10 Ways to Improve Your WordPress Site Speed

Website optimization is an essential and routine task of anyone managing a website. Though Google officially included page speed as one of the search-ranking factors, it has a very little weightage. Regardless of search ranking, over period you will start realizing that site speed has impact on many other aspects. Even having a dedicated server will not help in improving the speed when your usage is different. In this article, let us explain 10 ways to improve your WordPress site speed and optimize the site for better user experience.

Speed and Purpose of Your Site

Remember it is not necessary to have 100/100 score in Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom or GTmetrix. Same goes for passing Core Web Vitals in PageSpeed Insights. It completely depends on the purpose of your site and the tradeoff you like to have for speed.

1. Avoid Using Advertisements Like Google AdSense

The major purpose of having a website is to make money from the traffic that you receive. It could be from the sale of products or by the way of advertisements. Not everyone can make product and sell online, so the easiest way is to build your site and look for advertisers to show their advertisements on your site. Website owners can apply for AdSense account or for any other advertising program and after approval can show advertisements on their site from Google.

Well, this looks very attractive and can make you rich if you work hard. However, the biggest problem is that AdSense or any other PPC ad for that matter needs you to insert JavaScript code on each of your webpage. Though these scripts will load asynchronously it can create many other problems and heavily affect your page loading speed.

• You cannot cache the images from advertisers on your server. Thus serving uncached images will take more time.
• Some advertisers still use HTTP, which will cause mixed content problem when you have HTTPS on your site.
• Most advertisers serve uncompressed content, which will affect the speed of your site.

You can check the speed of AdSense webpage using Pingdom or GTmetrix to see all types of problems that could arise from AdSense advertisements. You can also refer our detailed article on AdSense Vs site speed to get more details on this issue. There is a tricky solution available to handle this situation – by delaying JavaScript files loaded on your site. You can do this by using plugins like Perfmatters or WP Rocket. Though it will increase the speed score, it will not improve user experience and you will also lose revenue with delayed loading of ads.

Therefore, if site speed is most important factor for you then be away from AdSense and any other programs that need JavaScript injection on your pages. Alternatively, you can try affiliate marketing to earn handsome money.

2. Disable Gravatar Images

Gravatar is a small profile image shown on the comments and user profiles. Users need to link their profile picture and email address in gravatar website owned by Automattic, the same company that owns wordpress.com and behind the wordpress.org. WordPress will show up the profile image when you use the email id linked in gravatar website.

These images may look beautiful on the comments, forums, profiles and other sections. However, loading images from external service will cause problem in site speed. You cannot cache these profile images beforehand and serving static image files as uncached request every time will affect the loading speed of your page.

So, if you really do not need the gravatar, simply go to ‘Settings > Discussion > Avatar’ on your WordPress admin panel. Uncheck the box ‘Show Avatars’ against the option ‘Avatar Display’ to disable them on your site completely. This will boost your WordPress site’s speed for the posts with large number of comments. Alternatively, you can a plugin to host user profile images on your own server instead of loading from third-party service.

3. Content Recommendations with Images

Nowadays almost every site shows content recommendation to retain the users on their site. These content recommendation services also show advertisements in-between the recommended content thus helping you to make money. This will have the same problem as serving advertisements as explained above. So, you can show only text links of articles without thumbnail images or disable advertisements to improve the speed of your WordPress site.

4. Using Too Many Images

An image can say thousand words, but use them only when needed. Each image will send a separate HTTP request to server when someone opens your page. When there are lot of bigger images on your page, it will increase the server load and page loading time.

• Use image compression plugins like WP Smush or compress the images outside WordPress and then upload.
• Crop the images to required and smaller size.
• Avoid resizing images using CSS inside a page.
• Use font icons instead of images.
• Host images on subdomain and serve them without any cookies.
• Set cache header for images for browsers to cache them for long period of time.
• Prevent image hotlinking so that someone cannot embed your images on their site and consume your server resource.

5. Avoid Serving Too Many Thumbnails

Well, thumbnails are essentially images but not uploaded by you. WordPress core, theme or plugin, generate them. You cannot see thumbnails from media library, but they are available on your server and shown on the pages wherever required. Showing too many thumbnails on a page will obviously impact the speed as most thumbnail images are not part of the main content.

On your WordPress admin panel, go to ‘Settings > Media’ section. Under ‘Image sizes’ section, you can see WordPress thumbnail options for creating large, medium and thumbnail sizes from the original image you upload. Your theme and plugins will register image sizes in functions.php file for creating thumbnails. Later, on the frontend, you can see these thumbnails on featured images, slideshows, sidebar, footer, etc. depending on the usage.

In general, any commercial WordPress theme will generate 5 to 15 thumbnails for each image you upload on your site. Therefore, whenever you delete slider or image related plugins and change theme ensure to cleanup all those unused thumbnails to have sufficient storage and improve speed.

Note: Make sure to use lazy loading of all images so that images will load only when users reach that position and not on the initial page load.

6. Choose Correct Hosting Company and Plan

Theoretically, this should be the first point in the list. Nevertheless, it depends on your need. For example, when you start a site with few pages, definitely shared hosting is sufficient. When your site grows in size you can gradually move on to Cloud, VPS or dedicated servers. Otherwise, it may not be possible for all of us to spend $500 for dedicated servers each month to run few pages of blog.

So, do not hesitate to change the host or upgrade your plan when your site grows in size. The bottom line is that the server response time should be less than 200 milliseconds to increase page speed score. Again, this is a guideline, not a rule for you to strict to it. Because it depends on many other factors explained in this article.

We recommend using SiteGround Cloud or shared hosting for better value proposition.

7. Avoid Too Many Plugins and Heavy Plugins

Too much is always not good. However, for running any WordPress site you may need handful of plugins for SEO, security, caching, etc. You should strict to standard and limited number of plugins. Each plugin you install will create many different types of overheads:

• Meta boxes shown in post editor will add entries in wp_postmeta table for each blog post or page.
• Slider plugins will add many thumbnails and occupy storage space.
• Caching plugins will create huge number of directories which may violate the guidelines of your hosting company.
• All the plugins will add corresponding entries in wp_options table thus slowing down the admin panel and affect page loading time on live site.
• Online store plugins will add many script files reducing the page speed score.

In simple words – each plugin on your site will affect the page loading time. Heavy weight plugins like WooCommerce, sliders and security plugins not only occupy server space but also affect the speed. So, stop playing around with plugins on your live site. Even you delete the plugins, there will be lot of residual table entries in database and settings files. Cleaning up these leftover files is a tedious task which you should do periodically to avoid they increase the loading time.

8. Be Away from Improperly Coded Themes

It is difficult to realize the quality of coding without using and knowing the backend functions. For normal users – all that glitters are not gold – is the most suitable proverb you can remember when looking at those beautiful themes. Completely avoid the themes with bundled plugins, offering lot of shortcodes and having too many features. In long run, you cannot use many features on the theme that you think are useful at the beginning.

Some themes load 15 to 20 JS files for maps, custom scripts, sliders, etc. Try to avoid themes loading many scripts and have many thumbnail image sizes. You can always use plugins to have important functions on your site. Biggest advantage of plugins is that you can easily switch the theme. Otherwise, you will end up spending months to switch the theme bundled with plugin’s functionalities.

We recommend using simple themes like Astra, GeneratePress or Kadence and scale up your site easily.

9. Avoid Multiple WordPress Installations on Same Server

Most of the hosting plans allow having multiple installations of WordPress on a single shared server account. Having same set of plugins on multiple sites will kill the server speed. For example, having WooCommerce plugin on three to five different sites on the same server will kill the entire server speed.

If all the sites are mission critical for you then host them on different servers or go for a managed WordPress plans with dedicated servers. We strongly recommend to strict to the restriction of the shared server when you are at entry level (by not using WooCommerce, bbPress, etc.).

10. Avoid Hosting Third-Party PHP Scripts

It is very easy to buy scripts from Codecanyon for few dollars. Though the script may have good quality, running on subdirectories / subdomains / directly on your WordPress installation to enhance features will kill the speed. Hosting companies will have limitation on PHP run time and exceeding the limit will show 500 server configuration error or host will take your site down to protect other sites running on the same shared server. Since Core Web Vitals is also measured at domain level, hosting too many scripts outside WordPress setup also will impact the overall speed score.

So, avoid wandering around on marketplaces for buying low priced scripts or plugins. That will only cost you more in terms of site speed than the money you expect to earn.

Conclusion

Once you decided to manage your website for longer time, it is important to control your buying behavior. This will save lot of money and help to focus on your site’s performance and content. Also, do not get diverted with lot of plugins, different themes, beautiful images and cheap hosting. They will never help in getting good rank in search engines except some plugins offer functions that WordPress does not have in its core.