How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website in 7 Easy Steps

Do you know that reducing your WordPress website’s average load time from 20 seconds to 2 seconds keeps 50% of your visitors? This is why you need to speed up your WordPress website.

Overview

According to Google, when your site’s average load time drops from 20 seconds to 2 seconds, your visitors are 50% less likely to leave your site. Yes, 50%!

You should target to reduce the average load time of your website to 3 seconds or less. Not only does boosting your site’s speed keep users longer on your site, but it also improves your site’s overall SEO health.

Why do I say so?

When a user searches a query on Google and clicks on your site, it keeps track of how long they stay. If users leave your site as soon as they get there, Google will believe that your site does not deliver a great user experience.

This, in turn, may lead to Google dropping that article down on the search result.

If by now you haven’t seen the benefit of speeding up your WordPress website, let me be very direct. If your website loads faster, you will make more money, period!

In the following sections, I have discussed 7 things you can do now to get your WordPress site to load in under 3 seconds. Yes, under 3 seconds!

Step 1: Change to Cloud Hosting

I am starting with this because if the server hosting your WordPress website is slow, trying to speed up your website will be frustrating. While there are different types of Webhosting, cloud hosting is arguably the fastest.

Most people that launch a WordPress site will likely start with shared web hosting. The reason for this is that it is the cheapest form of web hosting.

However, as your website grows, you will need a dedicated server to handle the workload. In light of that, a cloud server hosting platform offers you the option to start small and increase your server size as your site grows.

When I got to the point where I needed to move Itedhguides.com (this website) to cloud hosting, I migrated to SiteGround. However, I quickly discovered that their cloud hosting offering is not robust.

Specifically, for some reason, SiteGround’s cloud hosting keeps hitting the limit of memory (RAM) and CPU. So, I was forced to keep increasing the RAM and CPU, but it quickly hit the limit again.

When this became unsustainable, I returned to the drawing board and researched the best cloud hosting platform.

Then I discovered CloudWays.com! CloudWays is unique in that they do not own any cloud server. Rather, CloudWays is a platform that acts as an interface between you and multiple cloud service providers.

Essentially, within the CloudWays platform, you can spin up a Digital Ocean, VULTR, or Linode server. Additionally, you can also launch an AWS or a Google Cloud server.

In addition to CloudWays providing you with an interface to launch a cloud server powered by one of these big names, they offer other services. For example, you can scale your server by simply sliding a scale.

Secondly, you can migrate your website from one server to another even though different cloud service providers provide the servers. Finally, among other services CloudWays offers, you also get exceptional customer service.

So, before you proceed to the second step of this article, I strongly recommend that you migrate to CloudWays now!

Step 2: Optimize WordPress Configuration

Once you have migrated your WordPress website to a cloud hosting provider (preferably, CloudWays), the next step is to perform some tasks to optimize your website.

Follow the steps in the following sub-sections to reconfigure your WordPress website as the first step to speed it up.

1. Optimize Your Homepage and Post Page

When a visitor opens your website from a browser on their computer, the browser downloads your site content from the server. So, the bigger the content the browser needs to download, the longer it takes to download the content.

Why is this information important?

It is because the number of items that load on your homepage and post page simultaneously affects the speed of your site. I say this because most amateur website designers add too many articles to their site’s homepage.

Another page that has the potential to slow down your website is the post (article) page. Like the homepage, most website design newbies add too many items to their article’s sidebar.

Additionally, website designers add too many “Related Posts” at the end of their articles.

Here is the problem.

With too many irrelevant items loading simultaneously on your website, the site will be slow. So, if you wish to improve your WordPress website’s speed, perform the following tasks:

1. Reduce the number of posts on your site’s homepage.
2. Use the “Next” or “More” buttons to load more posts.
3. Reduce the number of items and widgets on your site’s sidebars.
4. Reduce the number of “Related Posts” at the end of articles.
5. If possible, reduce the number of comments that load when articles load.

2. Reduce the Number of Autosaved Post Revisions

WordPress has a database (more on how to optimize it later). This is where WordPress saves all information about your website.

One of the information that WordPress saves on your site’s database is the number of post revisions. In light of this, it may surprise you to learn that when you’re writing an article, WordPress auto-saves your drafts every 60 seconds!

In addition to that, whenever you click “Save Draft,” WordPress saves a draft as well. And if you’re like me, that saves continuously while I write, you can easily accumulate thousands of revisions!

While this is useful, it may quickly become a problem by clogging your site’s database. I can confirm from my experience that too many post revisions on your site’s database slow your WordPress site down.

Furthermore, it wouldn’t surprise you to learn that WordPress has a “garbage collection” process. This is an in-built process where WordPress deletes some of the autosave posts.

Unfortunately, the default “garbage collection” frequency is too long – this runs every two days. So, if you write many articles, your WordPress site’s database can easily be filled with unwanted post revisions.

Based on all I have said so far, you first need to increase the rate at which your WordPress website auto-saves drafts. I recommend increasing the value from 60 seconds (1 minute) to 300 seconds (5 minutes).

This will automatically reduce the number of drafts that your WordPress site saves. Additionally, you need to cap the number of post revisions.

For this, I recommend fewer than 5 revisions.

You can perform these optimization tasks by adding a code to your site’s wp-config file. This file is located at the root of your WordPress site’s installation.

When you open your website’s wp-config file, enter the following codes. I have added comments before each line.

/** Changes default autosave interval from 60 seconds (1 minute) to 300 seconds (5 minutes) */
define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300); 
/** Limits post revisions to 7 revisions */
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 7 ); 
/** Garbage data is automatically deleted every 2 days - default is 30 days */
define('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 2 ); 

3. Disable the WordPress Cron Job and Enable Real Cron Job

WordPress core and plugins run scheduled tasks that perform routine tasks on your website. WP task scheduling is managed by a file called wp-cron.

However, the built-in WordPress cron scheduling is not the most efficient. I found this out the hard way.

Some time ago, I discovered that Itechguides.com was “eating” up a lot of server resources. Then, to find out why, I contacted CloudWays support.

When the support Engineer checked, he said that they found a large number of cron requests. The solution?

Enable “Real cron job.” What is that?

When I dug further, I discovered that setting up a “Real cron job” involves two simple steps:

1. Disable the inbuilt WordPress cron job
2. Enabling the cron job to run on your hosting server.

To perform the first task, open your site’s wp-config file and add the following line of code.

define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

Once you have done this, save the file. Then, perform the second step by enabling real cron on your website’s hosting server.

If you need help enabling real cron jobs for your website, contact the customer support team of your WordPress website hosting provider.

Step 3: Optimize the WordPress Database

In the last section, I mentioned that WordPress has a database. I also hinted that WordPress saves your site’s files and information on the database.

The implication is that as you save more files and write more articles, the database becomes “inefficient.” At this stage, it is important to mention that your site’s database stores information in tables.

Over time, these tables may bloat, and retrieving information to display on your site’s front end becomes slower. This is what I called “inefficient” earlier.

So, if your website’s database affects the speed of your website, it makes sense that optimizing the database will improve your WordPress website’s speed.

But how do you do that?

You can improve your site’s database in two ways:

1. Manually optimize the database
2. Use a plugin to optimize the database

Except you know what you’re doing, I do not recommend manually optimizing your site’s database. Having said that, some of the tasks I mentioned in the last section amount to manually optimizing your site’s database.

For example, reducing auto-saved post revisions, increasing posts auto-save frequency, and reducing the frequency of garbage collection, improves your site’s database load time.

This, in turn, speeds up your WordPress website by loading data from the database faster.

Earlier, I mentioned that you could manually optimize your site’s database or use a plugin. As you can imagine, there are numerous plugins you can use to optimize your WordPress site’s database.

However, I recommend Advanced DB Cleaner PRO. With this plugin, you can perform the following:

1. Clean (delete) your posts, revisions, drafts, and spam comments
2. Optimize your site’s database (tables, Options, and more)
3. Schedule the database clean-up and optimization
4. Delete orphaned tasks, Options, or Tables

Step 4: Use a Caching Plugin

If you’ve performed the tasks to optimize and speed up your WordPress website, you’ve done a lot already. However, there is still more to do.

Talking about more to do, another important element of optimizing your site to load faster is installing and configuring a caching plugin. As with any other WordPress plugin, many caching plugins are available.

However, I recommend WP Rocket. If you’re wondering why I recommend the plugins I recommend in this article, it is because I have used these plugins.

In terms of configuring WP Rocket, after installing the plugin, use the points below as a guide:

1. CACHE tab: in this tab, enable caching for mobile devices and configure “Cache Lifespan.”
2. FILE OPTIMIZATION tab: use this tab to configure file modification. Essentially, modification combines multiple files into one to improve load speed.
3. MEDIA tab: use this tab to enable Lazy loading if your site’s theme does not support this feature.
4. PRELOAD tab: the preload tab allows you to preload cache, links, and fonts. Additionally, you can configure Prefetch DNS Requests in this tab.
5. HEARTBEAT tab: Enable the “Control Heartbeat” checkbox. Then, configure this tab’s “Reduce or disable Heartbeat activity” section.
6. Ignore the following sections: ADD-ON, IMAGE OPTIMIZATION. You will perform image optimization with a different plugin in step 6 of this article.

Step 5: Enable Cloudflare CDN

You may have heard that serving your site’s content via a Content Delivery Network (CDN) makes your site faster. I can confirm that it does.

Similarly, you may be aware that many companies are offering CDN services. However, you may be wondering why I am recommending Cloudflare.

Here is why

When I was optimizing Itechguides.com, I tried other CDN providers. Specifically, I tried StackPath.

Unfortunately, my site’s speed was not doing as well as I wanted it to. Then, I decided to try Cloudflare.

When I did try Cloudflare, the difference was obvious. I am not suggesting that other CDN providers are not great.

They are, but from my experience, Cloudflare delivers the best performance.

To further speed up your WordPress site with Cloudflare, follow the following subsections.

Step 1: Add Your WordPress Site to Cloudflare

The first step to speeding up your WordPress site with Cloudflare is to add your site to the CDN platform. Follow the steps below to complete this task.

1. Create a Cloudflare account by opening Cloudflare.com. Then, on the top right of the page, click Sign Up.

2. Complete the signup process. Once you click the “Create Account” button, Cloudflare will sign you into your account.

2. Then, on your Cloudflare Dashboard, select the first option.

3. Next, enter your site in the field provided and click the “Add site” button.

4. Once you enter your website, Cloudflare will require you to select a payment plan. You can start with their free plan, but I recommend selecting their “Pro.”
   
   Then, scroll down and click Continue.

4. In the next step, enter your payment information, then scroll down and click the “Purchase” button.

4. Finally, complete the process of adding your site by configuring DNS. When Cloudflare confirms that your site is active, it will be displayed as active (green tick) in the “Websites” section of the dashboard.
   
   Proceed to the next subsection.

Step 2: Setup Your WordPress Site on Cloudflare

Now that your site is “active” and managed by Cloudflare go through the following steps to optimize the site.

1. On the “Websites” section of the dashboard, click the website’s name. In this example, I will be configuring “ilifeguides.com.”

2. Then, configure the following sections by selecting them on the left pane of the page.

SSL/TSL: This section allows you to configure your site’s SSL/TLS encryption mode, SSL/TLS Recommender, Edge Certificates, and other SSL/TSL settings.

Security => Settings: In this section, you can select your site’s Security Level, Challenge Passage, Browser Integrity Check, and more.

Speed => Optimization: The settings in this section allows you to optimize your WordPress site to load fast. Go through each setting and switch them on or off as required.

Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress: This setting is in the Speed => Optimization section.

To take advantage of the speed optimization provided by this, you need to install Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) WordPress plugin. Then, configure the plugin to optimize your site for the best performance.

Network: In this section of the settings, you can enable or disable HTTP/2, WebSockets, and other connectivity options that affect connectivity to and from your hosting server. Some of these settings also affect connectivity between Cloudflare and your visitors.

Once you have configured the sections described in this subsection, you can ignore any other setting. In the next subsection, I’ll explain a Cloudflare feature called “Argo Smart Routing.”

The subsection also includes the steps to enable this Cloudflare feature that supercharges the speed of your website.

Step 3: Enable “Argo Smart Routing” on Cloudflare

Some Cloudflare features are included in your standard subscription, while others are not. The “Argo Smart Routing” feature is one of those features not included in your Cloudflare subscription.

Rather, when you enable Cloudflare “Argo Smart Routing,” Cloudflare charges you based on traffic usage. Cloudflare calls this type of product a “usage-based product.”

So, what is “Argo Smart Routing”?

According to Cloudflare, “Argo is a service that uses optimized routes across the Cloudflare network to decrease loading times, increase reliability, and reduce bandwidth costs.” In simple terms, when users visit your site, Argo delivers your site’s content to the visitor via the fatstest route in the Cloudflare network.

Cloudflare claims that “Enabling Argo activates Argo Smart Routing, reducing Internet latency by 30% and connection errors by 27% on average.”

While I cannot verify the exact improvement based on my data, I can confirm that after I enabled Argo for Itechguides.com, my site load time (as confirmed by Google Analytics) improved considerably.

The next logical question is, “how do I enable Argo?”

To enable Cloudflare Argo, on the left pane of the site you want to enable the product, click Traffic => Argo. Then, on the right pane, read about the product, including the cost.

Finally, click the “Enable Argo” button to enable the product.

Step 6: Optimize Images

Do you know that images slow your site’s load time most? Since this is the case, optimizing the images on your WordPress site makes sense.

In this section, you will learn how to use ShortPixel to create smaller versions of images your site serves visitors.

I have divided this section into five subsections. Follow the steps in each subsection to complete the tasks, thereby speeding up your WordPress website by optimizing images.

Step 1: Sign up to ShortPixel and Pay for a Subscription

1. Open Shortpixel.com. Then, click the “Free Sign Up” button on the top right of the page.

2. When the Sign-Up page opens, enter your email address, and flip the “I accept the Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy.” switch from Off to On. Then, click the “Sign Up” button.

3. ShortPixel will display a signup confirmation page that includes your API key. Note this key.
   
   Then, head over to your email for the necessary login details. When you check your email, ShortPixel will include an auto-generated password.
   
   In addition to that, the email will also have your ShortPixel API key.
4. Finally, go back to your browser and click the “Login to your account” button. When you click this button, ShortPixel logs you into your account.

Step 2: Install and Configure the ShortPixel Plugin

You will perform this task on the WordPress website you intend to speed up image load speed.

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard with an administrator account. Then, install the ShortPixel plugin by hovering over Plugins and selecting Add New.

2. When the “Add Plugins” page opens, enter shortpixel in the search field (top right). Then, click the Install Now button on the top right of the “ShortPixel Image Optimizer – Optimize Images, Convert WebP & AVI” plugin.
   
   Wait for the plugin to install, then click the Activate button to activate the plugin.

3. Then, paste the API key on the paged opened by the plugin (after you activate it). Finally, click Validate to connect the ShortPixel plugin to your ShortPixel account.

5. Once your website is successfully connected to your ShortPixel account, the plugin will display the settings shown in the screenshot below.

Step 3: Bulk-optimize Existing Images with ShortPixel

Once you have connected your site to ShortPixel via the API key, from the point of activating the plugin, ShortPixel will automatically optimize any image you upload to your articles.

However, you have to optimize existing images manually. This is a bit of a nightmare if you have thousands of images.

Follow the steps below to optimize existing images on your WordPress site using ShortPixel.

1. From the ShortPixel plugin setting (previous subsection), scroll down to the bottom of the General tab and click Save and Go to bulk Process.

2. Then, on the “ShortPixel Bulk Processing” page, click “Start optimizing.”

3. The plugin will display the number of unoptimized images on your WordPress site. Additionally, it will display the number of unoptimized thumbnails.
   
   The total number of images ShortPixel needs to optimize manually will also be displayed on this page. In this example, I have 54 images that ShortPixel will bulk-optimize.
   
   If you’re happy to bulk-optimize the images and are sure that you have enough ShortPixel credits, click Calculate.

4. Finally, the plugin will display a summary of the total images it needs to bulk-optimize and the total ShortPixel credit in your account. If everything looks good, click Start Bulk Optimizing.

Step 4: Manually Optimize Existing Images with ShortPixel

If you need to manually select images to optimize to avoid ShortPixel slowing down your server, follow the steps below.

1. While logged in to your WordPress site with an administrator account, hover over Media. Then, select Library.

2. When your WordPress Media Library page opens, click the List mode button to display the images as a list.

3. Once WordPress displays Media Library in List mode, you can click the “Optimize Now” button on the “ShortPixel Compression” column to optimize one image at a time.
   
   Alternatively, you can select multiple images ad use the Bulk Actions drop-down to optime the selected images.

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Step 7: Additional Tasks to Improve Site Speed

If you follow this guide, you have performed most of the important tasks that will speed up your WordPress site. However, there are still some minor tasks that you still need to perform.

In the following subsections, I will list and explain the other minor tasks that be put the icing on the cake!

1. Install and Configure Wordfence

Wordfence is an all-in-one security plugin that provides the necessary safety net for your website. The plugin has a pro version, but you can start by installing the free version from the WordPress Plugins repository.

If you’re wondering how a security plugin can improve your site’s speed, here is how.

If your site is vulnerable to attack and comes under constant attack, your hosting server will spend resources attending to malicious requests.

This reduces the resources available to attend to legitimate requests from your site’s visitors, reducing how quickly your server can respond to them. The implication is poor user experience.

2. Reduce the Number of Plugins

Another thing you can do to speed up your WordPress site is to reduce the number of Plugins you install. You may not know this, but most plugin developers may not deliver clean code, slowing down your site.

Another potential problem that may result from installing too many Plugins is conflict. The more plugins you have, the more the possibility of conflict between any of the plugins.

By conflict, I mean that one plugin may affect the way the other plugin suppose to work, thereby slowing down your site.

Instead of installing the plugin for any WordPress feature enhancement, see if you can find the PHP function to provide the enhancement. Then, use the Code Snippet plugin to add the code to your site.

Another important best practice for Plugins is to delete anyone you no longer need.

Finally, always update your plugins as soon as updates are available. Better still, enable automatic updates for all plugins that support the auto-update feature.

Finally, like plugins, delete any theme you do not use and update your theme regularly.

3. Host Fonts Locally and Pre-load Them

WordPress uses fonts, and they’re usually saved on remote servers. This means that your site’s hosting server spends more time (and resources) loading the fonts from the remote server.

By hosting the font on your hosting server, they will load faster, thereby speeding up your WordPress website.

Some of these recommendations may look insignificant, but I assure you that they all contribute to the overall performance of your WordPress site.

Finally, after hosting your site’s fonts locally, use a plugin like WP Rocket to pre-load the fonts. As you may have predicted, preloading fonts means loading faster on your visitor’s browser.

This, in turn, improves your site’s speed.

4. Perform WordPress Site Health Check

My final recommendation is to run the inbuilt health WordPress health check. You will be surprised what this will unearth.

To open the Site Health status after signing in to your site as an administrator, hover over Tools. Then, click Site Health.

Finally, when the Site Health page opens, fix any issues that need fixing.

5. Enabling Object Cache

In point 4, I discussed the benefit of running a WordPress Site Health Check. The Site Health check lists actions you must take to improve the speed and security of your site.

If Object Cache is not enabled, the site check will highlight it. Enabling Object Cache is very straightforward.

Firstly, check that your hosting provider supports it and ask them to enable it. Beyond enabling it, you may also need to install a plugin on your WordPress installation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

If you take the steps in the 7 sections of this guide, I am confident that your WordPress website is loading faster than it was!

I provided as many details as possible with this article’s steps. However, providing deeper steps in some sections is beyond the scope intended for the article.

Based on that, I have decided to create a cause based on the outline of this article. The video course will give detailed steps of every step you need to perform all the actions recommended in this article.

If you struggled with implementing some of the actions recommended in this guide and will need help, join the waiting list by entering your email address in the subscription form below.

If you found this article helpful, click on “Yes” beside the “Was this page helpful” question below.

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