It can be pretty 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
The first step is to understand how your website is currently performing and see what factors are in check compared to what factors need improvement. Just log into your control panel and open your WordPress dashboard for a quick overview.
With our Performance Monitor, you will get 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 WordPress customers will receive additional tips on how to improve their performance. Read more about Managed WordPress.
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.
We created a Performance Cache plugin that 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 WordPress customers will have access to 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 your images, you want to balance small file size and acceptable quality. With optimised images, your website will load faster, your SEO ranking will be better, and you will use less disk space, leading to speedier backups.
Optimising your files is possible through manual compression before uploading or using plugins.
Tip: Check out the premium plugin WP Rocket, which can help you achieve this and many other performance goals in no time.
Optimise your database
We have created a separate guide that provides more technical details on optimising your database, resulting in improved loading time.
Click here to read our guide: How to optimise the WordPress database.
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 this separate guide, we go more into detail about why you should always update WordPress.
Regularly check in on your WP Admin and manually update everything that needs to be maintained.
Tip: Could you use some help with keeping your WordPress site up to date? Then, we recommend checking out our Managed WordPress 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, benefit from new features and improvements and, of course, significantly faster websites with faster execution times. However, your plugins and themes need to be compatible.
Read more about PHP here:
The latest PHP version might not always be the best version for your website! Ensure your plugins and themes are up-to-date before upgrading PHP. If they are not compatible your WP site will break.
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