Table of Contents
What is slowing down your WordPress Websites
Quality of the server
One of the most most affected WordPress speed reasons is the quality of the server.
That’s right, no optimization is better than the hardware level. A strong performance of the server is the most influential factor on the speed of the site.
If your server configuration is not high, upgrading hardware is the most rapid and effective way to improve the speed of the site.
Cache to the website.
WordPress itself is a dynamic website program, if you do not install the cache, all user access will be dynamically loaded, resulting in higher server resources.
And after installing a cache plug-in, users who access your site data will directly read the cached static files, which is much faster than direct access to dynamic files.
load too many pictures.
Some friends who have just learned to build their own websites have no concept of how to upload pictures on the site, often see some white website picture size are a few M camera or cell phone shot of the original picture upload, such pictures are directly affect the speed of the site.
Especially for sites with relatively small bandwidth, a large number of large pictures will make your website broadband is occupied, others open very slow.
How to Speed up your WordPress Websites
If possible, upgrade the server hardware
The recommended hardware configuration of WordPress at the time of this article is php 7.3+, database MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10.1+, and the basic memory requirement of these two versions of the database is 1G and above, so it is better to choose 1G or above memory configuration of your server.
Install caching plug-in
Cache includes page cache and database cache.
For page cache, we recommend that newcomers directly install WP Rocket. You can easily tell the effect but it is a paid plug-in. So the alternative is the free WP Super Cache.
For database caching, Memcached or Redis is usually used, but this cache needs to be turned on for VPS or managed web hosting, which is not supported by ordinary web hosting.
In addition, you can also open nginx cache.
Use a lightweight code simple theme
A good theme code quality is relatively high, and the purchase of some foreign advanced theme usually code will be more complex, supporting more plug-ins, ordinary users do not know how to optimize it will be slower.
So the easiest way is to use a lightweight theme, this site is currently using the Newpaper theme.
Remove the slow response plugins
I am not saying that too many plugins installed will necessarily lower the speed of the site. But if your server configuration is low, too many plugins do have some impact.
In the case of high server configuration, too many plug-ins itself on the site speed will not have a significant impact, but the quality of the plug-in and plug-in some API calls will impact the speed of the site, which requires specific troubleshooting. The simplest way you can try is to test those plugins one buy one, and then spot which plugin is making the site slower.
The use of CDN acceleration
CDN can indeed speed up the site. If you are using SiteGround as the hosting, you can easily open the CDN. Please check this article for insturction.
Reduce the size of the site picture
One mistake that new webmasters could make is upload the orginal photoes which could be as big as a few megabytes. Just image how hard it is for your website to load them each time. So just try to reduce the resolution of the picture, compress the size of the picture, and then upload.
Paginate the comment
If you have a lot of comments on the site, then it is best to paginate the comments, if necessary, you can turn off the comment avatar function.
Use excerpt for home page and archive page
The default WordPress theme in the home page and archive page is to directly output the whole article. So your website page will load several articles the complete content at once, including images and other resources. It will make your site lag. Use of excerpt will avoid this problem.
Of course you can just use this Plugin: WP-UTF8-Excerpt
Do not upload video and audio files directly to WordPress
If it does not haveto, it is not recommended to directly upload video and audio to the website background. Although the default will not automatically play, when someone is playing it will take up the bandwidth of your site and make it slow to load.
Long article pagination
If you an article is too long, please just paginate it.
Reduce external resource requests
For example, you refer to other sites pictures, if the other site is slower than yours, then no doubt it will also slow down your site loading speed.
Reduce database calls
Open the data cache will be significantly improved.
Use picture delayed loading
Also called lazy loading, you can use a3 Lazy Load settings, (WP Rocket also supports), and the news is that WordPress intends to make this feature a standard feature. Here is the introduction of this plugin
Use the new version of php
Usually new versions of PHP will improve performance, but according to their actual situation to consider, to avoid the theme or plug-ins are not compatible with the latest PHP situation.
