WordPress speed optimisation: 5 tips and tools
Who among us would want a website to load slowly. In fact, research has shown that if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, up to half of mobile users stop visiting the site. Google has also said that site speed affects search engine rankings. Google itself recommends that site load times should be less than 2 seconds. See how your site performs in Google’s own speed test: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
This is why WordPress site speed-up is one of the best ways to ensure you don’t lose customers, as well as sales and commerce from being generated. That’s why we want to help our clients succeed in their business and get the most out of their WordPress sites for speed.
It’s important to remember that while your site may load on your computer over a fast fibre connection without any problems, the situation may not be the same over a 3G or 4G connection on a mobile device. In this case, the bottleneck may be not only the data connection but also the performance of the mobile device, i.e. the slower system chip.
In this paper, we will explore five (5) different problem areas that significantly impact WordPress website load times. By improving these five issues, you can ensure that your site load time is not an obstacle to the growth of your business, website or blog.
Image: it pays to optimise images, as they are often the largest files on websites.
Tip 1: Improving WordPress load times by optimising images
Are you sending high-quality, printable images to the server as is? The problem can be with image files that are several megabytes in size and take several seconds to load over a slow 3G connection.
You can optimise the size and compression of your images in an image editor before uploading, or install a free add-on to your WordPress site that reduces the resolution of your images and compresses them more efficiently. One such add-on is Smush.
WordPress has also in more recent versions supported so-called Lazy Load, which loads images only when the user scrolls down the page and the image comes into the user’s view. You can also turn on Lazy Load in the Smush plugin or in the cache plugin settings (see tip #3 below).
The choice of image format also plays an important role.
Tip 2: Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Your website files are hosted in our webhosting in Finland on servers by default, with the exception of our customers for whom we have provided servers around the world – ask us for solutions if you are planning to do business in China or other countries that require special arrangements due to legislation and telecommunications.
A user who is geographically distant from Finland will experience delays due to slower movement of data traffic between countries and continents. There may be several bottlenecks along the way due to the different Internet backbone operators.
You can eliminate these delays by providing your website files closer to the user. A content delivery network, or CDN for short, provides files within the same country – or even the same city. In this case, the geographical delay can easily fall to over 1000ms (1 second).
As a XetNET customer, you can take advantage of the free QUIC.cloud CDN service, for which you get free credits. At the time of writing, the benefit of free credits applies to XetNET LiteSpeed Enterprise servers, i.e. all XetNET web hosting customers. If you wish, you can buy credits at a discounted rate from the service if your site has thousands of visitors from all over the world.
Photo: QUIC.cloud CDN service achieved over 1000 ms faster page load time in our tests, tested from around the world. Best of all: it’s even free to use!
Tip 3: Make sure your webhost supports fast caching technology
At XetNET, we’ve invested a lot of effort over the last few years in developing our servers with the latest technologies that speed up all web applications, but especially WordPress sites.
One of the major developments was the introduction of LiteSpeed servers several years ago. It allows our customers to download a free LiteSpeed Cache add-on to their WordPress site and take advantage of the server cache. With LiteSpeed Cache, you can make your site fly. LiteSpeed is the ultimate way to speed up your WordPress site. See Litespeedtech.com’s comparison of WordPress site performance to see how the LiteSpeed server stacks up against Apache and Nginx servers.
Compared to other paid caching add-ons, you’ll also save on costs. For example, WP Rocket cache costs $49/year for a single site at the time of writing and $249/year with an unlimited license. You get LiteSpeed Cache completely free for unlimited sites.
The idea of caching is to speed up the loading of a WordPress page/article by performing a database search once, and providing the same page experience to subsequent users more quickly from the cache. This also makes sites much more resilient to congestion, as database searches do not need to be performed as often when pages are loaded.
Image optimisation, as mentioned in tip 1, is also possible: LiteSpeed Cache can serve images in the new WEBP format to users whose browsers support the new image format. So you get the best compatibility and performance in image optimization. In fact, as a cache add-on, it is one of the best on the market.
Take advantage of the free LiteSpeed Cache and speed up your websites!
Image:LiteSpeed brings a significant leap in performance to WordPress sites. Photo: litespeedtech.com
Tip 4: Lots of database searches or online shopping? Turn on Redis
The cache mentioned above can speed up page load times when pages are static and don’t change frequently. For example, in WooCommerce online stores, users research and search for products, add them to their shopping cart and each page load is often done directly as database searches.
In this case, speeding up database searches with Redis, a service based on the server’s RAM cache, is a great alternative. With Redis, you can speed up database-heavy WordPress sites.
On our Docker server, you can enable the Redis server simply by subscribing to a single container/container running the Redis service. If necessary, you can scale the size of the Redis container by increasing or decreasing the amount of CPU power or RAM based on your site’s needs. This way, you don’t necessarily have to buy dedicated performance such as a virtual server for yourself, but can get the benefits of scalability in Docker in a cost-effective way.
Tip 5: Check your PHP version and settings
At the time of writing, PHP version 7.4 is due to expire on 28 November 2022. PHP is the programming language that runs an application such as WordPress on your webhosting server. You can manage and update your PHP version using the cPanel management tool on your webhost. By upgrading to a newer version of PHP, you can ensure that your site’s performance and security is up to scratch. Additional tip: also turn on the “OPcache” setting in the PHP advanced settings to speed up your site.
So, log into the cPanel admin tool and find the “Select PHP Version” setting in the tool. Please note that in the instructions in the link we advise you to upgrade from the old 5.6 version to a newer version. If you are using a version older than 8.0 (e.g. 7.4, 7.3, 7.2, etc.) it is already important for security reasons to upgrade to a more up-to-date version.
At the time of writing, the recommended version of WordPress is PHP 8.0 with security updates to guarantee support until 26.11.2023.
Image: it’s worth keeping your PHP version up to date for performance and security. Phoronix.com performance comparison PHP 5.6 -> 8.1
For more information on the performance benchmark: https://www.phoronix.com/review/php-81-benchmarks/2
Bonus tip #6: Design your pages and content smartly
Have you designed your WordPress site and content with the user in mind, or is the structure and number of add-ons on your WordPress site bloated like a bottle? If your site has dozens of add-ons, a heavily coded theme/layout, multiple JS files such as tracking codes, then it’s no wonder that your site load times are suffering. Each add-on takes some action and slows down both the backend, or admin management tool, and the frontend, or user-viewed site. Not all add-ons are automatically of high quality, so they can also cause slowdowns. Use the X-Ray App tool found in the cPanel admin tool of your webhost to find out what is causing slowness or even errors on the server. This way you can see if an add-on is to blame for the slowness.
It’s also a good time to consider whether you need each add-on. At the very least, check to see if the add-ons are up to date with the latest version.
Take a look at the download speed of your site on the GTMetrix.com speed test service and check which files and actions in the download are causing the slowness. You can see in Waterfall view the order in which the different files on your site load. If you find anything worrying in the Waterfall view, such as large images, JS files or resources external to your site that are causing the delay, you can take the bull by the horns and fix it.
PS. Not yet a customer of ours and want your site on a faster LiteSpeed server in our WordPress web hosting? Migrate your site to us from another provider at no charge and you’ll have access to a powerful LiteSpeed cache to speed up your WordPress site significantly without any additional investment. You may save on your monthly web hosting fee and get access to our high-speed servers located in Finland!