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Top 6 tips to speed up WordPress

Picture of Kyle Tapping
Kyle Tapping

Published: March 9, 2022

Last updated: December 8, 2022

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Top 6 tips to speed up wordpress

If there’s one thing we know at ELITEWEB.Co it’s that “speed matters”! This is why we are quickly becoming recognized as the fastest hosting provider in the world. Here’s a quick comparison to prove that our website, despite containing more content than our competitors, is much faster!

eliteweb.co/en-za versus other major hosting companies
ELITEWEB.Co VS bluehost.com VS hostgator.com VS domain.com

Not convinced? I don’t blame you. I mean we wouldn’t be either, as these web hosts aren’t known for server speed by any means. Here’s ELITEWEB.Co vs the fastest players on the market.

eliteweb.co/en-za versus the fastest web hosts in the market
ELITEWEB.Co VS Siteground.com VS Godaddy.com VS A2hosting.com

Why WordPress websites should be fast

Studies show that 57% of visitors to your website will leave if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. There is no doubt that website speed is an imperative part of the user experience and your business’s online success. So you’re probably wondering how, so let’s get to it. Here’s 6 ways to speed up WordPress and make your website super fast! 

1. Fast VPS hosting to speed up your WordPress website

Hosting is the only limiting factor you have when it comes to the speed of your website. Your website can only be as fast as its host, which is why I recommend Elite’s VPS Hosting. To learn more about VPS hosting read our blog post – What is VPS hosting? + 7 reasons why you need it to boost your website’s security and speed.

2. Install a good caching plugin to speed up WordPress

The fastest and easiest way to speed up WordPress website is website data caching. First, let’s take a look at what caching is and why you need it. Then, I will give you my recommendation on what the best caching plugin is.

What is caching?

The technique of saving and storing static copies of your website’s files in a temporary storage area on your server is known as caching. This enables faster delivery of a web page to the visitor’s browser. Let’s see what happens when a user visits your site for the first time to gain a better understanding of how caching works.

When a user visits your website for the first time, their browser sends a request to your website’s hosting server. It fetches all the different elements that make up your webpage, such as; HTML (Hyper-text markup language), CSS (Cascading style sheets), JS (Javascript), Images, and more. Once your server has received the requests it combines and builds these resources and sends them back to the user’s browser which then becomes a webpage that is shown on their screen.

If your website has caching enabled, a majority of the information that was fetched from the server will be stored locally on their device. So the next time they visit your webpage some of the files are served from their browser cache which, you guessed it, results in a much faster user experience.

Which caching plugin should you use for speed?

Whilst there are many caching plugins available within the WordPress plugin depository, some offer more than others in terms of optimization and integration. This is why I always use and recommend WP Rocket for only $49 per year.

WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin that offers a wide range of features. The features work harmoniously with Imagify and RocketCDN to give you the full package when it comes to site speed. WP Rocket offers cache pre-loading and GZIP compression. Whilst also allowing you to minify and combine CSS and JS files, delay and defer JS, lazy load images as well as schedule database cleanups.

WP Rocket is also e-commerce ready. It automatically excludes the ‘Cart’, ‘Checkout’, and ‘My Account’ pages from caching so that it doesn’t interfere with purchasing or the user’s account.

Using WP Rocket is one of the many tools eliteweb.co use to achieve a perfect score on GTMetrix and a website load speed of under 1s on Pingdom

3. Use a reliable and fast CDN (content delivery network)

A CDN (content delivery network) is crucial to your business’s online success if it is aiming to serve users from across the globe.

What is a CDN?

A content delivery network is exactly what it says on the tin. A CDN speeds up your website by serving cached content from servers located near your visitor’s geographic location. This means that your website’s visitors will be served static content from a server more local to them rather than from the server on which your site is built. Which could be on the other side of the world depending on where you’re based.

Overall this makes your user experience much better by ensuring they are getting the fastest possible website experience they can with you.

Which CDN should you use to speed up your WordPress site?

There are many content delivery networks available to you. Some popular options include RocketCDN, Cloudflare, Bunny.net, KeyCDN, and Stackpath.

Whilst all CDNs certainly have their place we found that the best and most reliable option is RocketCDN for only $8.99 per month. With automatic configuration, easy integration, and a strong global reach having 45 full-stack edge locations. Makes it one of the most respectable CDNs available on the market.

With RocketCDN being created by the WP Rocket team means full integration and compatibility with WP Rocket’s configuration. RocketCDN automatically applies the best CDN settings for your site including Cache expiration policy, GZIP compression, and HTTP2. They set everything up to boost your speed and performance scores. Whilst also having a great support team should you ever encounter any issues.

RocketCDN the best content delivery network

4. Optimize images in WordPress

Image optimization is an absolute must when it comes to a fast WordPress website and speeding up WordPress. One large image can be a detriment to your website’s speed, and it’ll also be flagged within Google page speed insights and GT Metrix.

Imagify is an image optimizer that is created by the WP Rocket team, it has a free option that is suitable for up to 200 images per month. It works seamlessly with both WP Rocket and RocketCDN, giving you an extremely powerful trio of WordPress optimization tools. It compresses images as they are uploaded to the media library automatically. As well as optimizing images already in your media library. It optimizes images at one of three levels that they offer you which you can set from within the plugin settings.

Types of image optimization with Imagify

Imagify has three optimization levels that you can choose between in the plugin settings: Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra. The options cover lossless compression, lossy compression, and strong lossy compression. This gives you so much more control over the level of optimization you want for your images. Whilst you can set a global setting to optimize images automatically. You can also manually compress each image to the level of optimization you deem necessary for that specific image. Furthermore, Imagify creates WebP images and also has the ability to output them on the front end for you automatically once they’re generated. You can also use WP Rocket to output the WebP images for you.

Imagify is compatible with popular WordPress plugins such as WooCommerce, and other popular plugins. Making it an ideal image optimizer for sites with lots of images that need to be compressed. In addition, Imagify backs up all of your original images, so if you over-optimize there is no need to panic – simply press ‘restore original’ and start again!

Website image optimization can be a long, tedious task depending on how many images your website has. You must change each image to suit the size of the screen that it’s on and reduce the quality of the image using a tool like Photoshop which can cost a fair amount if you’re not a professional designer. Fortunately there are several other solutions out there for WordPress image optimization which do most of the work for you. 

imagify by WP rocket the best image compressor

5. Optimize your MySQL database

WP Rocket offers some basic, yet handy database optimization tools. It allows you to clean up your post revisions, spam comments, transient cleanup and offers a quick database cleanup tool. If you want to clean up your MySQL database properly you’re going to need a level of developer knowledge to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

If you’re not comfortable with optimizing your database tables we recommend hiring a WordPress developer to help you.

6. Install a fast WordPress theme

Using a fast WordPress theme plays an important role in keeping your website fast. A bloated theme with a large amount of CSS and JS will definitely slow down your site. Check out our blog post on the top 5 WordPress themes.

Summary

The above takes a lot of time and dedication. Quite often a successful business owner or their team won’t have time to apply the above practices so employing a third party service such as the WordPress LAB by eliteweb.co is a great solution to supercharge your website to be the fastest it can be.

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Picture of Kyle Tapping
Kyle Tapping
Kyle joined the Elite team in 2018. With a background in website development and search engine optimization, Kyle takes great satisfaction from spreading his knowledge to help others succeed in the world of the web. His interests include website development, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, coding, and graphic design.

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