This article contains practical information and tips to make your WordPress website faster . In the first part I explain which parts are of influence, in the second part how you can make these parts faster.
Why
The influence of speed on the effectiveness of your website is often underestimated. Not only do visitors rather slow down on slower websites, and the conversion (the percentage of visitors who buy or do something on your site) is higher, search engines such as Google also give higher " SEO ranking " to faster websites, so you're better found .
Over WordPress
WordPress is an extensive system and there are many factors that influence the speed of your website, so it is useful if you have an idea how WordPress works. Therefore, first a short explanation about the operation of WordPress. The components of your WordPress website can be conceptualized in 3 categories.
1. WordPress itself
WordPress is a " Content Management System ", with which you can easily edit and manage the content of your website (via the wp-admin part). All text, images and layout that you enter there is stored in a database , which you can not really use. However, if someone visits your site "at the front", WordPress combines all those pieces of information from the database and other sources into a readable whole; your website.
If you compare your WordPress website with a house, this means that for every visitor your house is completely rebuilt! That seems impractical and not very efficient, but fortunately computers are now so fast that (usually) they work well. The big advantage is that the websites can be personalized (tailored to individual visitors) and you can easily update your website. Just as with houses, not every wall needs to be more bricked, but they can be placed the same in their entirety each time, for websites we speak about "Caching" (see below).
2. Plugins
If you use WordPress you undoubtedly have 1 or more plugins in use. As I compared WordPress with a house, you can compare those plugins with the layout of your house. Some plugins are very small, comparable to an extra table in your house, while other plugins look more like a huge extension. A small plug-in can for example be a simple contact form on your contact page. A "rather heavy" plugin is for example the SEO plugin from Yoast.
3. Thema’s
If plugins are the extra tables and extra rooms, then themes (which determine how your website looks like) can be compared with the layer of paint on and in your house.
And that's how it all comes together
The computer power that your hosting provider puts at your disposal can then be seen as the construction workers who have to build your house. Using more workers means that your house is finished sooner, but of course it makes a difference whether those workers have to build a small terraced house (a new WordPress installation), or a huge castle (a WordPress installation with many and large plugins, complex themes, etc.). And because for every visitor the workers build a "new house", frequently visited websites become slower because the computer power is divided over more visitors.
In other words; the speed of your website is determined by the complexity of the website itself, and the computer power available at that moment (which in turn depends on the number of visitors on the same server).
The cheapest way of hosting is called shared hosting . With shared hosting the computer power ("the workmen") is shared between a large number of websites, so if "the construction workers" are busy with someone else's website, that will also affect the speed with which your website is built. However, that is the responsibility of your hosting provider, who must ensure that every website has enough capacity at all times. But if conversion is important, or you have many visitors, shared hosting is not usually the best choice. You can then better switch to faster hosting such as Premium WordPress hosting , or a Cloud Server .
Make your site faster
Measuring is knowing. The first thing you have to do is measure the current speed of your website. You can use Pingdom FPT for this purpose *. Do that a few times throughout the day, for example in the morning and in the evening to get an idea whether your site is always as fast. A loading time under 4 seconds is acceptable for many websites, if it is slower than 6 seconds you should actually improve on that. If you have a web shop, you should aim for less than 3 seconds. If you have completed the tips below, measure the speed again to see if it has been improved.
* You can select a nearby location in Pingdom FPT under Settings such as Amsterdam, which makes a difference in the result, especially if you do not use CDN
Plugins
Step 1: The first action is to take a close look at all your plugins. Do you really need them all or are certain plugins actually not needed (anymore?)? Less distraction for visitors (of widgets etc.) can be positive on your conversion anyway, apart from the speed gain. Note, even inactive plugins have a (small) impact on the speed of your site, so remove them if you no longer use them.
Step 2: Use the P3 Profiler plugin to find out how much time each plugin uses. If a plugin really stands out, consider using an alternative that is faster, or simply not using that plugin anymore.
Especially functionality such as "Related posts" or performance trackers can be very delaying, and are often unnecessary.
Thema’s
Some themes are very complex or sometimes badly programmed, so they slow down your website enormously. The best way to find out is to activate the default theme (such as Twenty Fifteen). Consider another theme if it turns out that your current theme is slowing things down a lot. Often (but not always) paid themes are better programmed.
Caching en offloading
You can make (parts of) your website static (this is called caching), so that they do not have to be recreated for every visitor. Almost every frequently visited website makes use of this. For WordPress there are two very popular plugins that do this for you: W3 Total Cache and Supercache. In addition to caching, there are many other options in these plugins to make your site faster.
In addition to staticizing your website, you can also use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to load parts of your website such as images from the fastest locations. WordPress Premium customers receive a CDN by default , but you can use any CDN, also on shared hosting.
Other techniques
Google PageSpeed provides good insight into which parts of your website can be improved.
You can optimize the images on your site so that they do not take up more space than necessary. You can do that manually with a photo editing program, but it's easier to use a plugin like WP Smush.it (free for images up to 1 MB).
With Browser Caching you ensure that content that does not change frequently, such as images on the computers of your visitors are stored. In this way, someone who visits your website does not have to retrieve each element every time. For this you can also use W3 Total Cache, or something more technical, to add the rules yourself to the .htaccess file of your website.
Visitors can leave standard comments (this is different from a contact form). If your site does not use that option , turn it off .
Trackbacks off if you do not need (and have few sites that actually needed).
Your homepage is often the most important page. Make sure it is not too long, and work with "excerpts" instead of showing articles fully on your homepage.
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