Comprehensive Guide: How to Optimize WordPress Website Speed and Performance (Part II)

18 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

Regarding how to speed up WordPress, in order to help less tech-savvy people to optimize the speed of their WordPress website, you can operate according to the following in order to hire a developer only if you need to do so at the final stage.

1. Test your website speed

Use analytics tools to check for possible problems with your site and find easy fixes. Google PageSpeed, GTmetrix, Pingdom, WebPageTest, and Google Lighthouse are recommended for testing website speed.

These tools can help you understand the real issues with your site's loading speed. a score of 70+ is a good score, while 80+ is even better, indicating that your site will load in 3.5 seconds or less. Load times of more than 8 seconds (or even 5 seconds) are concerning and infrastructure improvements should be considered.

2. Optimization of website images

Optimizing your website images is the surest way to reduce load times and speed up WordPress. Optimizing your website's images using TinyPNG respond in singing Optimizilla Optimize images, choose the correct image resolution and make sure the image format is PNG or JPEG. install the Delayed Loading plugin to load only the necessary images to increase loading speed.

3. Delete unnecessary slides, videos and images

Removing unnecessary images and videos from key pages can dramatically improve website speed. Use the SEMrush Analyze the status of the site and remove unwanted media.

4. Selection of efficient themes

Choose a theme that doesn't take up too much space and ask the developer to write code specific to your needs. Avoid free themes with tons of unnecessary features and turn off unnecessary widgets.

5. Use only the necessary plug-ins

Don't overload your website with too many plugins and add-ons. Check and make sure plugins are working properly, update them regularly and remove unnecessary plugins. Use Query Monitor to analyze plugin performance and turn off unnecessary plugins.

6. Remove unnecessary widgets

Remove third-party code that slows down your website, such as Facebook pixels or Google Analytics. these tools typically slow down websites, so minimize their use.

7. Pay attention to the loading speed of Google ads

Ads may slow down the site, but this can be solved by asking the ad hosting provider to optimize or use delayed loading. This way, ads will only be displayed when the user scrolls near them.

8. Reduction in the number of redirections

Reducing the number of redirects to external sources can reduce load times. Shortening URLs and not using HTTPS or WWW in links prevents redirects from linking together.

9. Updating web hosting service providers

If your current hosting provider is unable to meet your needs, consider switching to a more reliable provider such as SiteGround. using cloud space hosting services can significantly improve website performance.

10. Use of high-quality DNS providers

Using a high-quality DNS provider, such as Cloudflare, can dramatically improve website speeds.Cloudflare offers the best infrastructure and responsive support.

11. Ensuring the use of content delivery networks (CDNs)

Using a CDN speeds up access to your website for users around the world. CDNs optimize the distribution of static resources and increase loading speeds. Cloudflare is recommended as it is reliable and provides strong support.

12. Enabling caching

Caching can significantly optimize the speed of your website. We recommend the Swift Performance, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache plugins. WP Rocket is the simplest caching plugin, comes pre-configured with basic settings and is ready to use after installation.

13. Improving site speed on mobile views

Optimize the speed of your website on mobile devices with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology, which provides a simple view that displays only the necessary information and greatly improves loading speed. The WP AMP plugin is recommended.

14. Optimizing JavaScript Code

Optimizing and compressing JavaScript code can significantly improve website speed. If code optimization is too complex, it is recommended to hire a developer to help.

15. Enabling HTTP/2

HTTP/2 can significantly improve website speeds, reducing latency and improving data transfer efficiency through techniques such as multiplexing, header compression, and server push.

16. Pre-connection and pre-loading

Prefetching, pre-linking and pre-loading can increase website speed.Google takes these optimization techniques into account in its search engine results pages.

17. Use of appropriate image resolutions and formats

Choose the right resolution and format when uploading your images, making sure they are no more than 1500 pixels wide and have a resolution of 72 DPI. this can significantly reduce loading times.

18. Regularly check website performance

Regularly check your website speed using the recommended tools and contact your hosting provider's support to resolve issues that may be causing the slowdown. Clear your cache regularly and optimize your website configuration to ensure that your website speed is always at its best.

Top 6 Caching Plugins on WordPress

As we mentioned, using caching plugins can be very helpful in speeding up WordPress. Here are the top 6 caching plugins that will help you in this regard.

What is caching?

A cache is a temporary storage space that allows quick access to data if requested. Once a request is sent, the computer performs multiple processes. Caching solves the problem of constantly sending and receiving data by storing some of it in temporary space, thus speeding up access.

Why is caching so important?

Caching can significantly speed up a website's load time, provide a better user experience, significantly improve user engagement rates, and increase traffic. Fast-loading websites perform better in terms of search engine optimization (SEO), with search engines prioritizing websites that load quickly.

Best Caching Plugin

1. Swift Performance
   • specificities: Automatically set up to dramatically improve site loading speeds with a single click, optimize images, cache, optimize CSS and JS code, optimize databases, manage plugins.
   • utilization effect: Can speed up WordPress sites by 440%.

2. Autoptimize
   • specificities: Remove unnecessary characters such as spaces and line breaks from your theme and WordPress code, compress and optimize CSS, HTML and JavaScript code.
   • Usage: Install the plugin, select the code you wish to optimize in the settings menu, and you can add scripts to exclude specific code.

3. WP Rocket
   • specificities: One of the easiest to use caching plugins that doesn't require extensive knowledge of WordPress, one-click caching, crawlers automatically call site pages to activate caching, Gzip compression, page caching, and cache preloading support.
   • Additional features: Support for delayed image loading, CDN and DNS.

4. W3 Total Cache
   • specificities: One of the most popular caching plugins, with comprehensive features including web caching, object caching, Gzip compression, compression support, CDN support and more.
   • caveat: It may seem complicated to use for the first time, but once you are familiar with it, it can effectively improve the performance of your website.

5. WP Super Cache
   • specificities: Popular free plugin with all the useful features to speed up your site with Gzip compression, page caching, use cache before loading, CDN support.
   • Usage: Has two tabs, Full Setup and Basic Setup.

6. Sucuri Security
   • specificities: Top WordPress firewall and security plugin with preset options for web caching and Gzip compression.
   • dominance: Acts as a DNS firewall, caching content and providing access before it is requested by the user, improving site usability.

Summary:

Optimizing your WordPress site for speed is a critical step in improving your user experience and search engine rankings. By using Google PageSpeed,GTmetrix Tools such as testing website speed, optimizing images, removing unnecessary media and plugins, choosing an efficient theme, enabling caching and content delivery networks (CDNs), and regularly checking website performance can significantly improve website loading speed. Employing top caching plugins such as Swift Performance, WP Rocket, and others, combined with HTTP/2 and preloading techniques, will further improve the responsiveness and overall performance of your website.

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