5 Tips to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

One of the most used strategies to generate income online is to generate content on a WordPress blog, and it is not for nothing, but it has many advantages, such as generating long-term traffic for free, you can monetize it in many ways such as with marketing affiliate or AdSense, allows you to build your own brand, etc.

In fact, it is one of the recommended strategies in the course that I liked the most about online marketing with one of the most successful in this field: John Thornhill, you can check it out here: https://stelaahau.com/ThornhillWebinar
So, yes it is a good strategy, however, nowadays if your website is not fast enough google and internet search engines are not going to send you the maximum traffic because your website is slow.

Then, what are the factors that you can improve to make your WordPress site faster? Check with me these 5 tips that can help you improve the speed of your website:

1. Check your metrics
The first thing you have to do is have a diagnosis of how the performance of your page is.

To do this, visit these two sites and enter your URL:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
https://gtmetrix.com/analyze.html

Take a screenshot of the scores that these pages give you since this will be your reference point to measure the results derived from the improvements you make.

2. Increase your hosting Speed
If your score in the previous tests came out very poor, especially in red or yellow, the most likely thing is that the biggest problem you have is your hosting service. You can check if this is your problem if in the google page speed insights report you first see a red triangle with the suggestion to “Reduce the initial response time of the server”

Also, check-in GTmetrix the TTBS indicator which should be below 1.6 seconds and if it is less than one second, much better.

Unfortunately, when we first create our website we do not take much into account the importance of good hosting or we get carried away by what the gurus tell us, who generally just want to sell you something, and many times the most recommended hostings are the slowest!

Research comparative tables and especially if they have data about the TTBS. I also leave you the link of my favourite hosting with which I have always been in good grade with my wordpress sites: 5cloudhost.com

I also recommend that your hosting has good 24-hour customer service, and other things such as PHP upload bandwidth so that you can make your own backup copies of your WordPress site. If you want to know more about this, check out how I learned through mistakes here: https://www.johnthornhill.com/blog/i-have-to-change-my-hosting-dont-make-my-5-mistakes-checklist/

3. Optimize your theme
Many pages are also usually slow because the theme they use is too heavy or they have built everything using page builders.

So especially if that second point is your case, I recommend you check that your theme is optimized to be easy to load and is mobile friendly since currently, that is taking a lot of relevance for google.

One of the WordPress themes that I like the most for its speed is Neve that you can find here: https://themeisle.com/themes/neve/

Or these happy themes that also have multiple versions for news pages, videos, blogs, health, etc: https://www.happythemes.com

And always remember, you can do your own research, but avoid building your entire page with elementor, optimize press, or other builders like that as they will put a lot of CSS and javascript on your website which will make it extremely slow no matter what other things you optimize

4. Optimize your website images
Image optimization can be very important for your website if you have many images in your post, in addition to converting everything to formats such as WebP can be very useful to make your WordPress site faster, since from the perspective of google this will be a point in your favour, since they are considered “next-gen” formats, that is, as the most modern for a website to work properly and faster.

In fact, in the initial analysis of google page speed insides, you can know if this is a point of improvement for you if you see a red triangle below with the legend “Publish images with next-generation formats”.

For this optimization, you can use a plugin like Short Pixel that can save you 30-40% of bandwidth in terms of loading your images, depending on how much you have had congestion at this point.

I recommend the one-time payment, with which with a payment of 19.99 USD you can have enough to optimize your entire blog. Also, consider the optimal size to which you want to configure your images since it can be automated or you may prefer a custom size that fits well with the configuration of your theme.

Do not worry that whatever service you choose, there are surely detailed tutorials for all the configurations, however, remember to look for the next-gen formats.

5. Reduce the CSS and Java code on your website
This is relevant because there are many plugins that we install on our website that put codes of this style on all your pages even if they are not going to be used on each of them, and this may be slowing down the visitor experience on your site. WordPress.

You can remedy this with a service such as “perfmatters” that allows you to install a “scriptmanager” on your site and thus analyze which codes may be affecting your pages and deactivate those that you do not need to be active.

PS. You can also use “perfmatters” to Add Missing Image Dimensions if that is a problem that page speed insights say your site has.

Conclusions
It’s all for today, I hope that these simple but powerful tips have given you the starting information you need to optimize your website and make it faster than ever, so that you can be more successful in your google rankings and that your visitors are very happy with their experience on your site.

Thanks for reading this far, I’m Stela Ahau, see you in the next post.

This is a guest post from Stela Ahau if you would like to be considered for a guest post please contact me.