Making your WordPress website load faster is one of the most important things you can do to improve user experience and increase your chances of ranking higher in search results. As you’ve probably heard about the latest industry stats, analyzed your website’s traffic trends or experienced it yourself, most people browse the web on mobile devices. So, ensuring your website loads fast is of utmost importance.
People are impatient. If the website isn’t loading fast enough on their phones, they will not wait. They’ll bounce and look for another website that will give them what they want. Even Google has moved to giving priority to mobile websites. If your website isn’t fast enough and users keep on bouncing out of it, then there’s no reason for Google to even show your site in search results. So, how do you speed up your WordPress site?
In this guide, I’ll walk you through all the steps you need to take to speed up your website. You don’t need deep technical knowledge to make significant improvements to speed up your website, but implement the steps below:
- Find a fast webhost
- Upgrade to the latest PHP version
- Enable web caching
- Purge inactive and useless plugins
- Update WordPress version
- Optimize your images
- Optimize WordPress database
- Consider theme choice, SSL security and more
I’ll use my fitness blog, trainerandrei.ca as a case study.
I’m in the process of reviving the blog. It has been dormant for a very long time, yet traffic remains steady.
So, after completing the steps outlined above, I’ve been able to make a significant improvement to the site’s performance.
Website performance before and after
| Before | After | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|
| GTmetrix (Speed) | 4.5s | 1.7s | 62% |
| Pingdom (Speed) | 2.87s | 883ms | 69% |
| GTmetrix (Score) | 77 | 85 | 10% |
| Pingdom (Score) | 61 | 89 | 46% |
| Google Page Insights | 70 (desktop) 37 (mobile) | 86 (desktop) 81 (mobile) | 23% (desktop) 119% (mobile) |
It’s running on Genesis Framework using a News Pro Theme with the following plugins:
- Adminer (Inactive)
- Advance Export (Inactive)
- Akismet Anti-spam
- BackupWPup
- Contact Form 7
- Disqus
- Easy Pricing Tables (Inactive)
- Expand SEO
- Export to Text (Inactive)
- Genesis Design Pallette (Inactive)
- Genesis Design Palette Pro – eNews Widget (Inactive)
- Genesis Design Palette Pro – Entry Content (Inactive)
- Genesis Design Palette Pro – Google Webfonts (Inactive)
- Genesis eNews Extended
- Genesis Layout Extras
- Genesis Simple Edits
- Genesis Slider (Inactive)
- Genesis Tabs Extended
- Google AdSense
- Hello Bar (Official)
- HTML Javascript Adder
- Jetpack by WordPress.com
- Really Simple CAPTCHA
- Simple 301 Redirects
- Simple 301 Redirects – Addon – Bulk CSV Uploader
- Simple Social Icons
- Soliloquy (Inactive)
- Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Hardening
- TablePress (Inactive)
- Title Experiments Free
- UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
- Velvet Blues Update URLs (Inactive)
- W3 Total Cache
- WebSub/PubSubHubbub
- Wordfence Security
- WordPress Database Backup (Inactive)
- WordPress Importer
- Yoast SEO
Of course, all these would have to be addressed and see which plugins slow down the website.
Benchmarks before speed optimization
Find a fast web host
Almost any web host can make your website fast, you just have to pay for it. But if you run a website as a side project or a hobby, you’re bootstrapped. You do not have hundreds of dollars in monthly fees to pay for premium web hosting services. Instead, like many webmasters, your site is probably on the lowest tier of the plans available at your web hosting company. The lower tier plans are always shared hosting. It means that resources and space on a server that runs your website are also shared with dozens, if not more other websites. Your website is essentially competing for the same resources.
But not all web hosting companies are created equal. Although low tier pricing and plan features are very similar, the technology and infrastructure powering the hosts may not be. And this is where my website speed optimization project began. Picking a good web host and a hosting plan within your budget is one of the top things that could have the biggest impact on your website’s speed.
I spent last ten years with Netfirms, on their Advantage plan. It was time to shop around. The one web hosting company I often see come up in forums, reviews and in top recommendations was Siteground. On February 13th, I signed up for the GrowBig plan on Siteground, cloned and moved my site over. Like on Netfirms, it’s a shared hosting plan, also competitive on features and pricing.
Before making the switch, I benchmarked the performance with:
- Pingdom Page Speed Tool
- Gmetrix
- Google Page Speed Insights
- Search Console Crawl Data
Web host speed performance
| Netfirms Load Time | Siteground Load Time | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|
| GTmetrix | 4.5s | 3.3s | 26% faster |
| Pingdom | 2.87s | 2.07s | 28% faster |
Web host performance scores
| Netfirms Score | Siteground Score | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gmetrix | 77 | 81 | 5% improvement |
| Pingdom | 61 | 73 | 12% improvement |
| Google Page Insights | 70 (desktop) 37 (mobile) | 86 (desktop) 76 (mobile) | 23% (desktop) improvement 108% (mobile) improvement |
I also noticed a massive improvement in how Google crawled the site.
As you can see, after switching web hosts mid-February Google spent less time downloading pages, while at the same time downloading more.
Upgrade to the latest version of PHP7
When I moved the site over, the system default on Siteground was PHP version 7.0.29. I decided to upgrade to 7.2.4, the latest available version.
Load time after PHP Upgrade
| Netfirms | Siteground | PHP7 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| GTmetrix | 4.5s | 3.3s | 2.7s |
| Pingdom | 2.87s | 2.07s | 1.63s |
Performance score after PHP upgrade
| Netfirms | Siteground | PHP7 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gmetrix | 77 | 81 | 85 |
| Pingdom | 61 | 73 | 75 |
| Google Page Insights | 70 (desktop) 37 (mobile) | 86 (desktop) 76 (mobile) | 85 (desktop) 80 (mobile) |
As you can see, just by switching over to a better website host and upgrading to the latest PHP7 version I was able to significantly improve the speed of the website. I could stop here, but there are other things I could to improve the speed. I want to get the site as close to 1s load time and to 100% scores as close as possible, even on a shared hosting plan.
Enable Web Caching
Web caching is a term used to describe the temporary storage of frequently accessed web files, accomplished by hard of software tools. By enabling web caching it can have a big impact on your site’s performance because it reduces the latency in accessing files, number of request from the content provider and load on the hosting server.
Many web hosts already provide and enable caching services for your website, or you can run setup your own with a WordPress plugin.
When I transferred trainerandrei.ca to Siteground, it also brought over old plugins as well. However, it didn’t add Siteground’s SG Optimizer like it would if you were to set up a new WP site.
- removed WP-Cache
- static caching was already ON
- enabled dynamic caching
- enabled free Cloudflare account – but made it worse. Forced the site to ‘www’. Had to disable it.
- flushed cache
Making these changes improved the site load time, but not much difference in overall scores. In some cases, the scores dropped a point or two.
Load time after updating cache settings
| Netfirms | Siteground | PHP7 | Cache | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GTmetrix | 4.5s | 3.3s | 2.7s | 2.2s |
| Pingdom | 2.87s | 2.07s | 1.63s | 908ms |
Performance score after updating cache settings
| Netfirms | Siteground | PHP7 | Cache | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gmetrix | 77 | 81 | 85 | 81 |
| Pingdom | 61 | 73 | 75 | 74 |
| Google Page Insights | 70 (desktop) 37 (mobile) | 86 (desktop) 76 (mobile) | 85 (desktop) 80 (mobile) | 83 (desktop) 83 (mobile) |
Purge Inactive or Useless Plugins
There are a lot of inactive and useless plugins on the site. I deleted all inactive plugins and went through the list of active plugins. I discovered a few that I no longer used or provided value, include Jetpack and Hellobar. Plugins that were removed are:
- Adminer
- Advance Export
- Easy Pricing Tables
- Expand SEO
- Export to Text
- Genesis Design Pallette
- Genesis Design Palette Pro – eNews Widget
- Genesis Design Palette Pro – Entry Content
- Genesis Design Palette Pro – Google Webfonts
- Genesis Slider
- Hello Bar (Official)
- Jetpack by WordPress.com
- Soliloquy
- TablePress
- Title Experiments Free
- Velvet Blues Update URLs
- W3 Total Cache (removed during cache optimization stage)
- WordPress Database Backup
- WordPress Importer
Load time after purging plugins
| Netfirms | Siteground | PHP7 | Cache | Plugins | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GTmetrix | 4.5s | 3.3s | 2.7s | 2.2s | 2.2s |
| Pingdom | 2.87s | 2.07s | 1.63s | 908ms | 820ms |
Performance scores after purging the plugins
| Netfirms | Siteground | PHP7 | Cache | Plugins | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gmetrix | 77 | 81 | 85 | 81 | 81 |
| Pingdom | 61 | 73 | 75 | 74 | 85 |
| Google Page Insights | 70 (desktop) 37 (mobile) | 86 (desktop) 76 (mobile) | 85 (desktop) 80 (mobile) | 83 (desktop) 83 (mobile) | 82 (desktop) 83 (mobile) |
Update WordPress
Everything performed before this stage was intended to deal with legacy processes and items. Even WP version remained at 4.8.6
Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress or any piece of software it’s always expected that it will improve things on many fronts, including speed and overall site performance.
Although I didn’t expect much, but I noticed decent site performance improvement after upgrading to WordPress version 4.9.5
Load time after WP upgrade
| Netfirms | Siteground | PHP7 | Cache | Plugins | WP upgrade | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GTmetrix | 4.5s | 3.3s | 2.7s | 2.2s | 2.2s | 2.3s |
| Pingdom | 2.87s | 2.07s | 1.63s | 908ms | 820ms | 795ms |
Performance scores after WP upgrade
| Netfirms | Siteground | PHP7 | Cache | Plugins | WP Upgrade |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gmetrix | 77 | 81 | 85 | 81 | 81 | 88 |
| Pingdom | 61 | 73 | 75 | 74 | 85 | 90 |
| Google Page Insights | 70 (desktop) 37 (mobile) | 86 (desktop) 76 (mobile) | 85 (desktop) 80 (mobile) | 83 (desktop) 83 (mobile) | 82 (desktop) 83 (mobile) | 91 (desktop) 81 (mobile) |
I’ve also updated some of the plugins and the Genesis Framework to version 2.6.1 but didn’t see any changes in performance improvement.
Smush Your Images and Optimize Your WP Database
WP Smush a widely used and recommended WP plugin for optimizing the size of your images. In addition to optimizing your images, you should also cleanup and optimize the WP database to ensure it runs as efficiently as possible. After these two optimizations, there was no significant improvement on the scores. The only thing that improved was GTmetrix SpeedScore, which reached 90%, up 2 points form 88.
Moving Forward
I’ve reached a point with the site where I’ve done everything I can to speed up it up with free and previously purchased tools and themes. There’s still a lot of room for improvement. To move forward, I’d either need to invest in CDN subscription, buy a premium web caching tool or upgrade web hosting, or all of the above.
Before investing in one of the options, I switched out a theme, from Magazine Pro to Studio Press’ sample theme and enabled SSL. Performance slightly dropped.
Load time after WP theme and SSL updates
| Netfirms | Siteground | PHP7 | Cache | Plugins | WP upgrade | Theme and SSL | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GTmetrix | 4.5s | 3.3s | 2.7s | 2.2s | 2.2s | 2.3s | 1.7s |
| Pingdom | 2.87s | 2.07s | 1.63s | 908ms | 820ms | 795ms | 883ms |
Performance scores after SSL and theme updates
| Netfirms | Siteground | PHP7 | Cache | Plugins | WP Upgrade | Theme and SSL | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gmetrix | 77 | 81 | 85 | 81 | 81 | 88 | 85 |
| Pingdom | 61 | 73 | 75 | 74 | 85 | 90 | 89 |
| Google Page Insights | 70 (desktop) 37 (mobile) | 86 (desktop) 76 (mobile) | 85 (desktop) 80 (mobile) | 83 (desktop) 83 (mobile) | 82 (desktop) 83 (mobile) | 91 (desktop) 81 (mobile) | 86 (desktop) 81 (mobile) |
There are of course many other things that can be done to optimize the site even further, and I’ll update this post if I decide to proceed down that path. In the meantime, check out some of these WordPress optimization resources: