If you want to improve user experience and increase your page views, feel free to apply most useful WordPress speed optimization tips to speed up your website and raise WordPress performance. All of them will be helpful within your WordPress SEO as well. Even if you have an amazingly quick website, you still need an equally reliable hosting server. Don’t hesitate this important point and move forward through really cool suggestions from experienced Themes Zone team.
Site Speed
Since you frequently visit your own website, modern browsers, like Chrome, FireFox etc., store your website in cache and automatically prefetch it as soon as you start typing an address. This makes your website load almost instantly. However, an ordinary user, who is visiting your website for the first time, may not have the same experience. In fact, users in different geographical locations will have a completely different experience. This is why we recommend testing your website speed using a tool like PageSpeed Insights. PageSpeed Insights reports on the real-world performance of a page for mobile/desktop devices and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved. If you do the following steps correctly, you have good chances of providing a good loading speed to your site’s visitors, like us:
Your website site speed largely depends on your server and site optimization. These are the steps we recommend you to take in order to get a dramatic increase in site speed in case if you need one:
- Use Merge + Minify + Refresh plugin. You can download it here.
Combine your CSS/JavaScript files and minifying them. It also caches them so your server doesn’t have to repeat the entire loading process each time they’re requested, and it automatically updates everything when you make changes to those files. This little plugin has one job: make all merged scripts produced by the Merge + Minify + Refresh plugin load asynchronously. Within this awesome plugin, you have an opportunity to handle scripts loaded in the header & footer, apply minification on WordPress Multisite and, even failed minification doesn’t break the site, visitors will instead only see the merged results. View status of merge and minify on settings page in WordPress admin - Use WP Super Cache plugin. You can download it here.
This required plugin generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress site significantly. Caches the pages and delivers them without accessing the database. 99% of your visitors will be served by static html files. One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files well cut to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them. It’s easy to set up, very fast and even supports CDN. - Use a CDN for your site. Learn more about CDN for WordPress.
Modern CDNs can handle numerous IT tasks, helping you to improve page load speed, handle high traffic loads, block spammers, scrapers and other bad bots, protect your website from DDoS attacks and many more. Today, over half of all traffic is already being served by CDNs. How a CDN works: to minimize the distance between the visitors and your website’s server, a CDN stores a cached version of its content in multiple geographical locations (a.k.a., points of presence, or PoPs). Each PoP contains a number of caching servers responsible for content delivery to visitors within its proximity. In essence, CDN puts your content in many places at once, providing superior coverage to your users. For example, when someone in London accesses your US-hosted website, it is done through a local UK PoP. This is much quicker than having the visitor’s requests, and your responses, travel the full width of the Atlantic and back. - Your hosting must be a good one and support at least one of php caching solutions to reduce server response time.
Recommended Server Requirements:- PHP version 5.6 or greater
- MySQL version 5.6 or greater
- The mod_rewrite Apache module (for permalinks)
- PHP max_input_vars 3000 or greater
- WP Memory limit 64 MB or greater (128 MB or higher is preferred)
- PHP Time Limit 60 or greater
- post_max_size 32M
- upload_max_filesize 32M
- WP Multisite usage is not recommended
You can find more information on system requirements here: WordPress Requirements, Hosting WordPress, Woocommerce Server Requirements.
- Make sure your images are compressed with one of the many existing image compression tools, because heavy images slow down your site significantly. One of the simplest and free online tools for image compression is Tinypng.
TinyPNG is a really outstanding online service that uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colors in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size! PNG is useful because it’s the only widely supported format that can store partially transparent images. So user-friendly drag and drop functionality. You can use Save for Web to export your images as 24-bit transparent PNG files and upload them to TinyPNG. We’ll convert them to compressed PNG files. You can also install the TinyPNG Photoshop plugin. It allows you to scale, preview and save compressed PNG and JPEG images straight from Photoshop. PRO account is available as well.
