I noticed that a lot of articles around the web mention more the 20 Tips to optimize WordPress website speed. But you only need these 3.
As i read them i came to the conclusion the 90% are pointless and are just mentioned so the article gets a higher word count.
Sometimes you just cannot use another theme, simplify the design or use „high-quality” plugins
Because WordPress is requiring plugins & themes to extend its functionality, plugins & themes that are made by 3rd party developers 99% of the time, you noticed that after a while the website speed is dropping significantly.
The performance drop is just one of the problems you can experience, also there can be vulnerabilities, errors or even in some isolated cases permanent damage caused to the Database.
There are multiple causes for those problems (besides plugins) and in this article i will try to explain as fast as i can how you can improve your WordPress site speed and also prevent some security and data corruption along the way.
I hope i don’t bore you because it will be a somewhat long article with some technicalities.
Before we start you must ger familiar with the following:
- read server logs and also read WordPress logs
- understand how to modify a server configuration
- minimal understanding of WordPress debugging
What is WordPress site speed an why is important?
First of all, a quick definition for those that dont know for sure what WordPress site speed is.
WordPress site speed refers to the time it takes for a website’s pages to fully load and become interactive for visitors. In other words, it’s the measure of how fast a web page loads when someone clicks on a link or enters a URL in their browser. Site speed is a critical factor that can significantly impact user experience, search engine rankings, and overall website performance.
If you have a bad or very bad site speed it can affect multiple areas of you user journey that is impacting in a negative way conversions & leads.
Also as i mentioned above it effects also how search engines are indexing your content.
How to test your website speed?
There are more then 10 website speed tests you can take.
But i advise to use only the most popular ones because they are the most relevant overall.
First you can use Googles Lighthouse that is built into Chromes Developers Tools.
Or a another speed test that im using often is gtmetrix.com.
Basically they do the same thing but offer a different layout for the test information that they display.
What is a good site speed?
In an ideal scenario the website loading times should be less then 3s. Googles guidelines are telling us that we need to be even below 2s, but sometimes that’s not possible.
In 3s your page should load completely and be functional. If your page take longer then 3s to load fully users are getting frustrated and most of the time leave never to return again.
Even though you have active remarketing campaigns the user tends to remember that they had a bad experience and they will have doughs to invest any more time in your website.
First tip: Check your current server load and make some adjustments
WordPress tends to get power hungry sometimes. If you have a lot of products, traffic or plugins that extend your functionality the server is important to be fast and responsive.
Do some basic checks regarding the following aspects:
- how much free space do you have left
- average CPU load
- average RAM usage
- Process usage
- I/O
If one of those metrics are above 100% that may be your problem.
This happens because you have one or more plugins are are not working just right, a theme that is not optimized correctly, a plugin that is conflicting with another or just to much site trafic that your server can handle.
You need at least 20% free disk space
Also if the space on the disk is above 95% note that cache, data and other temporary files cannot be stored correctly by WordPress and can cause your site to have a dip in performance and some weird issues like unable to log into your admin account.
Plugin or theme conflict
The first thing to check is your WordPress Error Log and also the Server Error Log to see if you can spot some plugin/theme that is not acting right.
If you found something try to disable that plugin and test again your website speed.
The problem most of the times gets fixed by doing just that but that doesn’t mean your problem is 100% fixed. You need to contact the plugin or theme developer to present him the issue for further investigation.
And in this case it will be a difficult decision to make: change the theme or plugin or wait for the developer.
PHP version conflict
Try to update to the latest PHP version supported by your server and monitor the performance after the update.
Sometimes an outdated PHP version causes the WordPress installation to act weird.
If the problem still persists then you need to let the lates PHP version applied to your server because it future proofs your website.
But if the problem gets worse then most certainly is a plugin that is causing the issue.
Upgrade hosting
If you don’t have plugin or theme conflict that spike server loads or conflicts regarding the installed PHP version i guess the next logical step is to upgrade the hosting package.
This is especially the case if you have a low tier hosting package and the website traffic exceeds a certain amount of daily visitors.
Second tip: Always make sure to update your plugins and theme in time
Themes & plugins can have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malicious actors to compromise your website’s security. Theme developers often release updates that address these vulnerabilities and provide improved security measures. By keeping your theme up to date, you reduce the risk of security breaches.
Like any software, themes & plugins can have bugs or glitches that affect the functionality and appearance of your website. Theme updates often include bug fixes that resolve these issues, ensuring a smoother user experience.
And because WordPress is constantly evolving, and updates to the core software may introduce changes that affect how themes or plugins interact with it. Theme developers release updates to ensure compatibility with the latest version of WordPress, as well as with popular plugins. Failing to update your theme could lead to conflicts or broken functionality.
From my experience, 90% of the time when a website is experiencing performance issues is related to a theme or plugin that is out of date.
First check the logs in WordPress to see what plugin or theme is acting weird.
Create a backup of the Wp-Content & Database, then update the theme or plugin.
Update WordPress to the latest version
After you’ve updated the theme or the plugin most likely you need also to update the WordPress Core to the latest version in order to improve the compatibility.
We aware of old plugins or themes that wont receive updates in the future
If you are in this situation im afraid you must migrate to a different solution.
Not only that’s a huge security vulnerability that will blow into your face in the near future but most likely it will cause a lot of problems with future updates of WordPress.
Because in the update process of WordPress Core, PHP or other services, sume functions get updated or deprecated.
So if the plugin or theme is depended on one or more of those functions you can have serious issues now or in the near future.
My advice is to find an alternative an migrate as soon as possible, even though it can take a lot of time searching for one you will be better of.
The last tip: Use a caching plugin & also a CDN
A caching plugin for WordPress is a tool that helps improve the performance and speed of your WordPress website by implementing caching mechanisms.
Caching involves storing static copies of your website’s pages, assets, and content in a way that allows them to be served to visitors more quickly, reducing the need for the server to generate each page from scratch every time someone accesses it.
My advice is to use a plugin that is integrated with our server, like Litespeed Cache, because it also provinces a ton of options for page speed optimization and image compression.
But if your server doesn’t have Litespeed try WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache.
WP Rocket is more simpler to use and understand but W3 Total Cache is targeted towards more advanced users.
All of the plugins that I’ve mentioned offer a wide range of optimization’s of your WordPress installation in terms of JS/CSS optimizations, HTML optimizations, lazy loading for images and files with the bonus of caching and CDN.
Litespeed Cache and W3 Total Cache offer you different options in terms of CDN and Wp Rocket only provide their own CDN service.
Whatever CDN you choose is a great additional boost for your page speed score and you will see real time page loading speed improvements.
Also Litespeed Cache has a powerful images optimization option that is actively compressing your images into .WEBP format that can reduce an image size by up to 80% of its original size.
Activate Minification of CSS and JavaScript files
When developers write CSS and JS code, they often include comments, whitespace (spaces, tabs, line breaks), and formatting to make the code more readable and maintainable. However, these elements are not required for the code to function properly when it’s executed by the browser. Removing them can significantly reduce the file size, leading to faster loading times.
With optimization plugins you can do that with just one click but take note: sometimes when you active those options you can experience layout shift or weird behavior of the theme.
If that’s the case, then you need to exclude from Minification the theme files.
Activate browser cache
The first thing to do when you’ve installed and activated on of the plugins mentioned above is to active Browser Cache in the options.
Browser cache refers to a temporary storage location on a user’s web browser where various web page resources, such as images, stylesheets, JavaScript files, and HTML documents, are stored.
When a user visits a website, their browser downloads and stores these resources in the cache so that if they revisit the same website or navigate to another page within the same website, the browser can retrieve these resources from the cache instead of downloading them again from the web server.
