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Actions to Speed Up Your Slow WordPress #

Actions to Speed Up Your Slow WordPress Site, Various factors can influence your website’s load time. Understanding these causes is just as crucial as knowing how to fix them.

When analyzing, we know that page load factors include:

  • File Size and Type
  • Hosting Providers
  • Bandwidth
  • Plugins
  • Browsers
  • Website Traffic
  • Web Page Size
  • Cached Files
  • Generated Requests
  • Website Content (Static or Dynamic)

Page speed can vary due to these factors.

To address issues affecting your page load time, consider implementing the following measures for faster loading.

How to Speed Up Your Slow WordPress Site #

1) Utilize GTmetrix: Actions to Speed Up Your Slow WordPress Site #

GTmetrix is a free tool for website analysis. It evaluates your website’s performance and offers actionable tips for improvement. This tool provides a simple but valuable report on site loading speed.

GTmetrix monitors your website’s performance with tracking, graphs, and alerts. It can also be used on mobile devices to analyze your webpage.

Simply visit GTmetrix.com, enter your site or page URL, and click the Test your site button.

Actions to Speed Up Your Slow WordPress

2) Monitor Resource Consumption #

When hosting your website with specific web hosting types and plans, CloudLinux LVE (Lightweight Virtual Environment) sets resource limits for CPU, physical memory, entry processes, number of processes, bandwidth, etc.

If your account frequently reaches these resource limits, your website will slow down. Excessive resource usage will result in either an error message or slower website performance.

3) Activate GZIP Compression #

Gzip is a software application and file format designed for compressing and decompressing files. This tool helps save significant disk space on your local computer. Likewise, GZIP compression can be utilized for the web.

Gzip works by shrinking the size of files using adaptive Lempel-Ziv coding in deflate mode.
This significantly decreases bandwidth usage and the time required to access your website.

GZIP compresses files so that when a visitor accesses your website, their browser will first unzip the site. This significantly reduces bandwidth usage.
This compression application reduces page sizes by up to 70%.

4) Activate Browser Caching: Actions to Speed Up Your Slow WordPress Site #

Caching involves storing content with the potential for future use (e.g., a weapons cache). A browser or Web cache does this with program and website assets. When you visit a site, your browser downloads parts of the link to your computer’s hard drive.

Browsers store the following assets:

  • Images – logos, pictures, backgrounds, etc.
  • JavaScript
  • HTML
  • CSS

Web browsers typically cache ‘static assets’ – parts of a website that remain unchanged with each visit.

When someone visits your website, the browser requests assets like HTML, Scripts, Images, CSS, etc. from the server. The server then responds to these requests.

Depending on the asset size and server process time, the response might take a while, increasing server load and slowing down the website for the user.

In this scenario, browser cache is effective. It stores static content on a user’s browser during their first visit. If your website isn’t properly configured with browser cache and you test its speed with performance tools, you’ll see a warning to leverage browser caching.

Caching ultimately enhances browsing speed.

5) Remove Unused Plugins and Themes #

Another way to enhance site speed is by removing unused WordPress themes and plugins. Keeping your plugins and themes updated is crucial, and deleting unused ones is the next step for a faster site. Unused plugins and themes not only pose security risks but also affect WordPress site performance.

You can delete WordPress themes and plugins either via the WordPress dashboard or FTP.

To delete an unused plugin, you first need to deactivate it. Once deactivated, the delete option will appear for the inactive plugins in the list. Follow these steps to remove the ones you no longer need.

To remove unwanted themes using the dashboard, go to Appearance > Themes and delete the ones no longer in use.

Also, check for plugins or themes that consume the most resources.

You can identify which plugin is consuming the most resources by disabling the active plugins.
Then, activate them one by one until you find the problematic one.

You can do the same for themes. Identify issues by disabling the theme. Disable the active theme and remove the unwanted theme. Then, enable the default theme and check your website speed. If this resolves the issue, check if your theme is compromised or consuming too many resources.

6) Raise the PHP Memory Limit #

If the PHP memory limit is below 64MB, WordPress automatically increases it. However, 64MB is frequently not enough. Web servers, like any other device, require memory to run multiple applications efficiently. Server administrators allocate memory to various programs, including PHP.

7) Compress Image Size: Actions to Speed Up Your Slow WordPress Site #

Images take up a lot of space on web pages, slowing them down. They are the main factor in increasing webpage sizes. There are plugins available for image optimization. Using these plugins on your WordPress site can significantly reduce image sizes, thereby enhancing your website’s speed. You can reach out to your developer for assistance.

Some of the top image optimization plugins provided by WordPress are:

  • reSmush
  • ShortPixel Image Optimize
  • WP Smush
  • EWWW Image Optimizer

8) Enable Cache Plugins #

Caching benefits your WordPress hosting servers by reducing their load and speeding up your website. A faster site enhances user satisfaction, increases page views, and improves user experience, encouraging visitors to stay longer.

There are many WordPress caching plugins available that make it easy to implement caching rules for your website. These plugins can greatly boost your site’s loading speed.

Some of the best cache plugins for WordPress are:

  • WP Rocket
  • W3 Total Cache
  • WP Super Cache
  • Sucuri Firewall
  • SG SuperCacher

9) Clean and Optimize WordPress Database Tables #

The WordPress database holds everything your website needs. WP-Optimize eliminates unnecessary data, tidies your tables, and recovers space lost to data fragmentation.

WordPress Cleaning and Optimization includes:

  • Removing redundant data like pingbacks, trackbacks, and expired transient options (e.g. trashed/spam comments, stale data).
  • Defragmenting MySQL tables with one click.
  • Scheduling automatic weekly clean-up tasks.
  • Retaining a set number of weeks’ records during clean-up.
  • Executing optimizations without manual queries.
  • Deleting unwanted data to minimize database size and backup size.

Regular database optimization enhances website performance. You can contact your developer for assistance.

10) Organize Your Media Library #

Over time, we gather images that become unused. To free up space, consider deleting these unused media files.

You can use a plugin like Media Cleaner or remove them manually.

To manually delete unused media, go to Add Media -> Media Library -> Unattached and delete the files not in use.

11) Activate Cloudflare for Your Domain #

Cloudflare is a web infrastructure and security company offering CDN services, DDoS mitigation, internet security, and distributed domain name server services.
Your website visitors come from various global locations, which affects the site-loading speed based on their distance from your hosting server. Numerous CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) help maintain minimal site-loading times for visitors from different countries.

A CDN stores a copy of your website in multiple data centers worldwide. Its main function is to deliver the webpage to visitors from the nearest location.

Additionally, a CDN results in faster page load times by using the closest optimized server to your site visitor. The data center stores static content and files, delivering them based on the user’s location. This reduces external HTTP requests since the static content is readily available, avoiding multiple simultaneous HTTP requests.

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