WordPress Tutorial

Step 12: How to speed up WordPress

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But don’t worry, y’all, we’re not done yet!

For the time being, you may be — the steps outlined here are all you need to get from zero to “grandma can see my website over the internet tubes.”

BUT. WE. ARE. NOT. LEAVING. YOU. HANGIN’. THERE. FAM.

Because, aside from building your pages and blog posts and fully customizing your site to your heart’s content, there are a few other things you’ll want to do (on a regular basis) to keep your WordPress site functioning well.

Starting with site speed.

This one’s important for 2 reasons:

  1. If you want free traffic from Google, they’ll want your site to be fast.
  2. If you want people to like using your site instead of leaving out of frustration, you’ll want your site to be fast.

The quantity of text, photos, code, and other elements on your website will increase as it expands.

In general, the more you have, the longer it will take to load.

However, there are techniques to optimize your WordPress website such that it loads pages as quickly as an Olympic 100 meter sprinter (much faster, if your site takes 9.58 seconds to load like our boy Usain took to run no one will visit you).

You can keep your site blazing fast and optimized without understanding how to code thanks to plugins and the knowledge we’re about to impart.

Basic WordPress speed improvement tools and strategies are listed below.

WordPress caching plugins

wordpress caching plugins graphic

Caching with a plugin is the first step toward optimization.

Without getting too technical, a “cache” is a temporary storing of data that allows it to be loaded faster; in the case of WordPress, this includes caching on your web hosting server and in visitors’ browsers.

WordPress caching plugins function by generating static copies of your websites, which can then be given to your visitors’ computers and loaded by their browsers much faster than if your web server had to send all of the PHP and other code for their browser to compute first.

The following are some of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress:

WordPress image optimizer plugins

wordpress image optimizer graphic

Images will most likely be the largest type of asset on your site overall.

And large files take a long time to load.

But, in this very visual world, we need them, so how can you make your site as quick as possible while while providing a plethora of super lovely images for people to fawn over?

There are two main reasons why graphics may slow down your loading times:

  1. Your images are too large

If you upload a 10801080 pixel image and your site resizes it down to 500500 pixels when it loads, you’re losing performance for two reasons: you have to transfer that larger file over the internet, and then your visitor’s browser needs to scale down that image before it can be properly displayed.

  1. Your images aren’t fully compressed

Assume you’ve completed the preceding steps and have the same 500×500 scaled-down image. Uncompressed, it might be a 3MB file at full resolution. You can then reduce the file size to 2MB by compressing the image – perhaps losing a little quality that no one will notice, or preserving full quality. A smaller file size means a faster loading time.

Before uploading your photographs to your site, you can now manually resize and compress them.

But that takes a lot of time when you’re creating a lot of content!

That’s where WordPress image optimizer plugins come in, including:

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