Speed Up WordPress in 10 Steps

Speed Up WordPress to get the best loading time is one of the most important steps. Now we will show you 10 very easy and traditional steps to speed up wordpress. Just need you have a very little experience with wordpress to do all of these steps. Maybe you just need to do 6/10 steps, it still good enough to get your wordpress site faster a lot. Now let ‘s get ready.

speed up wordpress

1. Choose the right wordpress hosting

The first and the most important step to take effect to all of other steps is wordpress hosting. It doesn’t make sense if we do all of optimization on a low quality hosting. But if you are in a good wordpress hosting, it ‘s already in a fast level before you optimize to speed up wordpress. That ‘s why you need to choose the right wordpress hosting, if needed we have to move to new hosting.

As always, we recommend you choose the first option of this list http://wp2x.com/top-10-wordpress-hosting-best-performance-security/. It will help you have the best speed, performance and support full caching on server what you don’t have to install any more extra server software.

2. Remove all of unnecessary wordpress plugin to speed up wordpress

Slow wordpress plugin can cause your site to slow down. We only install enough plugin for our usage and remove all of unnecessary plugin. The wordpress core is designed to wordpress fast and optimize but the plugins are not. Plugins are implemented by third party and WordPress can’t cover the optimization so that we have to take care it. If we have to install a wordpress plugin, let ‘s get the first priority for the simple plugin and serve enough our need.

uninstall-wordpress-plugins

3. Optimize wordpress .htaccess for browser cache

This is a long story but just take you 5 minutes to do. Let ‘s follow this post to finish this step http://wp2x.com/optimize-wordpress-browser-cache-htaccess/

4. Cut down the number of HTTP requests

Every time someone visits a page on your site, the corresponding files must be sent to that person’s browser, including images, CSS files andJavascript library references. So if you have a HTML file, two CSS files, five Javascript files and eight images, that’s a total of 16 files that need to be loaded.

By reducing the number of objects in your site’s pages, you can minimize the number of HTTP requests that are required to render a page, speeding up load times.

It doesn’t take you too much times to do this by these steps:

– Combine all of picture/image you can to one: by doing this you will have to use some feature of css about the sprite. But luckily, if you do the step (10), you don’t need to do this.

– Combine js/css: it ‘s good idea to use external plugin for this and just need to turn it on. Time by time, we always have a very good choice ready on wordpress plugin community. You can find one for you here: http://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/minify

5. Combine and Minify HTML, CSS, JavaScript

I think we already done this in step (4), but in this step we do it without plugin. Why? Because maybe our wordpress doesn’t support well for js/css combination, in this case we have to do it manually. If you are an wordpress developer. I suggest you do that manually with this php source https://code.google.com/p/minify/. It ‘s easy to use by get out all of js/css link in wordpress theme and combine/minify them with minify library then put css file tag in header and javascript file in last of loading resource.

Wait! If you think this step is too difficult then maybe you will see it ‘s easier in step (6) and the more extra help in step (10)

6. Speed up wordpress by Install and configure wordpress cache  plugin

We are more than comfortable to suggest you one of these famous plugin as leading in wordpress caching world.

But keep in mind that you are allow to install only one of them in one wordpress site. Here you will see how to minify js/css/html too.

These tools essentially create a static version of your web site. For sites where content does not change frequently, then can save tons of PHP and MySQL processing. A cached page can be served 20-30X faster than a non-cached page.

wordpress-cache-plugin

For example, WP Super Cache will put this in your HTML so you know how fast things are happening:

This tells you that the page was generated in 0.566 seconds — quite fast. But serving this page from a static file eliminates this half of second.

With any plugin, these tools do have their problems. If you have a highly dynamic site, you may find that comments are delayed or scheduled posts do not execute exactly when you want.

This is one of the trade-offs when using aggressive cache methods. You give up some of the real-time nature of WordPress for the performance of static HTML code.

Like database tuning, which WordPress performance plugin will work for you depends on your site.

In my experience, WP Super Cache causes fewer issues on complex sites while W3 Total Cache provides more optimization techniques.

7. Install and configure cache server Memcached/APC/eAccelerator and Opcode cache

This is a little bit advantage step of wordpress optimization. We will show you how to do this on a VPS or a dedicated server in another article. But for now, if you want your wordpress site become very fast, you can choose the share hosting what already support all of caching above. As we know, SiteGround WordPress Hosting support all of cache features we need.

8. Optimize Images Display Size

It ‘s pretty simple that we only display the image in the right size. If you want to scale the image then let ‘s scale it offline and upload it later. Or we can have functionality in wordpress theme what allow us create many thumbnail to get it re-size to the size we want. This way, we will save bandwidth of server and user don’t have to wait too long to just see a small image.

9. Optimize WordPress Database

Another hard task but we solve with a magic wordpress plugin. It will be more than best for this if you use one of these wordpress plugin to optimize wordpress database:

10. CDN (Content Delivery Network)

If you don’t know what is CDN you can take a look at this post What is CDN?

The idea of technique is pretty simple. We always have the static files in our website and they take the most time to load to visitors browser. But in the most case, the static files don’t change at all time to time. So that CDN was born to help us serve all of static files global by save them on many servers on the world to make sure it serve visitors fastest.

  1. For free CDN service, we recommend you use CloudFlare
  2. For paid CDN service, we recommend you MaxCDN what support very good for all of source code and more server on the world with trust speed and up time. Of course, the paid service ‘s always better. Just belong to you, your site need the very high trust load up-time or not. For a simple blog, we only need the free service.

As always, if you have any problem with the optimization to speed up wordpress, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

31 comments

  1. In step (5) 5. Combine and Minify HTML, CSS, JavaScript, do you have any plugin to do that or I have to do it manual via coding, I think your instruction about this too general, I need something more detail.

  2. Hello guys, I received many email ask about the mod_rewrite of wordpress supercache problem. To make sure it work well, please make sure you turn on mod_write module. If you meet the server issue 500, let ‘s change the name of .htaccess and then run the site again and turn off permalinks

  3. Hello David..
    We are syndicate of university strudents.We want to do our final year project in wordpress theme developement and then its marketing on envato market.Please let us know if you can suggest any best potential work that is not done yet so that we can hit the market as well as your project got accepted.We have deadline of monday to get approval of proposal.
    We are looking forward for your previous advice.
    Many Thanks

    • You are welcome! The market always need thing relate to SEO, you can try to figure out the best and easiest way to let wordpress user do the best SEO on-page

  4. Need help for step 10.. When I buy the hosting from this list http://wp2x.com/top-10-wordpress-hosting-best-performance-security/ and turn on CloudFlare CDN what support ready in hosting, it require me use www for domain. How can I use CDN without using www in domain name? Thanks

    • If you want to use CDN without www. You need to sign up account in https://www.cloudflare.com then change nameserver to cloudflare nameserver. Everything will be control under cloudflare and they know what to do for you, you don’t need to change to www domain. It ‘s an easy work, so don’t afraid to try :).

  5. Well, just need to install wordpress supercache or W3 total cache then you will know what to do to make wordpress site faster

  6. Other than that, I don’t think cloudflare is a good CDN service, I used their free service but it ‘s almost act as a DNS server, not much more than that.

    • Recently, Cloudflare didn’t do the good job since they doesn’t help much in bandwidth saving and serve static files for free account. But paid account work better. For the good result, you have to pay, it ‘s easy to understand. But the way maxcdn do for you, they always take care 100% static files, so you can make sure what you are using with MaxCDN is good

  7. That ‘s cool, thanks for a great help to speed up wordpress. Just need to install wordpress super cache what make my site faster a lot. Nice help

  8. I’m going to try the optimization on my database to see if it helps speed up my website. Everything is very useful though.

  9. Cool tutorial, you help me a lot to speed up my wordpress site. Thanks

  10. When I install wordpress super cache plugin, it ‘ve already added the .htaccess code. Should I add one more time in your step (3)?

    • No, if you installed wordpress super cache plugin, it ‘ve already added the good .htaccess code for you. You can control it in admin panel of plugin. Don’t add more .htaccess code.

  11. Speed up wordpress is needed for anyone. But I see you just need install plugin in step 3 and follow the instruction then everything will work well.
    I see almost people try to figure out the good way to speed up their CMS, what if we do a CMS/blog what ‘ve already taken care about the performance from beginning?

    • The main reason why we use CMS is saving time. But yes, if we have some CMS what design for fast speed from beginning, it will be better a lot.

  12. I think we just need to choose the right hosting then install wordpress super cache plugin then the site will fast enough for all of us

  13. It ‘s really useful for me to get started with wordpress. I must say it upset me a lot in the first time I install wordpress until I see your tutorial to choose the right host and do the right configuration, wordpress work fast as I expect. Cool

  14. Now I know how to make my wordpress site work faster. Thanks a lot for a really useful tutorial.

  15. It ‘s nice. Just do step by step and everything become very fast. Thanks author for a nice help

  16. Wow, I love you so much, you know. My site ‘s just crazy fast now! Thanks

  17. So choose the right host
    Install W3 total cache or super cache
    Then that ‘s all to have a great site.

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