WordPress is a great CMS but it can run slowly if your site is not set up and optimized correctly. Figuring out why it’s slow can be challenging but there are some things you can do that will quickly boost performance and speed up your site.
Fast loading pages are vital to improve the user experience of your website visitors and for your Google ranking. It’s now well-known that page speed has a direct effect on search rankings and Google penalizes slow websites by pushing them below faster competitors.
01. Monitor resource usage to see how pages are performing
UsageDD is a great little plugin that adds a small box bottom center of your screen. It’s only visible to admins and displays the number of MySQL queries, amount of memory used by the page’s code, “time to first byte” (TTFB) and time required to generate the full page. TTFB is used by Google for page-ranking purposes.
02. Select the CSS/JS that loads on a page
Asset CleanUp scans your page and detects all the assets that are loaded. All you have to do when editing a page is select the CSS/JS that are not necessary to load, speeding up the page load time. Make sure you test this thoroughly as it can break your site.
03. Install a caching plugin
Caching works by by serving up static HTML files of each page on your website instead of processing heavier WordPress PHP scripts, reducing database queries and the load on your server. It can dramatically improve the speed and performance of your website. I generally use WP Super Cache to boost performance on sites.
04. Use the latest WebP image format
WebP tech speeds up your website by serving WebP and AVIF images instead of the standard JPEG, PNG and GIF formats. WebP can save over half the page weight without losing quality. WebP Converter for Media has a simple setup and works efficiently.
Note
Installing these plugins will help speed up your site but the quality of your hosting will play a huge part in determining site speed.
If you use eCommerce plugins, membership plugins, page builder plugins, gallery plugins, social sharing plugins or stats plugins, they can all impact website performance and affect page load time.
