5 Ways To Speed Up WordPress Performance

WordPress Performance

Who doesn’t love a site that loads at lightning speeds and has an amazing performance? Not just the users, even search engines give higher priority to sites that have good performance and fast loading times. So you need to take all the extra effort you can to make your sites faster and smooth, and SEO-friendly.  […]

Who doesn’t love a site that loads at lightning speeds and has an amazing performance? Not just the users, even search engines give higher priority to sites that have good performance and fast loading times. So you need to take all the extra effort you can to make your sites faster and smooth, and SEO-friendly

While WordPress does provide regular updates and patches to keep improving your site’s performance, you have to go beyond the default capabilities and optimize all possible aspects to make sure your site is faster than your competitors’. Here are some top ways to help you make your site perform better. 

Choose The Best WordPress Hosting Plans

There are different types of WordPress hosting available. Depending on the plans you choose, your website’s performance may vary. 

Shared WordPress Hosting

Shared WordPress hosting is the cheapest and the most popular hosting method available. But anyone using this hosting is sure to expect slowness at some point in time. The reason is simple. When several sites use shared resources, website performance will suffer due to overcrowding. 

Issues from other sites can impact your site performance and trickle into your site as well. So, if you want better performance, you should start looking for better plans, which will be more expensive than shared hosting. 

DIY VPS WordPress Hosting

Having your virtual private server is the next better option allowing you to balance costs and performance to an extent. You can subscribe to third-party virtual servers for setting up and maintaining the servers. But remember, these plans have the drawback of having to manage it all by yourself. 

You need the right technical expertise, skills, and dedicated resources as managing VPS becomes your responsibility. Most casinos and e-commerce stores prefer going for this option.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Managed WordPress hosting plans offer a high level of sophisticated web hosting services and excellent support. The cost of these hosting plans will be the most expensive but will provide the high performance and troubleshooting you are looking for. 

Use The Nearest Data Center

The physical location of your servers impacts your WordPress site speed.  If your target audience is based in Europe, make sure your hosting servers are located nearby in any European cities to reduce the time taken for each server request and response messages.  

You can find your target audience’s geolocation from Google Analytics and by checking your e-commerce data. 

Make Use Of Dynamic Caching

Browser caches have been in use for a long time to improve page loading speeds and reduce the number of HTTP requests. You can make use of the same concept with your WordPress site via Dynamic caching, where a WordPress page is generated only once, and its copy is served to the next visitor. This way, you can greatly reduce the stress on CPU, database, and other computing resources as you don’t have to generate the pages again and again for each visitor. 

Dynamic caching can be managed with the help of the relevant WordPress plugins. 

Some popular plugins for caching include W3 Total Cache, WP super cache, wp Rocket, Cachify, and so on.

Pick The Right Host

The hosting partner you choose will mostly determine your website speed and performance. Here are some tips to help you choose the best host for your site. 

  • Pick a host that uses the Nginx server. Nginx is well known for its performance optimizations and scalability and out-perform most other popular web servers. Big names like Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, Citrix Systems, Target, Intel, and many more prefer Nginx for its excellent performance. 
  • Research into the network your host uses. Look for hosts who use premium tier networks that can provide better performance and better traffic speed. 
  • See if your host supports http/2. This web protocol was released in 2015 and is considered a better option as it supports better multiplexing, HPACK compression, parallelization, and server push. 

Use CDN

Content Distribution Networks allow you to sever all the static content of your website through the nearest server accessible to your client. Content like JavaScript, HTML, images, CSS, and such are always the same and don’t change as dynamic content does. 

By serving your static content via CDN, you can easily save a lot of traffic and avoid encountering page not found or timeout errors. 

The Wrap Up

These were a few simple yet effective ways to boost your website speed visibly and enhance its performance. Picking up the right host, choosing the right hosting, using CDN, relying on the nearest data center, and using dynamic caching will ensure that your website performs the best.

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Frank Martins
WordPress Developer
WordPress needs themes and so do we. We have been getting a lot of help on that from Frank who is a wizard when it comes to creating themes. He developed his first-ever WordPress website when he was still in high school and...