10 Tips to Help Improve Page Load Speed on a WordPress Website

The speed of your website is a major factor in its SEO performance. Search engines tend to favor faster sites and readers also prefer to visit websites with fast loading pages.

In this guide I will be sharing 10 tips to make your WordPress website load faster thereby enhance your SERP rankings and enriching your User Experience.

What Causes a WordPress Website to be Slow

Running a speed test is usually recommended for website owners to identify the areas of improvement pertaining to the speedy loading of the pages on their websites.

However the technical jargon in the speed test report can be hard to understand for beginners.

There are certain common causes of a slow website and these includes

• The web host not being properly configured
• Your website does not have cached pages
• Your images are not well optimized
• A poorly coded plugin can slow down the site performance
• Sometime scripts from external sources usually cause a website to load slowly

We have seen the basic reasons why the page on WordPress website can be slown down, we'll now take a look at 15 simple things we can do to speed up a WordPress website.

1. Choosing a Web Host

You need to use a good and rated host for your website.

Using shared hosting might be cheap but it could also lead to downtime and server failure, if your website is targeting very high volumes of traffic then shared hosting is not really for you, instead try dedicated hosting.

The most recommendable host for WordPress is WPEngine. They are reputable with great service and support .

2. Use a Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network or CDN for short is used to serve static content on a website to whoever is requesting for it as fast as possible.

A CDN is a large distribution network that's spread across the world. You can check out this guide of the best free CDN service to gain better insights on the best available CDN to choose from.

3. Install a WordPress Caching Plugin

Caching your website can make anywhere from two to five times faster when it comes to loading pages. Here's how it's done, after a user visits a page on your website for the first time the caching plugin will make a copy of the page of the page so it won't have to reload the page whenever the user requests again, this will result to a smaller consumption of memory and faster loading time for the page.

WP Super Cache is one of the commonly used WordPress plugin.

4. Use a Simple Theme

It's much more advisable to use a not-too-complicated theme if you plan to keep your website design and features simple.

Do not use a heavily loaded theme if you are not going to use any of its numerous features.

5. Optimize all Images

Images help boost engagement, if your images ain't optimized it could hurt your SEO in the long run.

Before uploading an image use a photo editing software to optimize the image for web.

6. Optimize the Homepage

Here are a few tips you can make sure your homepage loads faster

• If your homepage features your blog choose to show excerpts of posts instead of full posts
• Limit the posts displayed on a page to five and not more than eight
• Remove inactive plugins and widgets
• Have a clean page design

7. Reduce the Number of Active Plugins

It's okay to download as much plugins as you want but only activate the ones you need.

Plugins come with their own custom css stylesheets which will result to an increase in load time.

8. Upload your Videos on Youtube First

The HTML player allows you to upload videos directly to WordPress but it's really not advisable.

Hosting videos directly will take up space and bandwidth which will slow down the load time for the pages on your website.

Upload all your videos on YouTube first, then embed the videos on your page.

9. Disable Hotlinking of your Content

Hotlinking happens whenever other websites link to images hosted on your server to display it ontheir own site, this could overload your servers and cause your website to slow down its speed performance.

To disable hotlinking place this code in your .htaccess file

disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?sparringmind.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/sparringmind [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]`

10. Use a Faster Plugin for your Gallery ##`

For some reason you might want to include an image plugin to handle the display of your images, WordPress users who own portfolio websites can relate.

A plugin optimized for speed is recommended.

A very good option for gallery plugins is the Foo Gallery.

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