Speed Up WordPress Sites?

[AlexGeorge]

I have some sites built base on WP cms but 2 sites are running slowly now.
Do you know any tips or speed up WordPress sites?

 

[ulterios]

What hosting company are you using to host them? A lot of times the hosting can be a huge factor in the speed of a website's load times.

Other factors can be:

Too many images.

High KB/MB images (not optimized)

Poor coding in the theme.

Plus many other factors.

One way that you can get the load speeds up is by using a CDN like Cloudflare or MaxCDN. Cloudflare has a free plan.

 

[RDO Servers]

RDO Servers

Once you have checked your plugins and Optimised your site as best you can, using a CDN is a great option. Ideally, look for a host that is a Cloudflare Optimised Partner. Then you can use Cloudflare Railgun for free which will compress dynamic content also!

 

[Ron Killian]

As always, Ulterios gave some good tips.

This can give you some clues as to speeding up your wordpress site:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

There are plenty of speed test sites, just don't have the address for others on hand. Search and you'll find plenty.

A good caching plugin can make a big difference. I've tried many and Wp Fastest Cache has worked best for me. And much less bloated than something like W3 Cache.

An optimize plugin can also help greatly. Autoptimize helped me. Though it takes time and messing with the settings.

This plugin can tell you which plugins are hogging too many resources:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/

Honestly it can be a pain, to find the right plugins and get them working together.

Hope that helps

 

[ulterios]

Good tips by Ron there, I forgot to point out that Google PageSpeed insights can be useful when trying to speed up your site.

Another good site load speed testing site that I use and have found helpful is http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

It's good to get a reference load speed time by doing several tests at these sites before making any modifications then re-testing to see if anything improved. One thing to keep in mind, especially when using Pingdom, is to test at the same rough time of day/day of week. I have done a lot of testing on there and noticed that speed tests vary depending on time of day. It might be them, or your host, but just try to test around the same basic time of day if possible to get the best accuracy.

 

[Ron Killian]

Ron Killian

Another great speed tool site. There are plenty of them. And some give even more details that the G tool does. That's one thing that bugs me about G insights, it "kind of" tells you how to fix things, but not really.

And I think we have to keep in mind, some things you just can't fix, like JS calls. Well, unless your a programmer

 

[Riviera]

In my opinion, i think to speed up website speed. We have many things to do.
+ Optimize photo quality - size per post./page/
+ Optimize Javascript./ CSS.
+ Install plugin cache for website (such as wp supercache)
+ If data center is so far away from your local. You can try CDN to improve your access speed. (for example: cloudflare)
+ Choosing "good" hosting provider for "good" speed, less downtime.
Less time loading - faster access.

 

[Localnode]

Have you tried using a caching plugin?
I've found these two are generally the best:
WP Rocket (paid)
Cache Enabler (free).

One feature of cache enabler is it works very well with Optimus.io. Optimus is an image optimiser, and it also converts to WebP format.
Cache enabler works well with WebP - and it has a fall-back for browsers that do not support WebP.

I'd highly suggest looking at a caching plugin - and something like Optimus. Optimus has a free and paid version. If you want purely free EWWW Image Optimiser's free version is capable of doing everything.

As others have mentioned - a CDN will help. My personal preference is KeyCDN as a CDN and CloudFlare for DNS.

One final way is in cPanel - search for "Optimize Website" - click on it and then select "Compress All Content" and then hit "Update Settings". It's a quick and easy way to speed up your website. It wont be a huge increase, but every little bit helps.


If you don't experience much difference (you will most likely have a speed savings of 1 to 2 seconds at bare minimum) then you should look at your web host.

My results from using WP Rocket, Optimus, and KeyCDN have made my website load in under 1 second from most USA locations.

 

[ericplotz1]

WP Fastest cache + MaxCDN ($9 a month) is all one needs. If you want to make money online, $9 a month to have your site load under a 1 second is golden.

On my affiliate sites I quit using a cache plugin all together and just utilize MaxCDN. I use a plugin to hide my affiliate links and every cache plugin out there seems to completely hide my links when showing the cached version of the site. Just an FYI

 

[vishwa]

Sometimes uses of unnecessary and unwanted plugins can slow down your WordPress site. So, Make sure that you have minimum amount of plugins and also check that it is compatible with latest version of WordPress. Use a cache plugin like W3 Total cache. Optimize your images, Don't overload your site with lots of ads, javascripts etc. Choose a Good web hosting provider.

 

[Reallt India]

I have some sites built base on WP cms but 2 sites are running slowly now.
Do you know any tips or speed up WordPress sites?

Be careful, when you choose a plugin for your website and remove all the unwanted plugins from the site. These unnecessary plugins are the major cause for slow websites. Slow website means low position and lower rank means lose in business. So, if you don't want to see lose in your business, remove all unused or needless plugins as soon as possible.

 

[sanjay7]

I have some sites built base on WP cms but 2 sites are running slowly now.
Do you know any tips or speed up WordPress sites?

You should use CDN (Content delivery network), Minify your Javascript & CSS, use WP total cache OR WP super cache kind of plugin, Optimize your images, Use theme which has less coding & Use low light weight Plugins for your website.

You should remove unnecessary plugins from your WP website.

 

[UWH-David]

I have some sites built base on WP cms but 2 sites are running slowly now.
Do you know any tips or speed up WordPress sites?

There is so much you can do! As many have mentioned caching is huge at the app, web server and PHP levels. We highly recommend WP Super Cache in mod_rewrite mode, have the rewrites added to your .htaccess, the recommended options enabled in advance and preload mode enabled. If that plugin gives you any troubles WP Fastest Cache is also excellent. If you want to try a different plugin which allows for finer tweaking and do not mind getting your hands dirty we recommend W3 Total Cache, which information can be found @ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/ It is an excellent plugin and may be configured for xcache / opcache.

RAM. Be sure you are hosting with a good amount of RAM as this can make a larger difference than processing power often with Wordress websites and caching.

Test website speeds via online website speed test benchmarks such as what is offered by Pingdom and GTMetrix. This can give you an excellent overview of what is going on with your website and where it is lacking in speed.

http keep-alive ON can be of benefit to most WordPress websites. This prevents a connection from being re-established on every web page visited.

You can use the Tidy PHP module or any online shrinker to go in and shrink down your css and javascript files. You would be amazed at how much file size this can save you at times.

Reduce how many posts show on a single page. 4-5 is all that should be necessary or use a theme that has excerpts of each page and links to them.

CDN! CloudFlare, MaxCDN, can hugely affect the speed of static content. This not only allows for loading the website from multiple sources speeding up your website but CDN servers usually run optimized nginx platforms for faster delivery of content. Use the Velvet Blues plugin to rewrite any URLs needed for usage.

Use a bad bot blocker and disable pingbacks and trackbacks. All of those can really load down your website and are unnecessary. By blocking them you free up resources for real visitors.

Reduce plugins. Too often we find WordPress installs which are loaded down by the use of too many unnecessary plugins. The more plugins you have installed the more processor load is required and the slower the performance of your site becomes. Try to limit your active plugins to all that is necessary for the website itself.

Find out your highest loading plugins and find alternatives where possible or disable. WordPress Plugin Performance Profiler plugin can help you view the highest load plugins you are using.

Optimize your images! Too often developers/designers do not optimize their images for web use and can blow up the size of your website and really slow down download speeds. For large images, we recommend TinyPNG.org as it really can squeeze out some file size savings. For WordPress plugins check out Smush.it or EWWW Image Optimizer. Smush.it is more server friendly and will install on most hosting plans but is not always as clean as EWWW with retaining image quality. Use .jpg over .png on large photo images. jpg compresses far better than png when it comes to photos. Smaller image files mean faster downloads.

Databases grow after time! Even if you have less traffic than usual, the load of your account may be higher as a result of a larger database. Do you really need to bloat your database with 2000 revisions of your posts? WP-Cleanup and Better Delete Revision Manager are both great plugins for going in and wiping out all those unnecessary saved revisions eating up database space.

Check your external content load times. When viewing your webpage speed at Pingdom or GTMetrix take a close look at your slowest load times. Often you will find they are coming from a remote image or video slowing you down and you may consider hosting it locally yourself on your server or removing it altogether.

Hopefully you find one of these to be greatly beneficial for you!

 

[SamanthaBrey82]

Make sure that your thumbnail images are not just resized versions of the larger images, if you're using a lot of pictures on your site. Even if a large picture is made into a thumbnail, the entire picture is still being loaded up, it's just being resized by your webpage code.

Other than that, make sure your template is using clean PHP coding efficiently as well.

 

[UWH-David]

Another thing you can do is remove version strings in your URLs. Ex: ..../css/ie.css?ver=20161007 . By doing so you can cache more files via CDN and static engines like Nginx and Varnish. To do so, jump into your theme's function.php file and add the bottom before the close tag:

// Remove Query String
function _remove_script_version( $src ){
$parts = explode( '?ver', $src );
return $parts[0];
}
add_filter( 'script_loader_src', '_remove_script_version', 15, 1 );
add_filter( 'style_loader_src', '_remove_script_version', 15, 1 );

 

[anhbloginc]

anhbloginc

This javascript doesn't work in some case. I don't know why but when I add to a few of my sites, it doesn't take effect.

Also, if you guys are looking for CDN, but don't want to spend money for MaxCDN or other CDN services, apply a free account of Amazon AWS. This type of accounts will give you 50GB of CloudFront each month for a year.

Of course, there are many other methods you can try to get more Amazon AWS coupon, to increase your Amazon AWS balance to use CloudFront.

 

[UWH-David]

UWH-David

It's not javascript, it's PHP. Place this in your active theme's function.php in the proper section. I just tested it out and it works wonderfully with the latest build of WordPress and the theme it has installed.

 

[Claire_Anderson]

If you want to increase the speed of your website then you need to follow these guidelines;

1. choose a good web host: If you are not using a good web host service then everything you will try to speedup your website will simply fail
2. Use faster slider plugins: Slider plugins are also one of the reasons to slow down the website speed.
3. Use a cache plugin: Your website speed usually slow up when the number of users visiting your website increases. To fix this issue, use cache plugins.
4. Optimize the images: Using too many images in the website slow down the loading time of the website. Some software allow the users to save optimized images.
5. Optimize database tables: The database also needs to be optimized to increase the speed.
6. Use a faster gallery plug:
7. Remove inactive plugins from your website.
8. Split your website comments into pages.

 

[aceofadsense]

I recommend the following ways to increase the speed of a Wordpress blog.

Clean plugins
It is not proven to be counterproductive to overload a WordPress installation plugin.

However, plugins are often an endless source of headaches. Although that feature of WordPress is what makes the platform really interesting.

The ideal is to carry out a cleaning of plugins. You can use [URLnf="https://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/"]P3 Plugin Performance Profile[/URLnf] to detect those plugins which slow down the performance of your blog.

Optimize images
Along with JavaScript scripts and CSS files, images are the elements that most influence the slowness of a blog. Speaking of increasing the speed of a blog, ideally a blog without images. But what is a blog without images? Use them but optimized. That is, do not occupy many K's.

The bad thing is that an image with few K's will surely have poor quality and will look bad (pixelated or blurry).

I recommend the use of a plugin to optimize the images at the time of uploading them to the server. The best is [URLnf="https://wordpress.org/plugins/ewww-image-optimizer/"]WWW Image Optimizer[/URLnf] reduces the size of images optimally.

Serving images from a CDN
It is best to place the images on a Content Delivery Network (CDN) configured to optimally serve the images. The Cloud Front Amazon (S3) has a very affordable price. And among other benefits, it is possible to associate W3 Total Cache . This automatically creates a copy of the images that you upload from your WP desktop.

Enable GZIP
This is a way for your site to speed up uploading files: compressing them with GZIP. You can see this function in your hosting control panel or enable it via .htaccess file

To find out if your site has enabled GZIP compression you can use find the tools on the internet.

Caching
The caching system is a solution to optimize the performance of a blog. WordPress has to generate blog pages every time someone requests it. This means multiple accesses to the database. And many operations that decrease server performance.

If static pages are served whenever possible, the loading time of the pages is greatly reduced.

As I said earlier, W3 Total Cache is the quintessential plugin for this type of caching. And it has numerous functionalities, including to integrate also with diverse CDNs, like the Cloud Front of Amazon or CloudFlare (as we will talk about this in next step)

Using a CDN
Increase the speed of a blog: [URLnf="https://www.cloudflare.com/"]CloudFlare[/URLnf]

Using a CDN can not only be useful for hosting the images and can be served faster, but can take advantage of all its functions to accelerate the loading of your blog. For example, CloudFlare offers a free plan, with enough features to a normal blog.

Minimize and unify CSS and JS
To speed up loading of your blog pages, you also need to reduce the size of CSS files and JavaScript scripts. There are plugins that make it as [URLnf="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bwp-minify/"]Better WordPress Minify[/URLnf] . But if you use a CDN, like CloudFlare, you'll have those features secured.

Delete unnecessary widgets
This section has to do with the fact that many external elements that are usually added to a blog use very heavy scripts. In most cases, the problem is also the connection to the servers where the download is very slow. The clearest examples are the links to Google Adsense service and Facebook sharing buttons.

Use an optimized theme
The PHP code of a theme, if not well developed, can also affect the uploading speed. With a premium theme (payment) you ensure, in addition to technical support and upgrades, a quality development. Not always that is so, but if you choose a free theme you risk errors that can lead to low performance of your blog.

Get involved in using WordPress
What if all else fails? So maybe it's time to consider leaving WordPress and migrating the blog to another platform. If you just want to have a personal blog and dedicate yourself to writing and publishing, there are other tools out there and the choice is yours.

How to measure the speed of a blog
The best tools are GTMetrix and Pingdom they will provide ratings and a list of the problems to solve on your site.

In most cases, you can get a rating of A / A (the best), without using W3 Total Cache or any such plugin, just by connecting your blog to CloudFlare and optimizing the elements that most affect the speed of Page load: images, code, theme, etc.

You must apply one or more of the ways that I have quoted in this post and check with which one is helping to reduce the load time of your blog. In some it does not require anything more than knowledge of WP and in others you will need to know something (very little) of server optimization.

 

[Percentage]

You can also try the plugin called wp smush I think that's what it's called, it makes the data size of images smaller.

 

[Hugo E.]

If you want to try a different plugin which allows for finer tweaking and do not mind getting your hands dirty we recommend W3 Total Cache

My hosting VPS is getting the problem with high load on RAM, if I install W3 Total Cache on websites, it could solve the problem or not?

 

[UWH-David]

UWH-David

Hello Hugo, if you follow my original post you should be set. When it comes to RAM, be sure to clean your revision history in WordPress which seems to be missed by most here. By clearing that and optimizing your database you can dramatically shrink down a blown up database which causes a lot overhead and the accumulation of load increases faster as a result. W3 Total Cache is great, but we have been a larger fan of recommending WP Super Cache in rewrite mode lately due to its simplicity and preload feature.

 

[kim16]

I have some sites built base on WP cms but 2 sites are running slowly now.
Do you know any tips or speed up WordPress sites?

There are actually plugins that help you boost site speed. Or you may look into your contents size such as images and videos. They are of course biggest contributors of speed.

 

[FoxMetrics]

Clearing cache and hosting have been mentioned and are important.
I have found images and videos to be the biggest factor in slow running site.

 

[Polymath]

Speaking from personal experience, a good wordpress caching plugin and optimizing the images on your wordpress website and that will make a big difference. You can also use a content delivery network but that won't have quite the speed boost as the caching plugin and image optimization will have in my experience.