One of the main issues with hosting a WordPress website is that often it takes more than desirable time to load the home page. Below, a few tips and tricks are being discussed to improve the performance of a WordPress website.
How to Speed up a WordPress website?
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Fixing the page load speed of a WordPress website depends on the cause of the issue. This article only discusses the load time from the website’s point of view. The DNS or ISP aspects are not being discussed.
* As a first step, always go for online speed testing services such as Pingdom who will provide a detailed report of the home page loading activity. The speed testing wizard of Pingdom will provide the time taken to load the homepage and the size of the page loaded.
* Content Delivery Networks and Caching plugins can drastically improve a WordPress website’s page load speed. I recommend using “W3TotalCache” as caching plugin and either “MaxCDN” or “CloudFlare” as CDN plugins.
* If the page size is more than a few MBs – lets say 3 or 4 MB – Look for the detailed report of components loaded which is listed under “Requests done to load this page”. There you can see the size of each component being loaded. Usually, image files are the main cause of larger page sizes. If this is the case, we can optimize the images using some ‘Bulk Resize Plugins’ available under WordPress repository. I recommend using ‘Imsanity’ as it provides bulk resize feature along with resizing new uploads.
* If the page size is low but still the load time is high, look for how many plugins are installed in the website. this can be figured out either by checking the database or by accessing admin panel. A lot of plugins means a high page load time. It is recommended to remove unwanted plugins such as inactive or multiple plugins with same features. You can use the plugin “P3” to assess the performance of other plugins in the WP site and remove the plugins which are causing delay.
* Another thing to do is to optimize the database. This doesn’t really mean to use the ‘Optimize Database’ option available in phpMyAdmin. Rather, it means to remove older comments, outdated posts, spam comments and such. You can use plugins such as “WP Optimize” for this job. However, remember that more plugins means high load time. So you can decide whether to remove such plugins after single use.
* A PHP file will be 20 times slower than an equivalent HTML file. WordPress uses PHP for even simpler things. For example, please see below how a PHP code can be replaced with HTML alternative:
PHP:-
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<div class=”site-info”>
<?php do_action( ‘twentyfourteen_credits’ ); ?>
<a href=”<?php echo esc_url( __( ‘http://wordpress.org/’, ‘twentyfourteen’ ) ); ?>”><?php printf( __( ‘Proudly powered by %s’, ‘twentyfourteen’ ), ‘WordPress’ ); ?></a>.
Copyright ©<?php echo date( ‘Y’ ); ?>
</div>
HTML:-
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<div class=”site-info”>
<a href=”http://wordpress.org”>Proudly powered by WordPress</a>.
Copyright ©2015
</div>
You can find a lot of such references in the theme’s index.php, header.php, footer.php etc files.
* Another thing to be done from the server side is to increase the memory_limit and max_execution_time from php.ini file. Also, we can enable output_buffering which can contribute to higher page load speed. Furthermore, GZIP compression should also be enabled for a faster WP experience.
* If you are a developer, you can really improve the page load speed by combining all the .js files being loaded for the home page into a single .js file. Multiple JavaScript files will slow down the website.
* Furthermore, it is recommended to show only the important things in a home page. An experienced designer will trim the home page contents to a minimum so as to improve the response time. If you are displaying a lot of contents and posts in the home page itself, I recommend using the plugin ‘Lazy Load’ which will load the contents only if a visitor scrolls down to see more. This will improve page load speed as well as help saving bandwidth.
* Host videos from external sources such as Vimeo rather than serving them from the same server.
If you require help, contact SupportPRO Server Admin
