WordPress is our top recommendation for websites for many reasons, and site speed is one of them! You may have heard that WordPress sites are slow and although we believe this is a misconception, we understand how people can come to this idea. Because WP allows for tons of customizable themes, plugins and extra features, sites can definitely become clunky and slow. But out of the box, before you add all of these extras, WordPress is super speedy! The trick to a fast site is how it’s built and maintained as you grow and add new content.
We use both GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights to test the speed of every site we develop and maintain. It can be nearly impossible to get a perfect score any speed testing site, so it’s important to keep in mind that these scores are simply a guide. Google doesn’t actually consider your site speed score, rather it picks up on your user experience (ie. how long someone stays on your website, if they click around a lot, etc). This signals to Google that your site is worth ranking above others in similar niches.
Five ways to speed up your WordPress site:
1. Install a caching plugin. This is a big one! The cache stores website files (think images, css, and scripts) and serves them as static files to repeat customers, making them quicker to load. While there are many free caching plugins out there, we always stick to the premium plugin WP Rocket. WP Rocket starts working as soon as you install it, which is amazing, but there are several settings you can adjust to really get your money’s worth. We’ve seen page speed scores increase significantly right after installing and configuring this plugin.
2. Consider your web host. TBH we’ve been using the same affordable webhosts since 2013 and everything has been just fine. But for websites with tons of content and thousands of visitors every day, a cheap host might not cut it. Examples of affordable hosts are Bluehost, Godaddy, and SiteGround. They each come with pros and cons, but generally get the job done. As your site starts getting more and more traffic, you may find yourself having to upgrade your hosting plan, making it not so cheap anymore.. A high end and very quick host we recommend is WPOpt!
3. Limit plugins. When building WordPress sites, we typically install 5 must-have plugins. Depending on the purpose of your site, you may need several more plugins, but make sure to go in every now and then and remove what you’re no longer using. Also even old, deactivated plugins can sometimes leave extra baggage in your database, which you can clear out using WP-Optimize.
4. Optimize your images. Oof. Many times it’s so easy to upload images to WordPress directly from our phones or screenshot files. The problem with this is that often times phone images and screenshot files are gigantic png files. WordPress usually limits image uploads to 2.5MB but even this is huge and could have great effects on your site speed. I recommend saving out images as jpg files, running them through TinyPNG, and then uploading them to WordPress. After you upload the photos, there is even more room for improvement. We always use an image optimizer to compress images before they are uploaded (without losing quality). Favorites are ShortPixel (premium) and Smush (free plan available). My personal goal with images is to always keep them under 200KB.
WordPress also comes with the handy ability to create and serve different thumbnail sizes across your site. For example, we might upload a photo that is 1000px wide naturally but only have it served as a 300px wide image on the homepage, taking up much less space.
5. Consider your theme. I recommend custom WP themes not just because I’m a developer, but because many themes can be clunky and slow, overloaded with features you don’t necessarily need (as mentioned earlier). Your theme might come with the capability to add fun sliders everywhere, videos, limitless content block styles, and every Google font, but if you don’t need all of these things, it’s just a bunch of code baggage. Themes with page builders will always have a negative effect on your site speed. Instead, choose a lightweight theme that can be customized by a developer if necessary, or just have the whole thing built from the ground up. Learn more about investing in a custom WordPress website here.
If you’re not sure exactly what it is that’s slowing your site, we can help! We offer website audits that assess site speed, SEO, user experience, and more. 🙂
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