How to speed up your WordPress site

Site speed affects website performance in more ways than one. For starters, it’s a crucial factor in how search engines like Google rank websites and pages. A lot of that has to do with improving the user experiences. Speedy sites make for a more intuitive and seamless experience and as such, users are less likely to bounce. But achieving optimal speed takes a fair bit of tweaking. This guide covers some of the best ways to enhance your website’s speed.

1. Choose a fast WordPress hosting provider

Page speed is determined by two factors – backend and front-end performance.

Front-end performance has more to do with your website’s optimization. This encompasses things such as how heavy your theme is, how optimized your WordPress plugins are, and the level of JavaScript and CSS optimization. The big challenge, however, comes down to backend performance which is determined by the duration your server takes to deliver files.

And the main culprit when it comes to poor backend performance is hosting. Choosing a reliable and fast hosting provider that can guarantee minimal downtime is crucial. Our web hosting service which starts from as little as £3 uses NVMe SSD storage for maximum speed. 

2. Switch to a fast, lightweight theme

Your WordPress theme does more than affect a user’s first impression from an aesthetic viewpoint. It’s an integral part of your site’s front-end, affecting how fast it loads. Bloated themes contain non-essential features. A lightweight theme such as Astra, Generate Press, or Elementor’s free Hello theme can offer a significant boost to your WordPress site’s speed.

3. Optimize your WordPress site

On the backend, images, CSS, and JavaScript could be bogging your site down. Images alone could account for half of a website’s size. You can optimize images prior to uploading them using Adobe Photoshop, or opt to have them automatically optimized once uploaded using a plugin such as Smush. For CSS, code can be minimized or combined using plugins such as WP Rocket. One way to optimize JavaScript is to use jQuery which condenses multiple lines of code and to keep your jQuery up to date. 

4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

When someone visits your website, by default their browser downloads content from your main server. A content delivery network (CDN) caches your site’s content to multiple servers around the world. That way, content gets loaded from the server nearest each site visitor, freeing up your main one and speeding up load times in the process.

Cloudflare is a free, leading CDN solution that not only accelerates sites but also protects them from threats as well as bots that affect website resources. 5wire is a certified Cloudflare partner and with our hosting plans can access it right from your dashboard.

5. Use Page Caching

When someone loads your page, what typically happens is that your site’s server “builds” each page from scratch by pulling content from your database. This can take up lots of time and use up resources especially if you’re using shared hosting. 

Page caching can offer a considerable boost to your WordPress site’s performance. If your hosting plan doesn’t already include page caching, plugins such as WP Fastest Cache and WP Rocket can implement it.

Conclusion

There are many factors that can affect site performance. To speed up your WordPress site, consider high-quality, low-cost hosting from 5wire and use the tactics covered above.