Optimizing WordPress to increase the speed of your website is one of the things you should do if you want a fast website that does not make users wait and to improve its positioning.
Because you should already know, and if you didn’t know I’m telling you now, that having a slow website is harmful for two reasons:
- Users get tired of waiting for your pages to load and go to the competition.
- Google considers that it is not a good option to be shown to its users and sends you to the bottom of the search results.
Wow, that’s more than enough reason to run off and optimize your website, isn’t it?
Well today I want to explain several things you can do to speed up WordPress in a simple way and without complicating your life too much, so let’s go.
But first, there are some things to keep in mind.
Things to keep in mind before optimizing WordPress
In majority of cases it will be possible to optimize the WordPress load, but there are times when no matter how much you try to improve the speed, you will not reach the desired numbers.
Contracted Hosting
The first thing you need is to choose the best hosting for your website.
What does this mean?
First of all, it has to be a quality hosting that offers a good performance by itself. With this you will gain a lot, because if you host your website in a bad quality, no matter how much you optimize WordPress, you will never get good results.
If your audience is in Spain, you will probably be interested in hiring a hosting company in Spain that has its servers in the same country or as close as possible.
If your audience is in Mexico, you will probably be interested in hiring a company in that country or close geographically, etc.
The further away the hosting is, the longer it will take to load the web. Anyway, you can always choose to use a CDN.
Topic used
Another thing that will greatly influence the speed of your website is the theme you use in it. There are themes that are badly programmed and on top of that they come with a multitude of plugins necessary for their operation, something counterproductive.
For example, many of those who sell on ThemeForest, the best-known marketplace of tracks, will not allow you to get a good speed because they come with a lot of trash (what if Visual Composer, if Revolution Slider … do not be dazzled by these “gifts”).
Here I leave you with some alternatives to ThemeForest for you to choose your next theme well and this is not the culprit of the low speed of your website, and here are the best WordPress themes for me.
Plugins used
It is always necessary to install plugins to add functionalities to your website that do not come by default with WordPress. But what you can’t do is make up your mind to install them as if there wasn’t tomorrow.
Each plugin that you install on your website is an extra weight that you are adding. There are many plugins that are light and barely affect the loading speed, but there are others that are too heavy and prevent you from getting an adequate speed.
You should always have installed the plugins that are essential for the operation of your website, saving you from those that you can do without completely.
Make a review of all that you have installed and see if you can eliminate some heavy or replace one with a lighter one that serves the same purpose.
Uploaded images
You must take into account the size and weight of the images you upload to your website.
If you upload very large images, no matter how much you try to optimize your website, you will be burdened forever. That’s why, before uploading them, you must reduce and compress the images.
How to optimize WordPress
Well, let’s see what you can do to increase the speed of your website. Most things you can do using plugins that will help you in your goal, so we’ll see a few plugins to optimize WordPress.
Caching the web
Don’t know what the cache is or why it will help you improve the speed of your website? Here I explain it to you
In short, a copy of your pages are stored in memory and each time someone accesses one of them, they will be shown faster to the user.
There are several plugins that cache your website. The most complete and the one I use and recommend is WP Rocket.
You will see that I mention it throughout the article, and is that not only deals with the subject of cache, but also does several other things that we will see in a while.
Other free plugins that will help you are WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache.