10 Smart Ways To Speed up WordPress Site & Load in <2 seconds

Want to reduce the time it takes for your WordPress website to load?

So I’m going to share ten tried-and-true strategies for speeding up your WordPress website.

Here are the results after implementing all of the tricks in this guide.

WordPress Page speed

How to use BloggingInsight WordPress SpeedUP Guide: 

SML = BloggingInsight.

Even though I did my best to make this guide as beginner-friendly as possible, getting the most out of it will take your attention. Nowadays, not all WordPress websites are the same. You may be using WordPress as:

  • Blog
  • Membership website
  • WooCommerce website
  • Learning Management System
  • Corporate WordPress Website

On the other hand, it could be something else.

However, the majority of the methods described here apply to all WordPress websites, while others are exclusive to one sort of website. For example, later on, I went into detail about WordPress transitory options, which are more pertinent to a membership site or any WordPress site that uses WooCommerce or EDD.

Also, I did my best to recommend a free plugin for each of the WordPress performance booster solutions listed below. However, it is best to utilize a single plugin that can handle everything.

 Have found WP-Rocket to be best at this, and that’s what I use here at BloggingInsight. 

So, you won’t need to install 4-5 plugins because this single plugin provides all of the functions that would otherwise require many plugins.

WP-Rocket will only solve half of the challenge; much more work is required to achieve a blazing-fast WordPress website. As we progress through this course, you will master the fundamentals of it and should be able to use it on your own.

Let’s do this.

Before getting started with the WordPress SpeedUP Guide:

The first thing you should do is test the speed of your WordPress site.

Run a speed test:

Here are a few WordPress speed-testing tools you may use:

  1. GTMetrix
  2. Web.dev
  3. Tool.Pingdom.com
  4. Page Speed Insights by Google
  5. Web page test
  6. TTFB checker (Time to first-byte checker)

Now, take a screenshot of the results and store it or write them down somewhere convenient.

Once you’ve completed the WordPress speed optimization steps outlined below, just re-run the speed test to compare the before and after results.

First, take a backup of WordPress.

Before you begin fine-tuning your WordPress, make a backup of the database.

Since we will be performing some database optimization, taking a backup provides a safety net in the event of an unexpected problem.

Should you apply all of these WordPress speed-up techniques?

Some of the tips can be applied right away, giving you a big speed boost.

However, some of the ideas, such as deploying CDN and using premium DNS, may necessitate the engagement of a developer or demand more technical knowledge over time.

Your goal should be to employ as many of these strategies as possible to lower the time it takes for your WordPress website to load.

Over the following few days, you should focus on adopting all of the speed optimization ideas to achieve the ultimate objective of less than 1 second load time.

I informed you a few days ago that Google started ranking websites based on speed, and since then we have all accepted and understood why it is not necessary to provide a quicker-loading blog.

Fast page load times benefit both search engines and readers. Not only will it provide an excellent user experience, but it will also help to reduce your blog’s bounce rate.

Today, I’ll share seven techniques to help you speed up WordPress and reduce its loading time. The end goal is to provide your users with pages that load quickly.

Proven Tips to Speed Up WordPress: How to Improve Load Time

1. Use the latest PHP – 7.0+

This simple modification could increase your WordPress speed by nearly 1.5 times. Many WordPress websites still use PHP 5.6, which is a depreciated version of PHP. The most recent version is PHP 7.4, which provides a substantial performance gain.

The PHP aspect is handled by your web hosting company, and you can either manually check your existing PHP version on which your WordPress site is operating, or just ask customer support:

Which PHP version is your WordPress website running?

If it is less than 7.0 (Which is 5.6), you can ask them to upgrade to the latest PHP version.

If you are using A2 hosting, you can follow the complete tutorial of A2 Hosting.

2. Select modern & fast WordPress themes:

If you’re still using an old WordPress theme built in 2022-23, it’s time to upgrade. A lot has changed in recent years, and the majority of themes are now built to load faster.

Furthermore, you should use a properly responsive theme to ensure that your blog loads quickly on mobile devices and tablets.

If you’re looking for a fast-loading WordPress theme, I propose the Astra theme, which is the best WordPress theme available.

Here are two more that are quite popular in 2024:

  1. Astra
  2. GeneratePress

3. Pick the server location closest to your idle audience.

The majority of web hosting firms allow you to select the data center in which your website is hosted. If you know your target audience’s country, choose the data center closest to your idle consumers.

If you use Kinsta, you may use the GCPing tool to determine the latency from your location to the various data centers provided by the Kinsta server.

Here’s a list of the fastest WordPress hosting options available.

4. Choose high-quality web hosting that is optimized for WordPress and speed.

This simple adjustment can significantly improve the speed of your WordPress website.

How do I know?

Because this is what happened when I switched BloggingInsight from basic hosting to managed hosting with A2 Hosting.

 Choose high-quality web hosting that is optimized for WordPress and speed.

Many of us make a mistake while choosing a local web hosting service to host our WordPress site. Typically, such hosting is recommended by our designer/developer or someone in our network.

Are these the best?

Your speed test could reveal the same.

Remember to only choose hosting companies that are well-optimized for operating WordPress blogs.

HostArmada definitely provides the highest quality servers in the shared hosting category, which is unused by the majority of us.

HostArmada

Hosting

If you run a WordPress-powered company website or a professional blog, HostArmada should be your hosting provider.

HostArmada provides several smart solutions that will immediately lower the load time of a WordPress site. Some of these features include:

  • Premium DNS
  • Free CDN
  • PHP 7.4

HostArmada operates your WordPress website on Google Cloud infrastructure, allowing you to choose from a variety of data center alternatives.

If you are using the WooCommerce platform, then only use these hosting:

5. Avoid using too many WordPress plugins.

Plugins are one of WordPress’s most powerful features, and some of you are so hooked on them that you have over 30-40 plugins installed on your blog. Not all plugins are terrible, and I’ve written a wonderful post about how many WordPress plugins you should use.

Try to keep your blog’s plugin count to a minimum and clean up your database regularly. The Advanced Database Cleaner plugin can help you accomplish this in no time.

Make sure you’re utilizing at least one cache plugin on your blog, and I recommend the WP Rocket plugin. One rule of thumb: remove any outdated plugins.

Many of our users also inquired, “How can I speed up WordPress Plugin”?

The most effective way to do this is to use less WordPress plugins. Whenever possible, use custom coding to offer a feature that you require.

Another option is to use the Asset Cleanup plugin to prevent scripts from loading on specified pages. Watch the video below to discover how to do this.

6. Optimize your images for faster loading.

Your objective for photos in WordPress should be:

  • Highest quality
  • Effective data compression
  • Smaller files.

photos are the foundation of the visual web, and if you include too many photos in your article or product pages, your page may load slowly.

The typical website sends 800-900 kb of photos for every URL.

Illustrating your posts with relevant photographs is fine, but more of anything is needed.

What would you do if your blog is photo-intensive?

You need to optimize your images for speed. You may immediately enhance the performance of a photo-intensive WordPress website by doing the following:

  • Use a CDN, preferably StackPath (formerly MAXCDN).
  • Use the correct image format:

Using the correct image format considerably minimizes the size of the image. At times, simply changing the file format from.png to.jpg resulted in an 80% reduction in size. With WordPress 5.8+, you can use webP pictures, which are 30% lighter than files.

If you have a graphics person on your team, ask them to compress the image in Photoshop. In our experience, it has been the most effective approach to reduce image size while maintaining quality.

Image compression and lazy loading are also useful technologies. Both strategies have been proven to speed up any WordPress page that uses photos.

Use this ShortPixel plugin to optimize your WordPress pictures. It provides 100 free image optimizations per month and allows you to accomplish the following:

  • Offer Webp image format (This will be very helpful)
  • Convert existing.png photos to.jpg or a superior webP format.
  • Different levels of compression
  • One-click compression of old images
  • Automatic compression of new photos.

Watch the following video to see how the ShortPixel plugin works:

7. Use a CDN network for faster delivery.

In the majority of cases, you will host your website at a certain geo-location.

For example, if you purchased hosting from A2 hosting, your website will most likely be hosted in the United States. Now, when a user from Asia or Australia visits your site, it will take a long time to load.

The reason is the distance between the user and your server.

What is the solution?

You can use a CDN network.

A CDN can assist solve this problem, allowing your website to load quickly in every part of the world.

Note: Cloudflare offers a free CDN service that is idle for all kinds of blogs.

8. Avoid too much marketing and scripts.

Avoid displaying too much advertising on your blog. Many PPC ads contain excessive HTML material, which can significantly slow down the loading time of your website.

If adverts are required, you should utilize Google AdSense or Media.net because they are well-optimized and provide the highest CPC.

Now, in many circumstances, it is impossible to uninstall third-party scripts, thus the best approach is to delay script loading. I recently discovered the “Flying scripts” plugin, and after using it to delay script loading, the GTMetrix test improved from 4.6 seconds to 1.4 seconds.

This is the plugin settings I’m using; however, you should adjust it based on the scripts you’re using:

Flying scripts settings

9. Reduce DNS lookups:

One of the reasons why your WordPress website takes longer to load could be a DNS lookup.

This is a pretty typical issue because we all employ a lot of third-party scripts for analytics, statistics, conversion optimization, and other purposes.

Here’s what you should do first.

Go to tools.pingdom.com.

Run a speed test.

Scroll to the bottom to load the results based on DNS load time.

You will see a result like the screenshot below:

You can quickly track which third-party scripts are loading on this page and how much DNS lookup time they are costing. It is a good idea to repeat the test three or four times after a 60-minute gap. The goal here is to determine which host is taking the longest DNS lookup time.

Now, here are some strategies for reducing DNS lookups.

1. Remove or replace the script:

If the script is causing excessive DNS lookup time, remove it or replace it with something more appropriate.

2. Choose a fast DNS service.

If you acquired your domain from NameCheap, GoDaddy, or any other service, their DNS resolver is not as fast as Cloudflare, Amazon Route 53, or even Google domains.

Consider switching your domain to Cloudflare or Google Domains. I prefer Cloudflare for domain hosting because it provides good value for money.

If you don’t want to relocate the domain, you can retain it with your current registrar and configure Cloudflare to use their premium-like free DNS service.

3. Begin using CDN.

I’ve mentioned using CDN before, and I’m including it again here. My goal here is to help you realize in which cases CDN will be most helpful.

If you’ve found that DNS lookup is causing your WordPress website to load slowly, you should start using a CDN immediately.

Using a CDN will drastically reduce the number of DNS lookups, resulting in an instant speed gain. If you truly want to speed up WordPress, I believe that using a CDN is no longer an option.

4. Implement DNS Prefetching in WordPress

DNS Prefetching in WordPress

Another technique that improves WordPress speed performance is using the DNS prefetching technique. Here is how the Google Chromium Dev project explains DNS pre-fetching:

DNS prefetching is an attempt to resolve domain names before a user clicks a link. This is accomplished via the computer’s standard DNS resolution method; no connection to Google is required. Once a domain name has been resolved, navigating to that domain will result in no effective delay owing to DNS resolution time.

The most obvious use case for DNS prefetching is when a user is viewing a page with numerous links to different domains, such as a search results page.

When we discover hyperlinks in sites, we extract their domain names and resolve them to IP addresses.

All of this is done in parallel with the user’s reading of the page, requiring little CPU and network resources. When a user clicks on one of these pre-resolved names, their navigation time is reduced by around 200 milliseconds on average.

More essential than the average savings, customers will avoid the “worst-case” DNS resolution delays, which are frequently more than one second.

At the time of writing, all major browsers support DNS prefetching.

You can activate DNS prefetching in WordPress using plugins or custom code.

Preload cache

Alternatively, you can use the Simple DNS prefetch plugin, which performs the same thing.

10. Remove the Transient options.

Removing expired transient options can result in a large performance benefit. This WordPress speed-up trick is especially useful if you run a WordPress membership website, and use WooCommerce, EDD, or a social sharing plugin. First and foremost, let us define transitory.

What are the WordPress transients:

Transients API allows developers to store data in databases with expiration dates. Typically, expired transients in your database are removed automatically; however, this is not always the case. Sometimes they just sit there and disorder your database, causing performance delays and a dramatic reduction in load time.

The solution is straightforward. Remove the expired temporary options.

This option is available in all database optimization plugins, including WP-Rocket. If you want a stand-alone plugin to delete expired transient options, Pippin Williamson’s Transients Manager plugin is what you’re searching for.

After installing the plugin, go to Tools > Transients to manage and delete WordPress short-term options.

WP-Rocket plugin users can locate this option under Database > Transients Cleanup.

WP Rocket Database settings

Optimized SML WordPress performance Conclusion: Think from the user’s perspective.

It’s fine to be fascinated with speed, but instead of depending solely on the numbers provided by programs such as GTMetrix or Pingdom, consider more user-friendly metrics.

Even if TTFB and first meaningful paint are high, your page loads in less than 2 seconds, you can see the impact of this in Google Analytics or any other data engine you use.

Keeping your visitors in mind while optimizing can also assist you avoid losing crucial scripts and capabilities that you’ve developed over time. Along with speed, keep conversion in mind; this will aid you greatly in the long run.

Okay, so here are a few basic steps you may take to improve the load time of your blog.

If you have any more tips that can help us enhance the performance of a WordPress website?

For further reading:

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