How to Speed Up a WordPress Site – Simple Guide 2024
Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2025 7:04 am
Creativemotions»WordPress Tips & Guides»How to Speed Up a WordPress Site – Simple Guide 2024
speed up wordpress
Website speed is a big deal. It directly impacts your chances of returning visitors, conversion rates, customer satisfaction levels, and even your website's ranking in search engines like Google.
In short, your website needs to be fast! But how fast? Well, generally speaking, pages should load in less than three seconds, but really, faster is better (ideally one or two seconds).
WordPress is a well-maintained and optimized system; when problems do arise, they are usually due to the fact that almost no one is using a vanilla WordPress installation. To get the results you need, you are belize phone number data using dozens of plugins to speed up your WordPress site , custom code, or third-party themes, all of which have the potential to make WordPress worse rather than faster .
In this article, we’ll look at the root causes of these slowdowns and explore what you can do to fix any issues and speed up WordPress .
Table of Contents view
Four Factors That Affect WordPress Site Speed
There are several factors that determine the speed of a WordPress website, here are the ones we will look at in more detail:
Ping
Hosting quality
Code quality
Website Requests
1. Ping
Ping is essentially the time it takes for a query to get from your computer (or your visitors' computers ) to your website's server. Ping is measured in milliseconds, and while it may seem like a small amount, those milliseconds add up quickly. If your website has a lot of requests, even a ping of 10ms could add up to a second or more.
Of course, you can’t ask users to physically move closer to your servers, but you can use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce ping on average and speed up WordPress. We’ll talk more about CDN services below.
2. Hosting quality
Hosting is probably the most important factor in your site speed. Not only does it impact the user experience by providing faster caching and more powerful servers, but with the right infrastructure, you will be better protected against traffic surges and the effects of poor code quality can also be mitigated.
Therefore, finding a good hosting should be a priority. As a general rule, it is worth investing a little extra for a premium hosting service, especially if your business relies on website speed and uptime.
3. Code quality
Code quality affects website speed in several ways: bad code takes longer to process; unoptimized code may require much more memory, taking longer to download.
Not to mention the snowball effect of hard-to-maintain code: the more developers add code to your site in different styles, using different methodologies, the more it will start to degrade, exacerbating the problems described above.
The problem is that unless you are an experienced developer, it is difficult to determine the quality of the code you are using. However, there are some things that are easier to control than others, such as choosing reliable plugins, as we will see later.
4. Website requests
The number of requests your website makes is related to the quality of your code, but it’s worth highlighting because you can control it to some extent. Every time your site loads a resource – an image, a video, a script (tracking code, for example) and other things – a request is made. Each separate request takes time, which slows down your site’s speed, but there are some techniques to reduce the number of requests your site makes – we’ll look at some of them below.
Read also: How to reduce HTTP/S requests in WordPress
How to measure loading times
Before you can figure out how to reduce loading times, you need to know how to measure them. GTmetrix is a great tool that lets you measure your site’s performance and get all sorts of actionable insights and solutions for free.
Other interesting options include Pingdom and WebPageTest, both similar services.
When running performance tests, it is important to consider a few things:
Variability : Make sure you run multiple tests at different times of the day to get a full picture of your site's load times. Individual tests can vary, so you'll need to run multiple tests if you want accurate data.
Test Location : Try to choose a test location that is close to your target audience, so you can accurately capture their experience. Or, if you have a global audience, be sure to test from different locations around the world to see how different visitors will experience your site.
Devices : More than 50% of internet traffic today happens on mobile devices, but most people still test load times on desktop. There are some important differences between devices, however. For example, budget smartphones take longer to process JavaScript, which means a JavaScript-heavy website can load much more slowly on mobile devices.
speed up wordpress
Website speed is a big deal. It directly impacts your chances of returning visitors, conversion rates, customer satisfaction levels, and even your website's ranking in search engines like Google.
In short, your website needs to be fast! But how fast? Well, generally speaking, pages should load in less than three seconds, but really, faster is better (ideally one or two seconds).
WordPress is a well-maintained and optimized system; when problems do arise, they are usually due to the fact that almost no one is using a vanilla WordPress installation. To get the results you need, you are belize phone number data using dozens of plugins to speed up your WordPress site , custom code, or third-party themes, all of which have the potential to make WordPress worse rather than faster .
In this article, we’ll look at the root causes of these slowdowns and explore what you can do to fix any issues and speed up WordPress .
Table of Contents view
Four Factors That Affect WordPress Site Speed
There are several factors that determine the speed of a WordPress website, here are the ones we will look at in more detail:
Ping
Hosting quality
Code quality
Website Requests
1. Ping
Ping is essentially the time it takes for a query to get from your computer (or your visitors' computers ) to your website's server. Ping is measured in milliseconds, and while it may seem like a small amount, those milliseconds add up quickly. If your website has a lot of requests, even a ping of 10ms could add up to a second or more.
Of course, you can’t ask users to physically move closer to your servers, but you can use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce ping on average and speed up WordPress. We’ll talk more about CDN services below.
2. Hosting quality
Hosting is probably the most important factor in your site speed. Not only does it impact the user experience by providing faster caching and more powerful servers, but with the right infrastructure, you will be better protected against traffic surges and the effects of poor code quality can also be mitigated.
Therefore, finding a good hosting should be a priority. As a general rule, it is worth investing a little extra for a premium hosting service, especially if your business relies on website speed and uptime.
3. Code quality
Code quality affects website speed in several ways: bad code takes longer to process; unoptimized code may require much more memory, taking longer to download.
Not to mention the snowball effect of hard-to-maintain code: the more developers add code to your site in different styles, using different methodologies, the more it will start to degrade, exacerbating the problems described above.
The problem is that unless you are an experienced developer, it is difficult to determine the quality of the code you are using. However, there are some things that are easier to control than others, such as choosing reliable plugins, as we will see later.
4. Website requests
The number of requests your website makes is related to the quality of your code, but it’s worth highlighting because you can control it to some extent. Every time your site loads a resource – an image, a video, a script (tracking code, for example) and other things – a request is made. Each separate request takes time, which slows down your site’s speed, but there are some techniques to reduce the number of requests your site makes – we’ll look at some of them below.
Read also: How to reduce HTTP/S requests in WordPress
How to measure loading times
Before you can figure out how to reduce loading times, you need to know how to measure them. GTmetrix is a great tool that lets you measure your site’s performance and get all sorts of actionable insights and solutions for free.
Other interesting options include Pingdom and WebPageTest, both similar services.
When running performance tests, it is important to consider a few things:
Variability : Make sure you run multiple tests at different times of the day to get a full picture of your site's load times. Individual tests can vary, so you'll need to run multiple tests if you want accurate data.
Test Location : Try to choose a test location that is close to your target audience, so you can accurately capture their experience. Or, if you have a global audience, be sure to test from different locations around the world to see how different visitors will experience your site.
Devices : More than 50% of internet traffic today happens on mobile devices, but most people still test load times on desktop. There are some important differences between devices, however. For example, budget smartphones take longer to process JavaScript, which means a JavaScript-heavy website can load much more slowly on mobile devices.