How can I improve the speed of my WordPress site?
It can be frustrating to visit a website and wait until all graphics, texts and buttons are loaded before you can start navigating it. Ensure that your WordPress website loads quickly and provides a positive experience for your visitors. Every millisecond counts!
Below we have compiled a list of recommendations you can implement to guarantee a faster WordPress site:
- Monitor your performance regularly
- Use caching plugins
- Use a CDN
- Optimise your images and videos
- Optimise your database
- Always update everything
- Use the recommended PHP version
Monitor your website's performance regularly
The first step is to understand how your website is currently performing and see if something needs improvement. Just log into your Control Panel and open your WordPress dashboard for a quick overview.
Our Performance Monitor provides you with a detailed status analysis. This feature is available to all one.com customers who have connected their WordPress installation via their one.com Control Panel.
Tip: Managed WP customers receive additional tips on how to improve their website's performance. Read more about Managed WP.
Use caching plugins
Caching saves a copy of your website, which will then be shown to the next visitors to your site. This results in faster loading times and can significantly improve your SEO ranking.
Our Performance Cache plugin helps you optimise the speed of your WordPress website using both: Varnish caching and CDN.
This plugin is available to all customers using the free one.com parent plugin. Managed WP customers can use the Pro version of the plugin.
Use a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers in multiple locations across the globe. By saving copies of your website in different places, CDN makes sure your data physically has to travel the shortest distance, resulting in a faster loading site.
CDN is already included in our one.com Performance Cache plugin.
Optimise your images and videos
When optimising images, you want to balance small file size and acceptable quality. By reducing the file size of images you can make your website load faster, improve its SEO ranking and save disk space, which also allows you to create backups faster.
You can optimise images manually before you upload them to your WordPress site, or you can optimise them in WP Admin with a plugin.
Did you know?
Our premium caching plugin, WP Rocket, can significantly enhance your website's loading speed and SEO ranking. It also includes file optimisation, improved lazy loading of images, and much more.
Optimise your database
We have created a separate guide which provides more technical details on optimising your database, which can improve loading times.
Always update everything
Keeping your WordPress version, plugins and themes up to date ensures that your site can live up to its fullest potential. In a separate guide, we go into more detail about why you should always update WordPress.
We recommend that you regularly check and install available updates in WP Admin.
Did you know?
Could you use some help with keeping your WordPress site up to date? Then, we recommend checking out our Managed WP add-on. This includes an Update Manager feature, which provides automatic updates when possible.
Use the recommended PHP version
The benefits of updating to the latest PHP version are better security, new and improved features and, of course, a faster website with faster execution times.
Read more about PHP here:
The latest PHP version might not always be the best version for your website! Before updating to a newer PHP version, make sure that your plugins and themes are compatible with it. If they are not compatible, your WordPress website may break.
Related articles: