How to Speed up WordPress Sites

[miladnorozi]

Hello friends
I designed a site with WordPress to address <snip>
But the speed of my site is very bad and it takes a long time to load. I wanted to see if you have a way to increase the speed of my site, help me a lot.

[edited by: engine at 8:41 am (utc) on Oct 28, 2021]
[edit reason] no specifcs, thanks, please see WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]

[not2easy]

Hello miladnorozi and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

WordPress can be slowed by an overburdened server (such as is more common on shared hosting for example) or overuse of plugins, or an older version of PHP or inefficient caching or too many off-site resources (such as external fonts, scripts or images) and most commonly, it is slowed by images too large or un-optimized for the site. And now and then it is bloated coding.

[tangor]

As not2easy notes above, just to the essentials, do due diligence in any imaging density (always towards speed and realization that anything over 96dpi and 254 colors is a waste of bandwidth with no benefit.

HOWEVER, today's web speeds are dramatically faster than two decades ago so just keep your images reasonable in size (pixel widths) and thing should work great.

And---thanks for joining Webmasterworld!

Drop any third party stuff you do not need, particularly anything your host throws in as a "bonus".

[Kendo]

Have a look at your web pages source code... see the html and the umpteen CSS and JS files being loaded? What an eye-opener that can be.

Choose plugins and themes wisely as some are not as well designed as you may assume.

Dump Google tracking code... it is a resource killer and not needed... does not affect rankings.

[Kendo]

Minify your CSS and Java files.

Most will already be minified. But the huge mistake that too many site owners make is installing too many plugins. I am often asked to debug failures of our own plugins and more often that not I see more than 40 different plugins installed, all using different CSS and JS files. On page load all of those includes are loaded. The risk of error is also very high because function names, parameters, unique identifiers and IDs can clash.

[eriky]

I've been running a fairly popular WordPress-based website for two years now. I'm a highly experienced/senior software and systems engineer, with two decades of experience running websites. These are my top tips:

• Use Cloudflare. If you can, pay for the Automatic Platform Optimization ($5/month). It will cache 95% or more of all your requests. Check out and try all the options to speed up your site (like rocker loader, etc.)
  
• Besides caching and speed, you'll be glad to have Cloudflare once you experience your first DoS or DDoS attack
  
• Combine your CSS and JavaScript. You can leave minifying them to Cloudflare or not do it at all. HTTP compression takes care of saving bytes too.
  
• Use as few plugins as you can, or at least be very picky. Some plugins are horrendous in terms of code and resource usage. Many plugins are written by unskilled programmers but do get high ratings (because most users are unskilled too and don't see the problems they introduce on their website).
  
• Pick a good, lightweight theme. Don't be blinded by fancy pictures. There are a LOT of theme creators that constantly pump out new themes with fancy images etc. They are usually worthless, over expensive, and badly maintained. Sort themes by the number of installs, and pick one like GeneratePress or Astra. I use GeneratePress Premium. They have solid support, have been around for years, and know their stuff. If you're serious about your site and have the money, shell out the $30/year or so for the premium version. You can use it on all your sites with a single license.
  

Some must-have plugins I install on each site, that help with security and/or speed: Wordfence, WPS Hide Login, antispam bee, Yoast SEO, Lazy Load for Comments

If you do everything from above, I'm convinced you have a super solid base to build on.

[robzilla]

At a minimum, install a caching plug-in like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. Without one, WordPress does a lot of unnecessary stuff on each page load. (Not strictly unnecessary, but unnecessarily repetitive.)

[eriky]

To add to @robzilla (can't edit my post above), I use WP-Optimize to combine and minify CSS and JavaScript. I disabled the caching function because Cloudflare does a much better job, but before Cloudflare, the caching worked well for me too.

[vishnu chatheri]

how are you checking the speed of your site?
If you are using "Pagespeed by google" it will show you what factors are affecting your website speed.
Common issues will be :
* Image size
* Server response time. etc