Fundamental Rules
Good Host
It’s the most fundamental rule of all. You can optimize your site all you want, but if your host sucks, your website will always be slow. It’s like optimizing a website for conversion that has no traffic: you can do it, but you’re not going to get more subscribers.
How to speed up a WordPress website?
Not Too Many Plugins
You should only keep the plugins you use. Don’t make your website a duplicate of the WordPress plugins directory!
The more plugins you have, the more likely you are to end up with a “heavy website” that is slower to load. Plugins can also conflict with one another, which causes some instability.
Update WordPress/Plugins
To keep your website optimized and secure, always upgrade WordPress, your theme, and your plugins. Then you’ll have access to all the latest features!
Host Videos Externally
If you have videos on your website, it’s better to host them externally (i.e., on YouTube, Vimeo, Amazon S3).
Use a Premium Theme
Finally, the last rule is to use a premium theme with clean code. When you select your theme, read the comments and reviews to make sure there aren’t any recurrent problems with how the theme functions.
Optimizing with Plugins
Optimize Images: COMPRESS JPEG PNG
Images are among the heaviest elements to load from a web page. It is important that we optimize them and make them as light as possible so that they’re quicker to load.
Server-Side Caching: WP Super Cache
Server-side caching includes different types of caching:
- Page caching: Save the pages as HTML files.
- Database caching: Save the results from previous requests onto the database.
- Object caching: Save complex data queries.
- Opcode caching: Save the compiled PHP code between requests.
Expires Headers (AKA Client-Side Caching) & Compression: WP Performance Score Booster
EXPIRES HEADERS: Setting expires headers will inform your visitors’ browser of whether it should request certain files from the server or if they can simply get them from the browser’s cache stored on the PC.
COMPRESSION: Gzip is a form of data compression used to make the files of your website Optimizing with Plugins smaller. As a result, this improves your page load speed and makes your website faster for your visitors.
CDN: CloudFlare
A CDN consists of a network of servers that are usually spread out all over the world. Each of these servers stores a large part of your website (the static files). Hence, when your visitor lands on one of your website pages, most of it will load from the closest server. This drastically reduces the loading time of your website.
Clean up your database: WP-Sweep
By default, WordPress saves every post and page revisions. Most of the time these revisions are useless.
When I finished my website, I had 636 page/post revisions in my database!
