How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website?

Discover how to speed up your WordPress website, how website speed optimization influences conversions and get the list of the top 27 ways to speed up your WordPress website.

How Website Speed Optimization Influences Conversions?

As 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less. And 40% will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds, the fact is that slow websites kill conversions.

If your site takes more than three seconds to load, you lose almost half of your visitors before they even arrive on your site.

That alone is a huge blow to your potential conversions.

And for the visitors that decide to stick around, your slow load times can deter them from returning in the future. In one survey, 79% of customers said they would not return to a site with poor performance.

In that same survey, 52% of shoppers said that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty and 44% said they tell their friends about poor site experiences.

This survey also discovered that a one-second delay can decrease customer satisfaction by about 16%.

One of the best examples of this is Walmart’s improvement in conversions and revenue after increasing their site speed.

During their initial analysis, they found that visitors who converted had received pages that loaded two times as fast as the visitors who did not convert.

How to speed up your website

There are tons of factors that influence how long each page on your site takes to load, so there are many different steps you can take to increase your speed and improve user experience.

In this post, we’ll go over 20 tips and best practices you can use to decrease your load times and improve your site’s performance.

And if that number sounds overwhelming — don’t worry.

While all of these tips can help you improve your site speed, you don’t need to do all of them today.

In fact, if you’ve worked on your site speed in the past, your site may already be in line with some of these best practices.

With that in mind, let’s get started.

How to Speed Up Your Website?

There are tons of factors that influence how long each page on your site takes to load, so there are many different steps you can take to increase your speed and improve user experience.

In this post, we’ll go over 20 tips and best practices you can use to decrease your load times and improve your site’s performance.

And if that number sounds overwhelming — don’t worry.

While all of these tips can help you improve your site speed, you don’t need to do all of them today.

In fact, if you’ve worked on your site speed in the past, your site may already be in line with some of these best practices.

Here are the top 27 best ways to speed up your WordPress website to consider use for your website:

1) Limit the number of external requests.

2) Minify and combine files.

3) Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files.

4) Defer JavaScript loading.

5) Minimize time to first byte.

6) Reduce server response time.

7) Choose the right hosting option for your needs.

8) Run a compression audit.

9) Enable compression.

10) Enable browser caching.

11) Optimize and Reduce Image Size.

12) Use a CDN.

13) Use external hosting platforms.

14) Optimize CSS delivery.

15) Prioritize above-the-fold content (lazy loading).

16) Reduce the number of plugins you use on your site.

17) Reduce redirects.

18) Reduce external scripts.

19) Monitor your speed over time.

20) Monitor mobile page speed.

21) Remove Unnecessary Plugins and Add-ons.

22) Significantly limit, or remove, social sharing buttons on your website.

23) Enable Gzip compression.

24) Regularly optimize your database.

25) Fix all broken links on your website.

26) Prevent others from hotlinking your images.

27) Use a PHP accelerator.

Read more here.