How do I speed up a WordPress website

So do you want to speed up your WordPress site?

My #1 recommendation is stop using heavy plugins.

Why?

Plugins are the reason why most WordPress sites load slow as they eat up a large chunk of your bandwidth which slows down your loading times and performance.

Since a plugin introduces extra code, it's going to have some impact on your website loading times. That being said, if it's a simple plugin, it might not even be noticeable in the big picture of performance or loading times.

Quick tip: You can install a plugin like UsageDD which helps you easily monitor the resource usage of their WordPress installation.

Some Plugins are made to make your website load faster. These are typically cache plugins like.

• W3 Total Cache
• WP Fastest Cache
• WP Super Cache
• WP Rocket etc

As a rule of thumb, limit your WordPress plugins to under 15.

Make sure to update all the plugins which are active on your site whenever you find an update. If a plugin doesn’t get updated for a couple of months, try to find a better alternative to it.

Another incredible way to increase your site speed is use a faster and better hosting.

Why your hosting matters?

Your hosting plays a HUGE role. It makes or breaks your website success.

When it comes to fastest hosting, I recommend WPX hosting.

Here’s the screenshot of our blog’s loading times using Pingdom tools (after enabling WPX cloud).

As you can see above, my site loads within half a second. And my blog has a ton of images, links, posts etc.

WPX hosting offers everything including;

• Fastest hosting performance
• Malware removal
• Super fast customer support

Malware Detection and Removal Service is a service to get rid of all kinds of malware threats, including, but not limited to, ransomware, trojan horses, worms, viruses, rootkits, keyloggers and adwares.

You can read my honest review of WPX hosting where you will find all the details including features, pros, cons, pricing etc.

So what are you waiting for?

Use this link to get 50% FLAT discount on WPX hosting (only for Bloggers Passion readers and offer ends very soon!)

Optimize your homepage to load quickly

This is the one tip which can drastically increase your site speed faster. Make sure to optimize your homepage so you can not only keep the visitors stick to the page but also load the page quickly. To quickly load the home page, include these things:

• Only show excerpts, not full posts.
• Reduce the number of posts on the page
• Try to remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (don't show flashy objects or too many ads)
• Declutter your home page

Here are few more things you can do to improve your site speed.

• Make sure your website is mobile responsive (as it helps your mobile users to experience a faster loading performance)
• Image optimization (make sure to optimize your image size before uploading on to your site)
• JavaScript and CSS Files minification
• Gzip Compression (Enabling gzip compression in WordPress can reduce site load time by over 300%. You can use a simple plugin such as Force gzip, which, as the name implies, forces gzip compression)
• Leveraging Browser Caching (The browser cache is a temporary storage location on your computer for files downloaded by your browser to display websites. Files that are cached locally include any documents that make up a website, such as html files, CSS style sheets, JavaScript scripts, images etc and you should leverage it to speed up your WordPress site)
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) (With a CDN or content delivery network, visitors can download all your static files of your site CSS, Javascript, and images etc as fast as possible. One of the best CDN is Max CDN Content Delivery Network)
• Minimizing the Redirects (so your site won’t load any unwanted or time consuming scripts or page requests)