WordPress is an amazing platform, but it tends to slow down as you add more and more plugins.
WP Rocket is a must have plugin for every serious WordPress user. It’s the fastest cache system available and it can even speed up your site by 400%.
The best part about this caching plugin is that it’s incredibly easy to use. You simply install the plugin, set up some simple options in your wp-config file, then activate the plugin on your website. Within minutes you’ll be enjoying faster loading times with no additional effort required!
With today’s users being more impatient than ever and increasing online competition, you need to have a fast-loading WordPress website if you want to succeed. Continue reading to learn how to check your site’s Google PageSpeed score and make seven quick but efficient improvements to boost WordPress performance.
What exactly is Google PageSpeed and how does it work?
Google PageSpeed is a free suite of tools that ranks how quickly your website loads. It also provides your site with two speed ratings: one for mobile and one for desktop.
To get an excellent rating, you should shoot for a score of 90 or more. A score of less than 50 is considered sluggish and requires immediate remedy. Fortunately, we’ve compiled a list of suggestions to enhance the performance of your WordPress site below.
Simply put your URL into the Google PageSpeed Insights search bar to see how fast your website loads. It’s important to check your Google PageSpeed scores on a regular basis and strive to improve them.
Why is Google PageSpeed so essential?
If your website loads quickly for you, it’s tempting to believe that it must be quick. However, because of caching, browser location, and other factors, your site generally loads quicker for you than for other people.
A responsive WordPress website is essential in today’s fast-paced digital world. Users are frequently quick to leave websites that take too long to load. This implies that if your site is sluggish, you may be missing out on a lot of visitors.
Users’ engagement and interaction with your site is also influenced by speed. In the end, faster sites convert more sales, sign-ups, donations, and other outcomes – so improving your site’s performance can improve your bottom line.
Last but not least, page speed is an important search engine ranking component. The higher your site will appear in search engine results pages if it loads quickly, particularly on a mobile device.
In a nutshell, more visitors and interaction equals more business.
The 7-step guide to improving WordPress page speed
Now we’ve got your back and give you our top recommendations for optimizing your Google PageSpeed score on WordPress.
1) Optimise your images
The most frequent reason for sluggish WordPress websites is oversized pictures. The larger the picture files on your website, the longer it takes to load.
Optimizing your images is an important stage in increasing website speed. Resizing and compressing image files so that they may be retrieved and loaded faster is known as optimizing.
The first stage of image optimisation is to make sure your picture is edited before it’s published on your website.
To do so, you must first determine where the picture will be used and what size is required. You may then use a program like Photoshop or Pixlr to trim and save the image in the smallest possible dimensions. Even changing file type can help reduce file sizes – for example, JPEGs are often smaller than PNGs.
Finally, install an image optimization plugin on your website – we recommend Smush (it’s what we use on the WP Panda site). This not only compresses images even more once they’ve been uploaded, which improves page speed, but it also includes a slew of other picture optimization functions, including lazy loading.
2) Enable caching
Caching is a technique for keeping your site data in local temporary storage spaces, called caches. This means that browsers can load your site files more quickly and don’t have to re-download everything from the server every time it’s needed.
Caching, in general, has the potential to increase your page loading speeds significantly. It’s simple to activate on WordPress with a free plugin like W3 Total Cache. However, we personally use WP-Rocket for greater compatibility ease of use, and support.
3) Think mobile-first
When it comes to developing and optimizing your site’s speed, you should consider mobile-first since Google focuses on the mobile version of websites in its rankings.
A responsive WordPress theme will give you the fastest loading mobile pages. This will guarantee that your website is optimized for smaller displays.
Additionally, several plugins may be used to improve the performance of your WordPress website’s mobile pages. WebP Express converts all of the images on your site into fast webp variants that are compatible with 80% of mobile devices. However, keep in mind that this will also necessitate the use of image compression software on your server.
The WordPress AMP plugin is also beneficial for improving mobile performance. It generates AMP versions of your website, which load quickly on mobile and other devices.
4) Enable GZIP compression
When you utilize GZIP, your website files are transferred between your server and users’ computers in lightweight compressed versions. This makes browsing on your site more rapid.
We recommend that you use the WP-Optimize plugin, which has a GZIP compression option. This plugin will also be beneficial when it comes to minifying website files in our following point.
5) Minify CSS, HTML & JS files
Minification of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), HTML, and JavaScript (JS) files is usually advised if your Google PageSpeed score requires improvement.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files are used to add comments to your website code. For example, comments may be added to clarify formatting or style. Minification is a term that refers to the reduction of file size and removal of unneeded code.
This is an excellent technique to improve page load speed and keep essential information visible. You may reduce the size of your JS, HTML, and CSS files on WordPress quickly and simply with the free WP-Optimize plugin.
6) Update plugins
Plugins may be having a negative impact on your site’s performance in a number of ways. Plugins with outdated software, badly-designed plugins, or useless/duplicate plugins might all contribute to slow website loading.
It’s worth noting that it isn’t always the quantity of plugins that slows down a website. (That is, unless you have a lot of plugins that do the same thing or aren’t used – in which case you should get rid of them to save space.) In general, how good and useful a plugin is has an impact on page speed.
It’s always a good idea to perform a Google PageSpeed check before and after installing any plugin. This will show you how much the plugin affects your site’s speed, allowing you to decide whether the plugin’s features are worth slowing down your website.
You may also check how your site’s speed is affected by any active plugins by turning them all off in the WordPress website backend’s ‘Plugins’ area, then running a PageSpeed test.
You should also make sure that plugins are updated as soon as new programs become available. Updates will always be highlighted on your WordPress dashboard, so check it regularly and action any update notifications.
7) Clean-up your database
Finally, you may speed up your website with a good old spring cleaning! Over time, the more you utilize your WordPress site, the clogged it will become with outdated and useless files that slow down performance. To improve performance, clean your database by removing any things that aren’t needed.
You may keep your WordPress website database clean by using a plugin like WP-Sweep or Advanced Database Cleaner. These will run in the background to keep your database up to date and improve page speed.
Do you require assistance?
We’re a WordPress agency with two decades of expertise helping businesses create and maintain their sites. If you want any additional assistance optimizing your WordPress website’s speed or enhancing its performance, please contact us.
For more fantastic recommendations and ideas, look at our comprehensive WordPress optimization guide, which covers all elements of how to maintain and enhance your WordPress website.
