How to Speed Up the Loading of a WordPress Blog Website. WordPress is the best platform for creating a website, blog or online store or website for your various other types of business. I also use WordPress in building my blog. There is no doubt that WordPress is the best platform because many users from all over the world have made their choice on WordPress.
WordPress also frequently updates to update its system, both from coding and from the interface, both back end and front end. In this article, I will provide a WordPress tutorial that will help your site load faster. Before you read how to speed up loading WordPress to be faster. You should know in advance about the benefits of having a fast website.
Why Must Website Loading Fast?
Website is a service for visitors, visitors come to look for something on your website, but if your website is slow to load even very slowly then automatically these visitors will feel annoyed and immediately go and look for other websites or blogs that have more loading. fast.
Do you want this to happen to your site, if you use your website or blog as a business medium? Of course not. 🙂
Another important reason why a website must have fast loading is in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), website speed is very influential in improving the one page SEO of your website or blog in search engines. Because Google and other search engines also include website loading speed in their algorithms to rate the website in Increasing Ranking in search results from a website or blog.
Here’s How to Increase WordPress Loading Speed?
I guarantee, if you apply the following tricks on your WordPress website or blog, it will drastically speed up your site.
WordPress has always been developed to have fast loading, but with a few tips and tricks below, it will certainly increase the speed of your WordPress site to be many times faster than before.
1. Choose the Best Hosting
Use the best hosting service for your WordPress website, because if you use good hosting, of course, the speed of your website being accessed from any country will still provide fast loading. I have personally experienced this, where I chose the wrong hosting, of course, local hosting 🙁. and because of this hosting error, my blog cannot be accessed outside Indonesia, and if the article is shared on Facebook, it cannot display thumbnails.
And after that I moved to International hosting on iPage, the service is really excellent, unlimited hosting and unlimited bandwidth , at an affordable price and free domain too.
If you want to use a hosting service on iPage you can register here . Or you can choose one of the best hosting services here » 10 Best and Cheap hosting services .
2. Use a lightweight WordPress theme
You can look for either a free or a paid WordPress theme, looking for a theme that is really light, responsive and SEO friendly. My blog also provides tons of free WordPress themes for you to download.
Please choose and look for a fast loading WordPress theme, don’t worry because the source of the themes I publish is mostly from the official WordPress directory and from well-known WordPress theme developers such as MyThemeShop. Download a Free WordPress Theme
3. Use Plugins for Cache
Use the Plugin to store the cache of your website or blog, you can use the W3 Total Cache or Wp Super Cache plugin, with this plugin the speed of your WordPress website or blog will automatically be fast. If you don’t like complicated plugin settings but want to get maximum results compared to other cache plugins, then I recommend using the WP-Rocket plugin.
The WP-Rocket caching plugin is not free but it has tremendous advantages, because it is premium, there is no need to doubt that this caching plugin really works well and is easy to use. I personally also use this plugin for the caching system on this blog WP Radar. You can read more in full in my article WP-Rocket Best Cache Plugin to Speed Up WordPress .
4.Optimize images (automatically)
Yahoo! has an image optimizer called Smush.it which will drastically reduce image file sizes, while not reducing quality.
However, if you compress the image for each image I’m sure you will be exhausted, and very time consuming.
And lucky for the WP SmushIt plugin that will do this process for all your images automatically. So, there is no reason for you not to install this one plugin.
5. Optimize Homepage
This is not one thing but really some easy things you can do to ensure that your site loads fast, the homepage section is the most important part of your site as your visitors will be accessing it the most.
Things you can do include:
- Show excerpts only instead of full model posts
- Reducing the number of posts on the front page (I like to show between 8-10 posts)
- Remove unnecessary widgets on your website or blog
- Remove inactive plugins and unnecessary widgets
- Keep it minimal, because your visitors come to read your content, not to see the widget.
Overall, a clean and focused homepage design will help your pages not only look good, but also load faster.
6. Optimizing the WordPress database
I’m definitely getting a lot of use out of the word “optimize” in this post! To do this you can use the WP-Optimize plugin. This plugin lets you do only one simple task: optimize your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce overhead on your WordPress database. This plugin is free and really helps you in database optimization.
However, if you use a paid plugin like WP-Rocket, then you don’t need to install this plugin anymore because it already has this feature in it and by using WP Rocket , you save more space and also the performance of your WordPress site.
7. Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content
Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft”. This occurs when other sites link directly to images on your site from their articles making your server load even higher.
This can add up as more people “scrape” your posts or your site (and especially images) becomes more popular, as should be done if you regularly create custom images for your site.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?WP Radar.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/WP Radar [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
You will see my feed (from FeedBurner), you will have to replace it with your feed name, otherwise your images will not display properly.
Read: How to edit htaccess files via admin read here
8. Add header expires with a static resource
An Expires header is a way of determining enough time to load the next visitor so that the visitor (browser) doesn’t have to return to fetch static content (such as css files, javascript, images etc.).
This way it can cut your load time significantly for the user. Please copy and paste the following code in your root htaccess file:
ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000 ExpiresByType image/png A2592000 ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000 ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
As with the database optimization section, using the cache plugin now includes this section, as Wp-Rocket automatically adds an Expires Header when the plugin is first activated.
9. Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
By default, WordPress interacts with other blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.
Every time another blog links to your Website, it will notify your site, which in turn updates the data on the post. Turning this off won’t destroy the backlinks to your site, just a setup that does a lot of work for your site.
how: Menu settings »discussion and uncheck as shown below.
10.Using a content delivery network (CDN)
All your favorite big blogs take advantage of this, Like one of the famous blogs that use WordPress here . how to see it visit the site and right click the image then view the image and see the url. TechCrunch is one that takes advantage of that CDN.
Basically a CDN or content delivery network, takes all the static files you have on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and allows your visitors to download them as quickly as possible by serving them on the server closest to the visitor’s position.
11. Limit the number of post revisions
You can limit the number of Post revisions to 2 or 3 revisions only. Because every time you edit a post, the edit will be saved in the database, and it will cause your WordPress database to swell because it is always stored repeatedly, to overcome this, you only need to write a line of code that can limit the number of post revisions according to your wish, the tutorial can be read in my previous article here → Easy Ways to Limit Post Revision in WordPress .
12. Add LazyLoad to your image
LazyLoad is a process that only runs on what is visible (i.e. only the image that is visible in the visitor’s browser window), then when the reader scrolls down, another image starts loading.
Not only will this speed up your page load, it can save bandwidth by loading less data for users who don’t scroll all the pages down on your web page.
To do this automatically, install the jQuery Image Plugin LazyLoad. WP Rocket users don’t need to do this because the feature is built in.
13. Use CloudFlare
Cloudflare is a distributed content delivery network and domain name server services to improve website performance and speed up loading your website and provide security as well. Cloudflare’s service is free, but if your site has large visitors you should go with the premium plan. This tip is actually the same as tip number 10 of this article, but because it’s free, I suggest using this service from CloudFlare.
You can use the Cloudflare plugins which you can download here , and you can register for cloudflare here .
14. Upgrade PHP Version
Upgrade PHP version on your hosting to PHP version 7 or higher for Best Performance. PHP is an open source, server-side scripting and programming language primarily used for web development. Most of the WordPress core software is written in PHP, along with your plugins and themes, which makes the PHP language very important to the WordPress community. You need to make sure your WordPress hosting offers at least PHP version 7 or higher.
There are several versions of PHP provided by hosting on your server, with the newer PHP 7.3 offering a huge performance boost.
In fact, in the latest PHP benchmarks, if you compare PHP 7.3 to PHP 5.6, it can handle 3x as many requests (transactions) per second! PHP 7.3 is also 9% faster on average than PHP 7.2. This can also affect the response on your WordPress admin dashboard.
Faster speed plus increased security, which is why you should upgrade to the latest PHP version. You can change PHP version very easily in your Control Panel.
And beware of all the WordPress hosts offering HHVM as an alternative to PHP. HHVM is no longer a suitable solution for WordPress hosting.
15. Use the AMP Version
Make your WordPress blog support the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) version, with the AMP version of your blog it will be very lightly visited by users who use a smartphone, and this version is highly recommended by Google so that it will make your blog website rank better in search engines and it would even be advisable to be the first among your competitors who don’t use the AMP version. Creating a blog that supports AMP is very easy, you can read the guide here ⇒ Making WordPress Support AMP .
Read: Tips for Effective Ways to Get Many Visitors to the Blog
Above are 15 ways to speed up your WordPress website or blog, use the methods above so that your WordPress site has a better speed, as I mentioned earlier that site speed is very important and you must pay attention to this. Hopefully this article was useful for you, good luck and hopefully useful. 🙂
