6 ways to improve WordPress page speed


1) Optimise your images

Oversized images are the most common cause of slow WordPress sites. The larger the picture files on your website, the longer your site takes to load.

Optimizing your images is, therefore, a vital step to improve your website speed. Optimizing involves resizing and compressing image files so that they can be retrieved and loaded more quickly.

Good image optimization involves two stages. Firstly, make sure to edit your image before uploading it to your site.

To do this, you’ll need to decide where the image will be used and what size is needed. You can then use a tool such as Pixlr to crop and save the image in the smallest possible size. Sometimes even changing the file type can reduce size – for example, jpg is usually smaller than png images.

Secondly, install an image optimization plugin on your website – we recommend Smush (it’s what we use on the Pedalo site). This not only compresses images further after they are uploaded – thus boosting page speed – but also has various other image optimization features, including lazy loading.

2) Enable caching

By enabling caching on your website, your site data can be stored locally in temporary storage spaces, called caches. This means that browsers can load your site files more easily and don’t have to re-download everything from your server every time your site is needed.

Caching thus makes your page loading speeds much faster, especially when people return to your site for a second or third time. It’s super-easy to enable on WordPress with a free plugin such as W3 Total Cache.

3) Enable GZIP compression

With GZIP compression, your website files are transferred between your server and users’ browsers in lightweight compressed versions. This makes the process in which browsers retrieve and load your website much faster.

We recommend installing the WP-Optimize plugin, which has a GZIP compression option. This plugin will also be useful for our next point when we come to minifying website files…

4) Minify CSS, HTML & JS files

If your Google PageSpeed score needs improving, minifying Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), HTML, and JavaScript (JS) files will almost certainly be listed as a recommendation.

CSS, HTML, and JS files are used to add comments to your website code, for example, to clarify formatting or style. Minification sounds complicated but it simply means reducing the size of these files and deleting unnecessary code.

Doing this is hugely beneficial as it will enable your site to load more rapidly, whilst retaining the key information needed in order for your site to display correctly. You can minify your JS, HTML, and CSS files on WordPress quickly and easily with the free WP-Optimize plugin.

5) Update plugins

Plugins may be reducing your site speed in various ways. Poorly designed plugins, plugins with outdated software, or surplus/duplicate plugins can all contribute to slow website loading.

It’s worth remembering that it’s not the number of plugins that generally cause a speed problem. (That is unless you have lots of plugins that do the same thing or are not used – in which case the surplus ones should be deleted.) In general, it’s the quality and usefulness of plugins that affect page speed.

It’s a good idea to run a Google PageSpeed test both before and after installing any plugin. This will show the impact of the plugin on your site’s speed, so you can make an informed decision about whether the plugin’s functionality is worth any site slowing.

You can also check how your site speed is affected by your current plugins by deactivating each one in turn in the ‘Plugins’ section of your WordPress website back-end, and then running a PageSpeed test.

You should also make sure to update plugins as and when new software becomes available. Updates are always highlighted on your WordPress dashboard – simply check regularly and click on any update messages to action them.

6) Clean-up your database

Finally, you can speed up your website with a good old spring clean!

The more you use your WordPress site, the more your database becomes clogged up with old and unnecessary files that slow down your performance. Cleaning your database, therefore, speeds everything up by removing the items that aren’t needed.

You can keep your WordPress website database tidy by installing a plugin such as WP-Sweep or Advanced Database Cleaner. These will work automatically in the background to keep your database up-to-date and maximize page speed.


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