There are a wide variety of things that you can do to optimize your website. Below is a list of some of the ways:
Caching plug-ins : This type of plug-in will store copies or “caches” of webpages and data onto your server, making it easier for the site to run faster. In order to achieve faster loading times, consider using W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. Both are simple plugins that will ensure your site loads at top speed. This type of plug-in will store copies or “caches” of webpages and data onto your server, making it easier for the site to run faster. In order to achieve faster loading times, consider using W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. Both are good choices.
– Enable Browser Caching to speed up your site’s load time.
– Remove unnecessary plugins and themes that are not being used in your site. It will remove excess code from the database thus speeding up your website.
– Check if you don’t have any broken links on your page by using Broken Link Checker. This can also be done with an online tool such as Gremlyn (you need to create an account before use).
– Keep the WordPress, theme, and plugins updated to avoid security issues. Avoid plug-ins or themes with known vulnerabilities, hackers love them! Trust me, I know this first hand.
– Don’t install too many plug-ins because it will slow down your site and you will lose your patience (it took me 8 hours to find the culprit). If you want to speed up WordPress , I highly suggest WP Rocket. It’s a fantastic caching plugin with very few settings. For $25, it should pay for itself with savings on bandwidth alone.
– HTML and CSS optimization can help as well.
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If your site is older than a few years, it’s probably been cached in search engines’ crawlers because they can’t tell when pages change over time. To correct this, make sure you’re using a dynamic caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. And if things get slow after that, try adding the following code to your functions file.
It redirects requests for pages that have changed in the last 2 minutes to the equivalent page, with a query parameter added so search engines know this is not a fresh result. Read more about it here
You should also regularly check your server speed using free tools like Pingdom Tools or GTmetrix .
If you find your load time is above 3 seconds, consider switching to NGINX + PHP7 which will greatly reduce static resources overhead and allow WordPress to load almost as fast as sites running on Lighttpd+PHP5/MySQL. Most people I work with are usually willing to spend an extra $10/month for the improved performance but if you insist on staying on Apache.
A useful tool for evaluating website speed is Google’s Lighthouse. It tests website speed by simulating your visitors’ journey through your site, starting with a search engine query result that is then pipelined through ad networks, web servers, and more before finally ending up on the page whose load time was tested.
A typical usage scenario would be to run this test for Google and Yahoo separately as most of the traffic from both these sources will use their own Search Engine Servers (unless you are in China). Let’s say our quick test shows the following:
While many may consider 3 seconds as being “not slow”, such a number should not be taken lightly. Google’s recent core update factors page speed as a main ranking factor. This coupled with the fact that Google itself is nearly instantaneous, should be a big hint to you about how search engines perceive speed.
You see, in addition to hurting your users and thus being an ethical issue (that’s right — search engine ranking factor or not— you want your users to feel happy), this kind of speed will cost you money. If users wait 3 seconds for a page load, they will likely click away before it finishes or leaves eventually as part of a bounce rate calculation. In both cases, there goes the advertising revenue from that point on.
