5 Quick Tips to Speed Up WordPress Website By Yourself Easy

Slow load times can frustrate visitors and affect the search engine ranking of your website. Fortunately, speeding up your WordPress site is easy with a few key strategies. Here we share five quick tips to improve your site’s performance significantly.

0. Start With a Performance Check

Before we get started, let’s see where we start.

To measure the performance of your website, use a free tool such as GTMetrix. Take the initial measurement, then go through the suggested steps, and finally measure the result again.

OK, if you’ve done the initial measurement, let’s get started with our 5 quick and easy tips to speed up WordPress website by yourself:

1. Optimize Your Images

Large images can drastically slow down a website.

Why?

Because the larger the images, the longer it takes the browser to download them from the website’s server. If we reduce the size, this time is shortened, so it will load faster. Simple.

As a first step, reduce the image size to the size needed to fit on the page. For example, as a simple rule of thumb, upload a full-screen width image at maximum full HD size (1,920 x 1,080 pixels), if the image only fills half the screen, half of that will be sufficient, and so on.

Second, optimize the images by compressing them without quality degradation. Tools such as Adobe Photoshop, TinyPNG, WP Smush, or many free tools online, can help reduce the size of image files, resulting in faster load times.

2. Install a Caching Plugin

With a caching plugin, you can significantly speed up your WordPress site by caching a version of your pages. This means less work for the server to do when your page loads.

Popular caching plugins like LiteSpeed Cache(Free), WP Rocket, or WP Fastest Cache(Free) can make this process simple and efficient.

3. Keep Your WordPress Site Updated

Regular updates are essential for speed and security. Make sure you are using the latest version of WordPress and keep your plugins and themes up to date. These updates often include optimizations that can improve site performance.

Don’t forget to make a backup before each update, just in case an update breaks something on your website!

4. Optimize Your Homepage

Your homepage is often the first thing visitors see. Keep it fast by limiting the number of posts displayed, removing unnecessary widgets, and focusing on a clean, minimal design. A faster homepage means a quicker first impression.

Avoid overly long page layouts, huge images, and the use of embedded videos. Avoid excessive use of CSS animations, not only for performance reasons but also to improve the user experience.

5. Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider

Your hosting provider plays a significant role in the performance of your website. Shared hosting can be a bottleneck in terms of speed. For better performance, consider upgrading to VPS or managed WordPress hosting, especially if your site is a fundamental pillar of your business, growing, or has high traffic.

What is shared hosting and why is it a bad thing?

Typically, the majority of hosting providers sell shared hosting, which means that thousands of websites can be running on a single server at the same time. The advantage of this is that it is cheap, but the disadvantage is that if one website overloads the server, in the worst case the other sites will also crash or slow down.

On the other hand, VPS hosting is characterized by the fact that only 1, or at most a few websites are running on a single server so that significantly more resources can serve the website, which will be much more reliable and faster even with a high number of visitors.

Conclusion:

Improving your WordPress site’s speed doesn’t have to be complicated. By implementing these simple tips, you can enhance user experience, improve SEO rankings, and ensure your site remains competitive and efficient. Remember, a fast site is key to keeping your visitors happy and engaged.

Need Help?

At WPWESS, we understand the importance of website performance. Our WordPress Website Maintenance and Support services include FREE VPS HOSTING and performance optimization (with our Cache Solution) to ensure your site is always running at its best. Contact us to learn more about how we can help keep your WordPress site fast and efficient.