7 best Steps to Speed Up WordPress Website (Ultimate 2022 Guide)

Most of the visitors like a fast-loading website for that we have to Speed up WordPress Website. It impacts hugely on every business.

Website speed optimization is a major work now. To run a website we have to keep track of our websites speed every time. In this article, I will guide and show you the ways to speed up WordPress website.

Why you should speed up WordPress website?

Fast of all Google ranking. Yes, my friend, Site Speed is one of the Google ranking factors. Google developed thereon lighthouse to check website speed. You can check your website speed to know what is the result. Fast loading sites rank fast on Google as well as rank on other search engines like Bing, and Yandex.

Secondly reducing bounce rate. Statistics says that on average 35 to 45 percent of visitors don’t visit low-speed loading website and it increases the bounce rate of a website. Bounce rate impact google ranking and it suffers most of the websites. If you are having a woo-commerce business then you will lose your customer rapidly cause of the bounce rate.

Thirdly and most importantly to generate revenue. Yes, If we have a blog site, woo-commerce site, travel blog, or any service-providing website then our goal is to generate revenue to continue our services online. IF our website ranking on google falls down and the bounce rate increases then we will lose our customers. We have increased our audience or customer rapidly to increase the revenue from our work.

That’s why we should care about website speed no matter if that is a WordPress Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify website! And we have to speed up our site. In the article, I will teach you all about that on WordPress.

Isn’t WordPress fast enough already?

WordPress’s latest versions are always fast with the latest PHP versions. But when you add new themes and plugins to develop your website in a certain structure it creates many files and increases the WordPress website database.

When the new files arrive and the site server loads all of them site becomes slow to load. That’s why we have to speed up WordPress website.

How to test website speed online?

Before we start the process of speeding up any website we have to analyze the current speed and note the problems that hamper the website.

We will measure the speed by checking the homepage as it is the important page of any website, you can check your other pages. We can check the speed on these websites:

1. PageSpeed Insights – Google Search
2. GTmetrix | Website Performance Testing and Monitoring
3. Website Speed Test | Pingdom Tools

After testing and analyzing website speed we can start our work. Be ready to know 7 Important Ways to Speed Up WordPress Website.

1. Choose High-Speed Hosting

First of all, we have to host our website on high-speed hosting. Because host servers serve websites. It is very important for a website. Only high-speed hosts can serve the pages of the site fastly.

That’s why we have to take hosting from a high-speed hosting service provider because all hosting providers don’t have good service. We have to take a deep look and analyze good hosting. Read also 7 best-shared hosting providers for new websites that provide high-speed server response time and support. It will help to reduce server response time.

You can buy hosting from here as they provide fast speed:

1. TMDHosting
2. KnownHosting
3. Namecheap: Cheap website hosting
4. Liquid Web | Managed Hosting & Custom Solutions
5. Hostinger: WordPress recommended LiteSpeed hosting provider.

Personally, I suggest going for only light speed server technology that uses hosting providers. If the server uses Litespeed technology, It can serve websites blazing fast to speed up WordPress websites. Read 10 Best hosting providers who use LiteSpeed server technology. You can buy hosting from:

1. Interserver: VPS Powerful VPS hosting
2. ChemiCloud – Hosting That Simply Works
3. Dreamhost: Unbeatable WordPress Hosting
4. Hostwinds: Customer-Centric Web Hosting Solutions
5. A2Hosting: Their turbo host plan uses LiteSpeed technology and provides good server response time.

2. Use a Lightweight Theme and Plugin

WordPress frameworks design depend on themes and plugins. Lightweight themes load faster. The website page builder plugins that are lightweight make the pages very simple to load. Otherwise, Heavy themes and plugins highly hamper the site loading time. I suggest using these themes:

1. Astra
2. Kadence
3. OceanWp
4. Generatepress

The above themes are very lightweight and very much popular. I also suggest using these lightweight page builder plugins:

1. Kadence Gutenberg Blocks
2. Ultimate addon for Guttenberg
3. Elementor page builder

I highly suggest going for Gutenberg page builder, Then go to another page builder if Gutenberg plugins don’t fully fill your requirements.

3. Reduce Server Resources

Lots of Server resources cause slow server response. That’s why we have to reduce the server resources. To reduce it, You can enable cache on the website. There are lots of free plugins on the wordpress directory that you can use to enable cache, browser cache, and object cache. Some are:

1. WP-Rocket
2. LiteSpeed Cache
3. WP Fastest Cache
4. W3 Total Cache

Read more: 7 best cache plugins to enable cache on WordPress.

Cache store the first visit to a website. Then if any visitor visits the site the browser provides the cache page of the website.

Secondly, you can stop the pingback service from wordpress. As wordpress provides free pingback, it takes a good amount of resources to identify who is giving you a follow backlink. To stop pingback and reduce server response time:

Go to settings > writings > remove pingback service > save.

Thirdly enabling Gzip compression. Gzip compression compresses the page and serves the extract version to the visitor, it reduces the server resources and speeds up the WordPress website. You have to just add these codes on the .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c> 
# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml 

# Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers) 
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html 
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip 
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html 
Header append Vary User-Agent 
</IfModule>

4. Minify Website CSS and Java Scripts (JS)

Website design and framework mostly depend on CSS and Java scripts. Most of the plugins use Java scripts to run their plugins. Lots of CSS and java scripts hamper website speed badly. That’s why you have to minify the CSS and java scripts so that it reduces the unnecessary CSS and js by minifying them. It will speed up WordPress website.

Also, you have to combine them into one file while minifying. It will affect to speed up the WordPress website. To minify CSS and JS you can use:

1. Wp-Rocket
2. LiteSpeed Cache

This plugin helps highly to minify and speed up WordPress Websites. But be careful, some functions can break your website. You can hire an expert to do this from Fiverr.

5. Cleanup unwanted files and database

Website unwanted files make the website very heavy and the database can be a big cause of unlimited revision or any rubbish files. It creates server loading time. Unwanted plugins cause java scripts to fall on the website. Makes the site heavier. That’s why you should care about it very to speed up WordPress website. Remove unwanted themes and plugins from your website. Use the plugin called WP-Optimize – Cache, Clean, Compress.

WP-optimize cleans the unwanted files and database. It will optimize and make fresh the website. You will see a great impact while you speed up WordPress website.

6. Optimize uploaded Images

Image is one of the main things that we use to attract our Website visitors. But mostly the designed images we use that have high size, hampers the loading time. That’s we have to optimize every uploaded image on the website. There are lots of plugins that you can use to optimize your images while uploading. It will help very much when you will speed up WordPress website.

It helps to reduce the file size and then serves as an optimized image to viewers. Also, Image optimization plugins convert the images to .webp versions. WebP is the browser version of images, it loads more smoothly. Premium plugins gave you the facilities to optimize and serve WebP images. Here are some most popular plugins that you can use:

1. EWWW Image Optimizer
2. ShortPixel Image Optimizer
3. Image optimization & Lazy Load by Optimole

Read more: 10 image optimization plugins for WordPress website.

7. Use CDN and improve server response time

CDN helps to deliver sites to worldwide users very fast. CDN has lots of servers and data centers worldwide, their technology helps to provide the site from the nearest data center of the user.

Usually, we use a hosting service from a default location. Who is nearest to that location, gets the site pages fast. But who is far away from the hosting data center, sees a high page load time!

To solve this problem all recommend using a good CDN provider. There are lots of CDN providers, you will get it free or paid. I recommend using:

1. Cloudflare CDN
2. Max CDN

Cloudflare is a free CDN network. You can use the free plan to speed up WordPress website. If you use LiteSpeed cache or Wp-rocket then Cloudflare integration helps you a lot.

Conclusion: Website speed is a major thing. We can easily understand that, If any site loads slowly we became bored and skip that site. We have made our website that much faster and lightweight so that nobody became bored while visiting any website.

Also, read another detailed guide on How to speed up WordPress Website.

If you are suffering and are concerned about how you will speed up WordPress website. You can take help from us. We will give you the rest. Also, You can buy website speed optimization services from Fiverr or Upwork. Have a look at Proficient man services. It might help you!