Steps To Optimize WordPress Websites For Speed & Performance

Today, given the ever-evolving and fast-moving digital online world the need to Optimize WordPress Websites for speed and performance is very crucial. This is an exercise that has become very important for User Experience (UX), search engine rankings, and even general success. A slow-loading site might result in a higher bounce rate, lower conversions, and terrible SEO performance.

It is no secret that the need to optimize WordPress websites is that they are the most used tools on the Internet. Millions of websites are using it. This platform is sure to have a lot of competition when it comes to user traffic. However, when you optimize your website for conversion rate optimization, you will be able to see an increase in revenue and more sales coming through your door!

Technically, WordPress is the world’s most popular Content Management System (CMS), including 34% of all websites on the Internet — it holds a 60.8% market share in the marketplace.  Notwithstanding, WordPress commands 14.7% of the world’s prime websites, including the most familiar ones such as the Web Tech Experts Website that digital online customers visit daily.

For a WordPress user, optimizing your website for speed and performance is not a choice; it’s a necessity. This is a step-by-step guide to making your WordPress Website as fast as it can be. Therefore, we start with choosing the right hosting provider and then move on through such tips and techniques as caching and optimizing images. We will cover everything you need to know too.

Why It Matters For Webmasters To Optimize WordPress Websites 

One essential reason for webmasters to Optimize WordPress Websites as the title suggests is to help foster high speed and quality performance. Thus, making WordPress websites lightning-fast is no longer a requirement but a necessity. Note that 500+ websites are developed daily using WordPress, while only 60 to 80 per day are formed on other platforms like Squarespace and Shopify.

It’s also worth mentioning that WordPress Themes (30K+) and WordPress Plugins (70K+) seamlessly run on an extensive directory that includes various website-building toolkits. Whether you run a high-traffic WordPress application installation or a small blog on a low-cost shared host, you should optimize WordPress websites and their server so they can run as efficiently as possible.

In our previous guide on speedy website design, we went over a lot of the fundamentals of performance and how it can have a huge impact on the success of your business. Today, we’ll dive into applicable techniques you can take right now to see improvements as you effectively optimize WordPress websites in simple steps. We’ll also share some resources that have been invaluable to us.

If you focus on providing a faster and safer experience to the users, you’ll benefit from the Google Page Experience update. And there’s more. Website speed influences SEO. Google has indicated that the speed at which your page loads is an important signal in determining its ranking. Before we explore the best optimization steps, it’s imperative to know why speed/performance matters.

Consider the following:

1. User Experience: Users tend to wait around for 2-3 seconds before expecting a website to open up. When it fails to do so, it leaves them to log off and probably not come back ever again.
2. Search Ranking: The page speed happens to be a ranking parameter by Google. The sooner a site takes time to open, the faster it ranks high in Google search results.
3. Conversion Rate: For every 1-second delay, the conversion rate is reduced by 7%.
4. Mobile Optimization: More or less users are hitting your site on a mobile device. However, for mobile SEO, speed is so much more crucial.
5. Revenue Generation: A faster website can lead to more page views, convert more leads, and eventually, turn passive customers into active buyers.

At it’s core, the goal of website optimization is to drive more traffic to a website, increase your number of conversions, and ultimately, increase revenue. Slow-loading pages are a major cause of WordPress website abandonment, impacting everything else. All too often, marketers and websters skip to other marketing plans without ensuring that their company’s website is fully optimized.

Be that as it may, before we dive into WordPress speed optimizations, it’s important first to understand that not all WordPress websites are the same. This is why a lot of users have problems, as you can’t go about tackling every issue the same way. We always give WordPress sites a classification: static or dynamic. So let’s first explore the differences between these two types of websites.

Mostly Static Websites

Static would typically include sites such as blogs, small business sites, lower volume news sites, personal, and photography websites, etc. By static, we mean that the data on these WordPress websites is not changing very often (perhaps a couple of times a day). Even most of the websites that the Web Tech Experts team empowers would be considered a static website.

This becomes incredibly important as many of the requests can be served directly from the cache on the server at lightning-fast speeds! Don’t worry; we’ll dive into the topic of caching in length further below. This means they will have fewer database calls and not as many resources will be needed to achieve Google performance.

Highly Dynamic Websites

On the flip side, we have highly dynamic sites. These include sites such as eCommerce (WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads), community, membership, forums (bbPress or BuddyPress), and learning management systems (LMS). By dynamic, we mean that the data on these websites is frequently changing (server transactions take place every few minutes or even every second).

This means that not all requests to the server can be served directly from the cache and require additional server resources and database queries. These sites also typically have a large number of concurrent visitors and sessions. On an informational or corporate WordPress site which is mostly static, a visitor might stay for five or 10 minutes until they find what they need.

In most cases, this is a high number, usually bounce rates are much higher. On dynamic websites, you have the opposite happening. Visitors typically come to the site to engage with something or someone. If they’re going through an online course, it’s not unusual for them to stay for hours. Where is this going? The concurrent visitors connected to your WordPress website host add up fast.

The Steps To Optimize WordPress Websites For Speed And Performance

We’ve published a lot of WordPress speed optimization tutorials over the years with ways to optimize and speed up WordPress. But sometimes it can be confusing trying to find everything you need in one place. So today we’re going to share with you everything we know about turbocharging WordPress, over 15 years worth of experience, and hard lessons learned, all in one guideline.

Whether you’re just starting to use WordPress or are a seasoned developer, we promise you’ll find something useful in this guide! As mentioned, over 43.6% of the web is now powered by WordPress. While this is awesome, it also means there are thousands of different themes, plugins, and technologies all having to coexist. For the everyday WordPress user, this is not that easy.

It can quickly turn into a nightmare when their website starts to bottleneck and they don’t know why or even where to start troubleshooting. To help optimize WordPress websites for our customers, we ensure the platforms that run them are in an isolated software container. A hub that contains all of the software resources required to run the site (Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL).

Eventually, this means that we use a CMS platform that runs each website on a completely private channel — it is not shared by anyone else, not even between your websites. Now, since your time is worth money and you should be spending it on growing your business, there are a few steps to optimize WordPress websites that you or your tech-savvy webmasters can consider giving a try.

Step #1. Choose A Reliable Web Hosting

A WordPress host is a company that stores all of your website’s data. You sign up for a plan and all your images, content, videos, etc., reside on a server sitting in the host’s data center. The WordPress host gives you an easy way to access the data, manage it, and route it to your visitors. Pretty simple right? Well, not quite. There are three very different types of WordPress hosts.

A. Shared WordPress Hosting Plan

This is the topmost popular type of WordPress hosting. These include the largest hosts in the industry such as EIG companies like Bluehost and HostGator as well as providers like Siteground, GoDaddy, Media Temple, OVH, GreenGeeks, and InMotion Hosting. They typically utilize cPanel Dashboard, and the average customer usually pays between $3 to $25 a month.

Most of these hosts offer what they call their “unlimited resources” plan. You have probably all seen this. Well, there is no such thing in the real world as unlimited resources. What hosts do behind the scenes is throttle the clients using up a lot of their resources. This, in turn, ends up with those angry clients leaving, making room for more clients who don’t use a lot of resources.

In the end, you have a vicious hosting company cycle pushing cheap plans and signing up customers who they hope won’t use a lot of resources and will purchase upsells. Still, customer support services with shared hosting are almost always subpar. They often spread themselves very thin to even make a profit and this usually leads to an unpleasant experience for the client.

B. The VPS WordPress Hosting Plan

The other website hosting type is the DIY VPS, or “Do it yourself on a virtual private server.” This crowd is typically made up of bootstrap startups and users with a little more development, server management, and WordPress experience. They are the DIY crowd. These folks are typically still trying to save money, but they are also usually concerned with performance.

They realize it matters in their business success. Commons setups might include using a third-party VPS provider such as Digital Ocean, Linode, or Vultr; along with a tool like ServerPilot to manage it more easily. A small VPS WordPress Hosting from the likes of the DigitalOcean Company starts at $5 a month and the popular plan at ServerPilot starts at $10 a month.

Depending on your setup, you may be looking at a cost of between $5 to $15+ a month. The DIY approach can cut costs, but it also means that you are responsible if something breaks, and for optimizing your server for performance. This plan can be great, but it can also backfire on you if you aren’t careful. Don’t try it if you aren’t tech-savvy or just because you want to tinker!

C. Managed WordPress Hosting Plan

In Managed WordPress Hosting, the hosts handle all the back-end server-related tasks for you, along with providing support when you need it. They are typically fine-tuned to work with WordPress and usually include features such as one-click staging environments and automatic backups. Their support teams will be more knowledgeable when it comes to custom servers.

Likewise, they often know their way around the CMS as they are focused on one platform daily. Plans for managed WordPress hosting typically range anywhere from $25 to $150 a month or more depending on the size of your site and needs. Large companies like jQuery, Intuit, Plesk, Dyn, Nginx, and even The White House are all using WordPress to host their website.

In simple terms, you must choose the right one from the beginning, otherwise, you’ll simply cause yourself headaches and waste time down the road. Consider a cloud-based website hosting provider that is different from traditional shared, VPS, or dedicated infrastructure, making it one of the fastest WordPress hosting solutions available. The speed and quick website load counts.

It should have:

• Fast SSD storage over traditional HDD-based servers.
• Server Location: Host from a server near your target geographic location.
• Scalability: Make sure your hosting plan can handle traffic spikes.

Some popular web hosts you are probably familiar with, or maybe also are currently using include WP Engine, SiteGround, Flywheel, Kinsta, Pressable, Media Temple, Pressidium, and Pagely. To take WordPress hosting to the next level, choose a hosting platform that doesn’t fall into any of the traditional hosting categories. An entire infrastructure that’s built on the Google Cloud Platform.

Step #2. Lightweight And Effective Design Tools

Each website container should run on virtual machines in one of multiple GC data centers and utilize Google Cloud Platform’s premium tier network for optimized low-latency data transfer. Each machine needs up to 96 CPUs and hundreds of GB of RAM. Hardware resources (RAM/CPU) are allocated to each site container automatically by our virtual machines on an as-needed basis.

If you are just getting started, we highly recommend you start building your new website using Elementor — the leading website builder platform for professionals and business owners on WordPress. However, there are many alternatives to Elementor, including Beaver Builder, Divi, Brizy, Visual Composer, Thrive Architect, and WPBakery that you can also consider worth trying.

When choosing an alternative, you can consider things like ease of use, templates, and pricing. One reason we recommend using the Elementor website builder is that it allows WordPress users to create and edit websites with a responsive drag-and-drop technique similar to Wix, Metaconex, or Webflow. Unfortunately, using a bloated website theme can decelerate your website drastically.

Consider:

• Bloksy
• Astra
• GeneratePress
• Neve

You want to shun themes replete with extraneous features, and unnecessary scripts as well. Equally important, ensure you install the most recommended/required/effective plugins to help run your website. Furthermore, the majority of plugins are readily accessible through the WordPress Plugin Directory as freemium options; with additional paid plugins on platforms like CodeCanyon.

In layman’s language, most WordPress Plugins are designed to extend the capabilities of the host application without requiring any changes to its core code. Be that as it may, these plugin tools can be used for a variety of purposes. Some webmasters may utilize them in cases such as adding new features, improving performance, enhancing security, or integrating with third-party services.

The topmost recommended:

• Elementor & Visual Composer
• WordPress Security & Wordfence
• LiteSpeed Cache & HubSpot CRM
• Google Site Kit & MonsterInsights
• WooCommerce & BigCommerce
• Contact Form 7 & WPForms
• AIOSEO & Yoast SEO
• Omnisend & Akismet

Remember, the role of WordPress Plugins is to act like applications run your mobile phone. You can download or purchase them to add or enhance the functionality of your WordPress website. After all, utilizing some of these WordPress Plugins is vital as it allows creative design webmasters to develop powerful websites without touching a single line of code.

Step #3. Optimize The Graphic Image Files

These are usually the largest files that reside on most websites and they have a real potential to bring the load time down. So here is how to optimize the images:

• Compress Images: Compress file size with TinyPNG, ShortPixel, or Imagify to reduce the size without compromising the quality of images.
• Use Next-Gen Formats: Next-Gen Formats like WebP cut image loading time.
• Lazy Loading: Lazy loads the images, which load only when an image appears on the device screen.

In addition, ensure you also optimize your website-wide advertisement graphic images. In this case, try to use images that are optimized for the Internet and overall web-based delivery.

Step #4. Implement A Quality Caching System

Implementing a systematic website caching feature helps cache the static website page versions that otherwise reduce server load time and improve your pages’ loading. Include the addition of a third-party plugin including WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and WP Super Cache that would help further in this issue. Enable object caching and the browser cache and get the highest effect.

In this case, installing a caching plugin may help store static copies of your website’s pages and images on the server so that they can be served quicker to visitors, with less load time for you. The WordPress page cache is usually activated by default, but it might not work as well if there are too many active plugins or themes. Just follow the simple steps to install the best caching plugin.

By improving both technical performance and user experience, you can create websites that not only rank well in search engines but also effectively convert visitors into customers. Use a caching plugin to create a static version of your website — this helps reduce the amount of data the server needs to process. It also helps your website pages and posts to rank high on search engine results.

Step #5. Consider Manifesting And Merging Files 

Manifesting website files means you minimize HTTP requests:— these are necessary for some features, but they add load time.

Combining the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files reduces the HTTP requests. There are also some plugins; among them, the following is mentioned:

• Autoptimize
• WP Optimize

Remove the unused code and scripts to create a light version of your website. Delete unused plugins and themes since they can take up server space and introduce security vulnerabilities.

Step #6. Utilize The Gzip Compression Strategy

Gzip compression is a data compression method that reduces the size of files by removing unnecessary characters and spaces so that it can transfer them faster. This can improve website performance by reducing page load times and bandwidth usage.  Numerous hosting companies have GZIP compression. Other methods include enabling this through a .htaccess file on a website.

Needless to say, we also use a plugin such as the WP Rocket to help further compress the files. During the compression process, the web server compresses files using gzip before sending them to the browser. As a result, the web browser that the user is operating with receives the compressed file, decompresses it, and displays it to the computing device (mobile, tablet, or desktop) screen.

Generally speaking, the major benefits of Gzip Compression include faster page load times, a reduction in the web server bandwidth usage, a decrease in SSL overhead, a substantial improvement of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) processes, and a fast file transfer rate. This means that search engine website-based crawlers can index your pages and blog post content more quickly.

Step #7. Integrate A Content Delivery Network

Of course, Search Engines such as Google, Bing, and Yandex often highly favor fast-loading pages. Still, a fast-loading website shows search engines that you care about visitors. Thus, the website loading speed is a crucial aspect that determines the success or failure of your entire business. If a user spends more than 30 seconds waiting for their browser to load, they are likely to abandon it.

Multiple methods to help optimize WordPress websites exist. For instance, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) may come in handy to help distribute all files from your website on other servers worldwide. As a result, your website would reply according to those different regions that your user may belong to. Some of the most popular CDNs include Cloudflare, KeyCDN, and StackPath.

Step #8. Continually Optimize Your Server 

On the one hand, ensure you remove External HTTP Requests. Some external scripts, such as Google Fonts, social media widgets, and analytics tools, can slow down your website. Load them less or load them as they become available. On the other hand, try to use Lazy Loading for video content and embedded files. Lazy loading loads videos and embedded content like YouTube videos.

Also, lazy-load Tweets only when they fall inside the viewport. This is a huge win on initial page loads. Moreover, a slow website can lead to visitors leaving, which can impact revenue. A responsive theme ensures a good mobile experience, which can impact revenue. To help optimize your website-based images, you may enable hotlink protection to mitigate bandwidth theft.

Step #9. Monitor And Analyze Performance

To help further optimize WordPress websites, as a webmaster, you may need to upgrade the core WordPress, themes, and plugins to improve performance and security. Clean up unused plugins and themes to de-bloat. Your WordPress database will also collect junk data over time. This means that your site is going to get slower and slower with time. This is one thing a plugin can do.

A plugin such as the WP-Optimize and Advanced Database Cleaner can help eradicate spam comments, erase post revisions, and optimize your server database tables. With that in mind, ensure you test and optimize WordPress websites for speed and performance weekly. Remember, for a website speed and performance testing plugin to be worth it, it has to yield real-world results.

Use tools like:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• GTmetrix
• Pingdom

Find bottlenecks to tweak. Unfortunately, the very themes, plugins, and tools that help enhance and optimize WordPress websites in terms of functionality (and help make WordPress so popular) can also be the reason why there’s a slowed-down performance. While this is awesome, it also means there are thousands of different themes, plugins, and technologies all having to coexist.

Step #10. Apply Long-Term Optimization Plans

Last but not least, it’s essential to focus on other options and consider long-term techniques that can help enhance and optimize WordPress websites moving forward. Usually, third-party scripts slow down your website similarly to plugins — they add data that has to be processed when someone visits your website. For example, let’s consider third-party scripts such as the perfmatters.

Perfmatters are essential tools that allow you to disable scripts on taxonomies that don’t need them, load Google Analytics locally, etc. On that note, ensure that you limit external scripts. External scripts are code files that your website uses but are not stored on your web server.

The other best techniques:

• Turning On HTTP/2: HTTP/2 will make your site load faster because it can process multiple requests simultaneously. Most of the new hosting providers support HTTP/2.
• Static Website Generation: Use WP2Static or another static site generator, if your site is very dynamic, to create static HTML copies of your pages.
• Optimizing For Mobile: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly by using responsive design and optimizing images and scripts for mobile devices.
• Minimizing Server Response Time: Slow server response can heavily impact the speed of your website. Optimizing server configurations, database queries, and PHP settings will help to improve response times.

The performance of your WordPress websites has always been a top priority for our team. It’s one of the main reasons clients choose us today over our competitors, and we’ve proven this time and time again. We’re consistently one of the first in the industry to release the latest software such as PHP 8.0.0 to users. The Review Signal has awarded us “top tier” performance five years in a row.

Outsourcing Webmasters Plus Tools To Optimize WordPress Websites

Every year Review Signal releases their WordPress hosting performance benchmarks, and we are proud that five years in a row, in partnership with other industry leaders, the Web Tech Experts Taskforce has proven to be the best company across all tiers! And not just on one or two of our plans, but every plan, from Single Users 35K up to our Enterprise and Agency WordPress plans. 🤘

Until now, the best fit for our partner-based hosting platform was GCP’s compute-optimized C2 machines, but a new machine type Google calls C3D is boosting VM performance again with improved hardware and a more efficient approach to I/O. Eventually, the C3D-Based VM Testing saw response times improve by 20% to 50% when switching from already-fast C2 machines.

Explore More: The General-Purpose Machine Family For Compute Engine

Unlike other hosts that use Google Cloud Platform’s general-purpose virtual machines, we make compute-optimized C2 and Compute Engine General-Purpose C3D VMs available for all our customers in supported regions. Uniquely, the Google Cloud’s C2 machines feature the latest generation Intel Xeon scalable processors capable of sustaining 3.8 GHz all-core turbo speeds.

Conversely, the Google C3D Machines is an innovative technology series that is powered by 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ Processors. Both are popular for CPU-heavy use cases like scientific modeling and machine learning, but they’re also great for high-performance WordPress hosting. Sure, migrating a WordPress website from a general-purpose VM to a C2 VM is very effective.

Next, to help power up and optimize WordPress websites with Managed WordPress Hosting, crafted for speed, security, and simplicity, there are a few fundamental principles that our webmasters support you with.

What you will get:

• Effortless control inside a custom dashboard
• Unlimited free migrations, handled by our expert migrations team
• 24/7/365 support from WordPress experts
• Google Cloud’s premium infrastructure
• Enterprise-grade security through Cloudflare integration
• Global reach with 37 data centers

At the same time, there are a few other absolute and must-have tools that our webmasters use to optimize WordPress websites for our target clients and potential customers.

Some are as follows:

• Google PageSpeed Insights: Analyze and improve the speed of your website.
• GTmetrix: Get detailed performance reports.
• WP Rocket: This is an all-in-one caching and optimization plugin.
• ShortPixel: This is an image optimization tool.
• Cloudflare: The CDN and security features.

The performance of your WordPress websites has always been a top priority for our team. It’s one of the main reasons clients choose us today over our competitors, and we’ve proven this time and time again. We’re consistently one of the first in the industry to release the latest software such as PHP 8.0.0 to users. The Review Signal has awarded us “top tier” performance five years in a row.

In Conclusion;

Speed and performance is a necessity that requires webmasters to optimize WordPress Websites all around the clock. It’s a constant process that demands attention to detail along with proper maintenance. The steps mentioned above will surely bring a remarkable change in the loading time of your website, while it will improve the user experience as well as increase the rank in SEO.

Remember, fast websites are no longer a luxury but a necessity in today’s competitive online environment. Start optimizing your WordPress website today and enjoy benefits such as increased performance and search engine rankings. Remember, the fundamental reason why we optimize WordPress websites is to help improve user experience, search engine rankings, and revenue

Overall, this guide helps you optimize WordPress websites to increase conversion rates and revenue. Follow the above-described tips for better WordPress website performance and increased user experience. Moreover, if you are facing issues while following any of the tips and tricks, get help from our expert WordPress website developers working in an excellent development company.