How to Speed up WordPress Load Time

The loading speed and the performance of your website are more important these days than ever. Therefore, one of the things you need to consider after putting your site online is learn how  to speedup WordPress load time.

A recent study shows that the average human attention span has dropped to less than 10 seconds when visiting a website. This means that you have a short time to show visitors your Homepage and convince them to stay on it.

That is why it is very important to  have a fast loading first page as most people don’t wait for a slow site to load.  If you lost a visitor or  a client  because of a slow loading page, he/she may not come back again, leading to loss of traffic, trust and also money.

Also, the the speed of the site is one of the most important SEO factors. Google is very clear about it. If your website has quality content but loads slow, your website may go down in ranking on Google search results.  

In order to help you improve the loading speed of your WordPress site, I will show below 10 ways  to speed up your WordPress site loading time. But, before doing that let me briefly answer some of the questions about this subject.

What is a good average load time for a website?

The ideal website load time is less than 3 seconds. Therefore, you need to optimize your website load time to be within this range. Google recommends page load time to be under two seconds.  

How to tell if your website is too slow?

You cant test the speed of your web site using any of the following websites:

1-  Google page speed Insight :-  This Google tool allows you to quickly test the speed of a your website page, and gives you a report of what’s slowing that page together with recommendations on how to fix it.  

The results may change slightly every time you make a test. The testing results depend on many factors. Thee factors include your your location, the testing server location, time of the test and the internet traffic at the time. But  The result l gives a good indication about how fast is your website loads.  A green color indicates that the site is loading fast.

This is the result of our website at the time of writing this article after using Google page speed Insight.

1-  Gtmetrix.com :-   This is another  free tool that allows you to analyze the performance of your web page with a single click. It shows you fast your website load,  and provides you with a list of actionable recommendations to improve it.  

Here is the result of our website after applying several optimization methods.

3-  Webpagetest  is a web performance tool that uses real browsers to test web pages and displays web page  metrics. The result shows how long it takes for the most important content to render.

Go ahead and try your website in all of the above websites and see the results before you read the next section.

Now, back to our main subject.

How to Speed up WordPress Site Load Time

Now that you know how fast or slow is your website, let us talk about how to optimize it to improve its loading speed.

Speeding up your website is not a simple or a straight forward process.  It involves  some  actions and requires many steps that takes time and a lot of testing before reaching to the optimum performance.  If you don’t have the time to perform the following tweaks , you can get help from a professional service such as  WP Speed Fix

How to improve WordPress Site loading Speed

1- Optimize WordPress Database – If you have a large database, it may slow down your website loading. Optimizing it can speed up your website. This can be done using a plugin such as WP Optimize.    Install the plugin and then choose database optimization. 

2- Use the Latest PHP Version. Old PHP versions  affect the site  loading speed. Therefore, it is  important to make sure that your PHP version is up to date.  If you are familiar with cPanel, you can easily update it yourself.  Otherwise,  contact your web hosting support team and they will update it for you.

3- Optimize images with a plugin. Image optimization plays an important roll in webpage loading.  Large images such as header images take more time to load than small images.  Fortunately, there are plugins that optimizes images speed up page loading.  A plugin such as Lazy Load or Smuch It can do this job.

4- Disable post revisions.  This is an easy fix.  All you have to to do is go to each post or page of your website, scroll up to the top and then click  screen options. uncheck  revisions to disable them.

5- Reduce the number of plugins and themes in your site to the minimum.  Deactivate and delete all the unnecessary  plugins, and  also  delete all the themes except the main theme you are using and its child them ( if available). 

6- Limit the use of external scripts such as advertisements., font loaders,  and affiliate links that include external images. Any advertising, or affiliate banner and 

7- Use a CDN Network such as Cloudflare.  Cloudflare is one of the biggest networks operating on the Internet. It has a network of servers around the globe to help their  customers improve the performance of their websites and deliver content as quickly as and securely as possible. Cloudflare  is available free with most cPanel’s. 

8- Clean up your Media –  Overtime your website may accumulate images that are not in use. These my take space and slow down your website. To remove these unused media ,  use a plugin like Media Cleaner. it is a free plugin that you can download from WordPress.org

9- Change your theme (If possible) – It is a fact that some themes are faster than others. Although it may take time to customize the site with the new theme, but the results can be amazing.  You may need to experiment with few themes before you decide on the right one for your web site.  I believe it is worth it, especially if you didn’t notice much improvement after implementing the above steps. For our site we switched to GeneratePress theme and it is fairly fast.

10  – Optimize Homepage to Load Quickly – The homepage is the most important part of your website because visitors will be landing there the most often. 

Most of the above and more can be accomplished by using service such  WP Speed Fix.  It can take your  frustrating slow website intro less than 2 seconds load time. Their service does not just speed up your website loading time but also find and fix the root cause of this problem. learn More about WpSpeedFix

Important Note:

No matter how much you optimize your WordPress site, if you have a slow hosting plan , your site will load slow. A good hosting provider like a2hosting offer optimized word press hosting  and is known to have fast hosting servers.

Conclusion

Optimizing your WordPress site is one of the most important tasks you need to perform once in a while. You can either learn how to optimize  it by yourself  using  the above steps, or by hiring a professional. Or use one of the online optimization services such as WP Speed Fix. if the above steps didn’t improve the speed of your WordPress, consider moving your website to a faster web hosting.

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