10 ways to speed up your WordPress website

Website speed is vital for improving SEO with your WordPress site

If you own and operate a WordPress website, you need to make sure it’s as fast as it can be or else your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will suffer.

Below are 10 ways to make your website faster.

Choose the right theme

Many people may not realize it, but using a theme that’s loaded with features will only slow your website down.

Also if a theme is poorly coded, it will cause problems.

The best thing to do is use a simple theme or go with a ones made by trusted companies like  StudioPress, Themify, or Array Themes.

There are also other great companies out there that make themes.

Cut down on widgets

The more widgets that your website has to load, the longer it will take.

Especially when it comes to advertisements. You should have no more than three ads on each web page at any given time.

Just remember that the more things you clutter your website with, the slower it will be.

Installing a caching plugin

Installing a WordPress caching plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache will quickly speed up your site when you have multiple visitors, since instead of your site having to go through the process of loading each web page, it can quickly serve up a cached page.

Keep your site updated

Updating your WordPress installation, plugins and theme are a huge part of keeping your site running quickly.

Updates not only provide help when it comes to security but for compatibility as well.

The creators of the themes and plugins are always finding bugs that cause issues on everyone’s WordPress sites.  When they fix them, it helps everything runner quicker and smoother.

Don’t install too many plugins

Having too many plugins can quickly bog down your WordPress site since it creates more tasks for the server to go through.

Try to get rid of any plugins that you don’t need and you will notice a difference in the speed of your site.

Break up long posts into pages

If you end up writing a blog post that’s 1000 words or more, it would be wise to break it up into multiple pages. Depending of course how long the piece is.

The more words on a page, the longer that page will take to load, which will of course slow down your website.

Don’t upload videos

Use YouTube. It’s as simple as that. If you’re going to post a video on your website, the best thing to do is publish it on YouTube and then embed it onto your website.

First of all, having it on YouTube will give you more exposure. Second of all, uploading videos to your website directly will only slow it down because it will cost you bandwidth.

Hosting videos on your site will also make your site backups bigger, which is not good as well.

Use a CDN

Using a content delivery service (CDN) is a great way to speed up your website.

I highly recommend Cloudflare, which is free with additional services available at a monthly cost.

Cloudflare does a great job of explaining how they can make your site faster.

Cloudflare can provide website speed improvements through our free CDN (Content Delivery Network) and optional performance features to enhance your website’s speed and overall performance. When you add your website to Cloudflare’s network, we act as a proxy and route your visitor requests through the Cloudflare network and can make modifications to improve response times. Since some of our performance features are based on the pricing plan you elect when you signup, below is a brief overview of key features that will help speed up your website.

There are other numerous CDN’s that you can use.

Optimize your database

Many people don’t realize that removing spam, post revisions, transients as well as other junk files will slow down your website.

A simple way to speed it up is by optimizing your database by using a plugin like WP Optimize.

Optimizing your WordPress database will get rid of unneeded files and junk that slow things down.

Optimize images

Like videos, large photos will slow your site down. When uploading images you need to make sure they’re not too big. If they are,  you can use a plugin like Smush Image Compression and Optimization, which will optimize your images.

Comment below and tell me what you do to speed up your website.