Update everything, the sooner, the better
WordPress, theme, and plugins, everything.
Each update released by developers brings performance improvements, increased stability, and new functionality.
If you have everything updated, you will be sure that your website works to its full potential.
Of course, before pressing the update button, remember to create a backup of the database.
The update process is usually straightforward, and there should be no problems, but from time to time, unforeseen issues arise. If you have a backup, you can restore your website easily and quickly.
2. Limit and control the use of plugins as much as possible
Plugins are cool. They let you add a lot of functionalities that you don’t need.
Have only the ones you need active, and before installing one or the other, compare their performance. To analyze the loading speed of the plugins, you can use the P3 performance.
Pay special attention to those who serve to:
- Image galleries.
- SEO.
- Social networks.
- Sliders.
3. Use a good cache plugin
Every time WordPress loads a page, it has to make a multitude of connections to the database, which means high consumption of resources and memory on your server.
With a cache plugin, WordPress does not have to create a new page every time it is displayed. The page is created only once and is cached for a certain time.
This allows WordPress to display pages much faster, greatly reducing load time.
4. Optimize images
This is a crucial point.
Too many images or the excessive weight of them can destroy the loading times of your website.
It is not about uploading pixelated images from compressing them so much, but you have to find a balance between quality and weight.
To solve this problem, you have two solutions:
- Optimize and resize the images with some editing program before uploading them to WordPress.
- If they are already uploaded, you can install the WP Smush.it plugin. It will be in charge of compressing the images that you upload from that moment and gives you the possibility to compress those that you have already uploaded.
5. Optimize HTML, CSS and JavaScript
The WordPress code can be compressed so that the servers take less time to read it and, therefore, to load our website.
To do this, you can use the WP-Minify plugin.
Another option is to use the W3 Total Cache plugin, which also allows you to compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so if you decided to install it, you could save on WP-Minify.
6. Optimize the home page
Your home page should be light. It must load fast since it will be one of the most visited.
You can try these solutions:
- Reduce the number of entries the page displays. Not more than 5.
- Delete unnecessary widgets. Those of the social networks that show the faces of our followers consume a lot.
- Do not show the full entries, only an excerpt.
- Be careful with the number of images you show.
- If you don’t need a slider, don’t put it on.
7. Clean up spam and database
All the reviews you make on the entries you create are saved in the database, which will eventually slow down your website.
The same goes for spam comments. To solve it, you can install the WP-Optimize plugin.
What it does is clean the database and remove those comments and revisions you don’t need.
Smaller database, faster web.
8. Use a Lazy load plugin
What these plugins do is that they only load the images when the user goes to see them.
Let us explain.
Imagine that the post you are in has 1,500 words and seven images interspersed in the text. If you are reading the beginning of the post, you will only be seeing one or two images.
What the plugin does is load only those two images, and as you go down, it will show the following ones.
This improves loading speed and saves bandwidth since many images are never displayed and, therefore, cannot be loaded. There are many; we leave you one with a good reputation that is BJ Lazy Load. Featured image source
