How To Improve Your WordPress Speed & Performance (Ultimate Guide)

In this digital world, everything is about speed and performance. Every developer and business owner continuously find a way how to speed up WordPress sites. The following information will help you, how to improve your WordPress speed & performance (Ultimate Guide). you will learn a few tips for increasing your WordPress site speed and performance.

How to improve your WordPress speed? This complete tool is the most used in the world for building websites, but if it is not well optimized it can cause performance problems. That’s why they need good optimization techniques, a good caching system, and how to choose the best website hosting will be the topics we will cover.

One of Google’s ranking factors is precisely the speed of your WordPress in relation to your competitors’ websites. Example: Your website is from the tech niche and your direct competitor has a faster website. Soon, he will appear in front of you in the search engine and this will certainly bring you fewer hits.

How to improve your WordPress speed

However, we are only talking about the SEO part, guidelines, and techniques used by Google. Another important point would be the experience that the user will have to access your page. Some studies even go further and reveal that just 1 second more delay in loading your site would drive away up to 10% of hits.

How to Identify if My WordPress Website is Slow

Some web tools can test your site’s speed and help you with that. With just a few clicks you’ll know if your site has performance issues or not. The GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed, WebPagetest, and Google Test My Site are some of them that would identify problems quickly focusing mainly on the speed that your site loads.

These tools generate a result/score of the speed of your website, above 80 is considered a good score, and below 59 is a bad score. In case of a bad score, a report on how to improve this result will be visible.

Some suggestions on how to reduce the size of your images, use a good caching system, and problems with your HTML codes will also be present in this quick review.

However, these tools alone will not be enough to solve your performance problems. It’s no use reducing your HTML codes and compressing your images if the user experience will be bad.

Here are some tips on how to improve the speed of your WordPress and bring a good experience for your users, customers, or readers.

Cache

Having a good caching system is one of the most important points that will make your WordPress speed improve a lot. This happens because the cache system saves some data from your page on the server, making these data/copies available faster to the user when requested. It also prevents your site from being visibly down if the server experiences a momentary crash, the user probably won’t even notice the downtime. The cache serves mainly so that the server does not have to load your page from scratch every time it is requested.

A plugin that can help a lot in this issue is the W3 Total Cache. This plugin has settings such as browser cache help, integration with external services such as CDN (excellent in helping your website speed), and minification systems (Excludes redundant user and browser activities).

PHP version

PHP is a programming language developed for web applications and is the basis of WordPress. That’s why having it always up to date is essential to keep your website safe and faster.

Besides the security issue, your WordPress speed is also affected if your PHP is not up to date. This is because the WordPress platform itself is constantly updated with PHP, and some plugins on your site may no longer have functions or have functionality issues for outdated versions (Aside from the vulnerability issue).

In its updates, PHP always releases tools and functions that can help a lot in loading your web page.

Cleaning your Database

Periodic cleanings also help speed up your WordPress. If you are going to perform this action and you are not fully aware of what you are doing, I recommend that you seek technical assistance and before making any changes (Always have a backup of your database on your machine).

Why do I need to clean my database? The answer is simple, over time the WordPress database accumulates unnecessary information and as this subject can be a bit extensive, let’s just focus on two simple points that could help you.

• When you start producing a new post and it stops halfway through production, your database automatically stores that draft. It becomes a kind of “junk mail” for your bank and depending on the number of times you do this, it would be the number of times your database would keep these revisions (An unnecessary accumulation).
• Another example is when you install a plugin for testing and that plugin for some reason you didn’t like. When uninstalling most of the time WordPress will not remove all information from that tool from your database. Now imagine that you are a curious user and every time you install and uninstall a plugin on your website, this can greatly affect the performance of your web page.

Now that you understand the reasons for having to clean your database, I will point out two very well known plugins that will help you in these tasks, WP Rocket and WP-Optimize, a note, if you are going to use one of these plugins you don’t need to opt for W3 Total Cache. Through WP Optimize it is possible to see tables that are overloaded for example. WP Rocket, according to the developers, can help you up to 80% in improving your cache system. There are software and tools Specially designed to be used to clean databases. Simple to use, yet very powerful. Or you can also simply get a customized software for your website for the same.

Have a Good Hosting Plan

One of the factors that can hinder the speed of your WordPress is the infrastructure of your hosting plan. It’s no use following the previous tips if your site needs, for example, 1GB of PHP memory, but your server only provides 500MB. In this sense, good optimization practices must go hand in hand with a good hosting plan.

The chosen service must make it clear how much consumption you can use, and when it comes to your website’s performance, two points are crucial:

• CPU in some cases vCPUs (which refers to the percentage of processing you use from that server/plan).
• RAM Memory: It would be the capacity together with the processor that your plan has to perform requests/tasks with the server.

So, time to choose a WordPress Hosting, check especially if the plan has the necessary structure to meet the requests that your website will make on the server.

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