How to Speed ​​Up a WordPress Site in 2024 [No Coding Required]

Need to know how to speed up a WordPress site? So find out below.

Did you know that WordPress manages almost 43% of the top 10 million websites on the Internet?

WordPress is arguably the most popular CMS in the world, used by millions of people around the world. In fact, WordPress has been downloaded over 20 million times.

So, if you are running a WordPress site, there is ONE most important thing you should always consider, and that is your speed.

The loading speed of your WordPress site literally determines the success of your website. In this detailed guide, let's talk about how you can speed up your WordPress site in 2024.

Table of contents ☰

How to make your WordPress site faster

How to Check Your Website Speed ​​and Performance: 3 Amazing Tools

“Is my website slow? ” – this is one of the most frequently asked questions by many people who run websites and blogs.

So, how to check your website speed (page load time) as well as its performance?

Well, there are some amazing (free) tools that can help you easily test and analyze your website loading times, mentioned below.

1. GTmetrix

GTmetrix is ​​one of the most popular website speed and performance optimization tools that you can use to test your website speed.

Simply enter your website URL and click Analyze and it will instantly generate a report of your website that looks like this:

As you can see above, it gives you a ton of details, including:

• Page Speed ​​Score
• Slow YScore
• Full Load Time (this is the actual time your page or website loads, in our case BlogPasCher loads in 2 seconds)
• Total page size
• Number of requests

It also gives you all the necessary suggestions to improve the speed and performance of your website as you scroll down.

2. Pingdom Tools

This is another amazing free website speed test tool which helps you easily find and analyze your website speed. It uses over 70 polling stations around the world to test and verify websites, which is great.

Enter any URL or individual page URL and click the Start Test button to continue. It also gives you the opportunity to test your website in a wide range of countries.

This is what it looks like;

As you can see above, you can find a ton of information on your website, including:

• Performance level
• Page size
• Loading time (actual loading time of your website)
• Number of requests

It also offers you a section called “Improve Page Performance” where you will find all the suggestions you need to increase the overall performance of your website as well as its speed.

3. Google PageSpeed ​​information

Finally, let's take a look at PageSpeed ​​Insights, developed by Google itself, which analyzes the content of a web page and offers you suggestions to make that page faster. Again, this is a free tool to use.

Go to PageSpeed ​​Insights, enter your domain name (or any individual URL if you want to optimize a particular page) and click the Analyze button to continue.

Instantly it shows you a score for mobile and desktop devices. The higher your score, the faster and better your web pages are optimized.

This is what it looks like;

As you can see above, on the desktop version our BlogPasCher site scored 79 out of 100, which is pretty good considering that we display a lot of heavy files (such as featured images, a registration box, etc.) on the home page.

The color code corresponds to these performance score ranges:

• 0 to 49 (slow): Red
• 50 to 89 (average): Orange
• 90 to 100 (fast): Green

Site Speed ​​and SEO: Are They Related?

Did you know that Google takes your website speed as a ranking factor ?

Take a look at the following article from the official Google blog.

As you can see above, Google is obsessed with speed and has introduced site speed as a Google ranking factor.

This means that if your site loads faster than other sites, you will ultimately benefit from higher rankings in search results. Likewise, you will experience issues with your organic rankings if your website has slow loading times.

According to an Akamai study, 47% of visitors expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds, and 57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

So yes, site speed and SEO are linked and if you want to increase your search rankings, especially on Google, improve your website speed. It's that simple.

WordPress Speed ​​Optimization: Key Benefits

Did you know that Amazon has calculated that a slowdown of one second in the loading speed of its pages would cost them $1,6 billion in annual sales ? That's a lot of money, right?

There are many issues that can slow down your WordPress blogs. You need to speed up your WordPress blogs and the reasons for this are mentioned below. These reasons will apply to all standard websites as well as WordPress blogs.

Speed ​​is a ranking factor on Google

In 2010, Google included page speed as one of the ranking factors in its search ranking algorithms. So, if your website loads faster, you will have an advantage over your competitors who are not putting much effort into improving their website speed.

For a better user experience

No one likes visiting a website that takes more than 2-3 seconds to load. People will immediately leave your website if they experience slow loading. You have a few seconds to convert a visitor into a potential customer or subscriber.

If you can't deliver your website content in less than 10 seconds or less, you're missing out on a lot of money-making opportunities. Since a large number of your website readers will immediately leave your website, this will negatively impact your website engagement metrics.

By improving your website speed, you make your website readers and Google happy, which will result in more traffic and business for you.

If you are still wondering why you need to increase the loading speed of web pages, here are some of the main benefits of faster loading websites.

• Higher search rankings because search engines like Google take website speed into account when ranking a page
• Better conversions because most people will abandon a site if it takes more than 2-3 seconds to load
• Overall improved user experience
• Your website page load times affect a huge percentage of your website's success
• And the list goes on and on

Enough about the benefits of WordPress speed optimization. Now let's talk about how you can actually speed up your WordPress websites in 2024.

How to speed up a WordPress site: the 10 best hacks

1. Switch to a Faster Host

There's a reason we put this number 1 on the list, because we know how important a web host is in determining the speed of a site.

One of the main reasons why most websites are fast (or slow) is their host. Your web host plays a KEY role in determining the speed of your website. Literally no one would want to spend their time waiting for a website to load at their own pace, right?

Everyone likes faster websites, including Google. Several elements determine how quickly your web host scales:

• Type of hard drives used (web hosts compatible with SSD storage load faster)
• Cloud Hosting Web Hosts load faster (like WPX hosting, Kinsta hosting, etc.)
• Dedicated resources (so you are not going to share your resources with anyone, this is also the reason why you should avoid shared hosting although they are cheap and prefer the choice of managed web hosting )
• HTTPS encryption (there are now many web hosts that offer free SSL certificates to change your domain from http to https and https sites are more secure and faster)
• Using CDN (there are hosts like Kinsta, WPX hosting, etc. that give you free access to a global CDN to improve your website loading times no matter where they are visited)

So, what is the best web host you can use to have faster websites?

Over the past couple of years, we've used a ton of web hosts and we know which web hosts actually produce great website speeds. We have 2 recommendations for you.

• WPX Hosting (the same host we currently use)
• Hostinger (if you are on a tight budget)

Now let's talk about both and their pricing plans and features so you can decide which one is best for your website and budget needs.

1. WPX Hosting: Probably the Best Investment You Can Make

We have been using WPX hosting for over 3 years now and have never had a single problem with them. Our site loading times have been significantly improved and most of our individual pages take less than a second to load – thanks to thecloud hosting WPX!

So, how much does WPX hosting cost?

WPX hosting offers you the 3 pricing options listed below.

1.plan Business : This is the basic and cheapest hosting plan from WPX hosting which costs you $24,99 per month and you can host up to 5 websites with 100GB bandwidth. You will also get 10 GB of disk space storage space. 

2. Package Professional : This plan costs you $49,99 per month and you can host up to 15 websites with 200 GB bandwidth. You will also get 20 GB disk space of storage space. 

3. Elite Plan: This is the advanced and expensive hosting plan of WPX hosting which costs you $99 per month and you can host up to 35 websites with unlimited bandwidth. You will also benefit from 40 GB of disk space for storage. 

WPX hosting offers a 30-day money back guarantee, so if you are not satisfied with their hosting, you can get your money back within 30 days.

2. Hostinger: One of the best hosts!

Hostinger currently hosts millions of websites worldwide and offers features like SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, and low-cost free SSL certificates starting at just $2,69 per month.

How much does Hostinger cost?

Hostinger offers many hosting choices, but we recommend its Premium Web Hosting plan which only costs $2,69/month.

Their 4-year hosting plan only costs $129!

Hostinger also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all of its shared hosting plans. If you are not interested in their services or hosting, you cancel your account and request a refund within 30 days of your hosting purchase.

So what are you waiting for?

2. Install a caching plugin

Did you know that your website retrieves information from many places before providing it to your website visitors? Just take a look at the following illustration.

As you can see above, when someone visits your WordPress site, they retrieve information (such as blog posts, images, videos, etc.) from PHP files and MySQL databases , then gathers all the information into an HTML content and finally delivers it on your website. visitors.

It's a LONG process, isn't it? You can override this by using page caching.

If you are wondering what page caching is, it is the temporary storage of web documents such as HTML pages and images. Usually, your web browser stores copies of web pages you visited recently to reduce its bandwidth usage, server load, etc. in order to provide faster speeds to users.

Fortunately, you can easily enable page cache by installing any caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache.

While there are a ton of caching plugins out there (and we've tried many over the past 5 years), one caching plugin stood out, and that is WPRocket.

This is what the dashboard looks like:

As you can see above, you'll find everything from file optimization to caching to preloading and CDN functionality to make your site load times blazingly fast.

Here is a list of things you can easily do with the WP Rocket plugin.

• Delete all files from caching your website, because you can delete all cache files from your website pages with just one click.
• Start cache preload
• Purge OpCache content which improves PHP performance by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory and thereby removing the need for PHP loading for faster load times.
• Regenerate critical CSS

3. Optimize images

Whether you know it or not, images consume a lot of size and create a load on your website's databases, ultimately leading to slow loading times.

No matter which web host you use, if you use too many images, it affects your page load times. So make sure you optimize image sizes if you really want to increase the loading times of your website.

There are basically 2 ways to reduce image size:

• Resize them before even uploading them to your WordPress library (use online image optimization tools)
• Use plugins (so you can optimize image sizes even after uploading to your site)

If you use WordPress, there is a great image optimization plugin called ShortPixel Image Optimizer .

This plugin can optimize any image you have on your website, even images that are not listed in the media library like those in galleries like NextGEN, Modula or added directly via FTP. It also offers lossy and lossless image compression for the most common image types such as JPG, PNG, GIF, and WebP.

The biggest advantage of using this plugin is that you can freely convert any JPEG, PNG or GIF to WebP (which Google loves).

Besides this plugin, you can also try the WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimization plugins, as both will compress any image you upload to your WordPress site.

4. Enable gzip compression

You can either use a caching plugin that automatically helps you gzip or simply add the following code to the .htaccess file in your root directory.

Quick note: Yes, we have already mentioned that this detailed guide on WordPress speed optimization is mainly for beginners and no coding is required, but the following code is exclusively mentioned for geeks who don't want to use additional plugin for gzip compression . You can simply skip this task and install any gzip compression plugin!

# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, text, XML and fonts

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE/javascript application

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject

Application AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE/font x

Application AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE/x-font-opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf

Application AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE/x-font-truetype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE/x-javascript application

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/icon x

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

# Remove browser bugs (this is only necessary for very old browsers)

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] without gzip

BrowserMatch \bMSIE!no-gzip!gzip-only-text/html

Header add Vary User-Agent

You can use the above code above or below the WordPress parentheses as it doesn't matter much. So there you have it, this is how you can easily enable gzip compression without adding any additional plugins.

5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Do you serve an international audience? If your website gets visitors from all over the world, you should use a CDN.

A CDN (Content Network Delivery) is a way to deliver content from your website to people faster, based on their location. A CDN is what gives your desktop and mobile users a faster website experience, regardless of where they are browsing it from.

When someone visits your website, the CDN closest to the user will deliver the static content such as images, Java files, etc., ensuring the shortest distance for the data to travel (also known as latency scaled down).

Just take a look at the following illustration of how a CDN works.

As you can see above, CDNs ensure that your website visitors can view or download data from the geographically closest servers. This is how a CDN helps your website visitors get the fastest web experience.

If you use a host such as WPX Hosting (already mentioned above), you will benefit from free access to a global CDN which will ultimately improve the speed of your website.

If you are looking for a free CDN, you can opt for the free plan Cloudflare CDN, which gives you features like unlimited DDoS mitigation, access to a global content delivery network (CDN), and shared SSL certificates.

6. Optimize databases

Whether you know it or not, your WordPress site databases store a lot of data, including unwanted data like deleted/unapproved/spam comments, stale data, pingbacks, trackbacks, etc.

All these unwanted things create additional load on your databases, which ultimately affects the speed of your website. You must therefore regularly optimize your databases if you want to clean up unwanted data.

There is an amazing WordPress plugin called WPOptimize which you can use to optimize your databases, which easily cleans your database, compresses your images and caches your site.

7. Check for updates related to plugins and themes

Most of the time, your WordPress site loads slowly due to the themes or plugins you are using.

In fact, most free themes are infected with malicious codes or heavy-loading scripts that affect your site speed. This is why you should always avoid free WordPress themes .

Not only themes, but the plugins you use on your site should be regularly updated and you should avoid using WordPress plugins outdated and high-load because they create a large load on your databases, which slows down your site speed.

You can install a free WordPress plugin called WP Health which checks for updates and ensures your WordPress site is up to date.

This is what it looks like once activated on your site.

As you can see above, it checks everything from server checks to the latest version of WordPress, the themes you're using and any plugins so you can stay up to date with them.

8. Try These 3 Simple WordPress Hacks

Here are some quick and easy WordPress hacks you can use to speed up your WordPress site in 2024 and beyond.

1. Disable image hotlinking: Image hotlinking is when someone embeds your images on their site by linking to them directly from your website, which negatively impacts your site speed because those images are still loading from your server. You can either disable it through your hosting cPanel or install the WP Security plugin, go to the firewall settings and select the “Prevent dynamic links” option to prevent image dynamic links.
2. Limit post revisions: Every time you make changes to your existing posts or pages, WordPress creates “post revisions,” which again creates a load on your databases. You can limit these revisions via your wp-config.php file or by activating a free WordPress plugin like WP Revisions Control
3. Enable lazy loading: if you use a ton of images on your site you can enable lazy loading because there is a plugin called Lazy Load by WP Rocket which displays images on a page only when they are visible to the user and this ultimately reduces the number of HTTP requests and improves your page loading times.

9. Reduce server requests

A server request occurs whenever your browser requests a certain type of resource from your hosting servers, like images, Javascript files, etc. The more server requests it takes to finish loading your website, the longer it will take. The fewer server requests it requires, the faster it loads. It's that simple.

You must therefore reduce server requests to improve the loading times of your site. You can easily find out what server requests your website requires, you can use tools like Pingdom Tools, GT Metrix, etc. which are already mentioned above.

That being said, here are some quick tips that will help you reduce server requests on your site.

• If one of your blog posts receives a lot of comments, split it into multiple pages from your WordPress dashboard Settings > Discussion (avoid closing the comments section after 30 or 60 days)
• Uninstall heavy or outdated plugins
• Remove spam comments and unwanted pingbacks
• Enable lazy loading on images
• Stop using fonts from external sources such as Google Fonts, as this can negatively impact your load times.
• Show fewer posts on your homepage
• Show only excerpts of posts on your homepage or archives

10. Keep an Eye Out for Security Vulnerabilities in Your WordPress Site

Did you know that 90% of infected websites belong to WordPress? Literally, over 100 WordPress sites are hacked or infected with malicious code EVERY day.

Keeping an eye on your website speed and performance is one thing. Making sure your WordPress sites are fully secure against all security threats is ANOTHER important thing.

In fact, if you can secure your sites against the majority of security breaches, you will definitely have a faster loading website.

That being said, here are some security precautions you can take to secure your sites.

• Limit login attempts on your site
• Install security plugins like iThemes Security, Sucuri, etc.
• Use https version
• Use a secure host like WPX hosting
• Update your themes and plugins
• Make backups of your site so you can restore it in the event of data loss

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FAQ on How to Speed ​​Up WordPress Site

Here is a list of some interesting questions about improving your website page load times and speeding up your WordPress sites in 2024 and beyond.

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• Semantic SEO: Beginner's Guide to Ranking Higher
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Final Thoughts on Speeding Up WordPress Site Load Times

No matter what niche you're in, having a faster website improves your overall results. From improved search rankings to better user experience to higher conversions, your website speed plays a key role.

Hopefully this guide has helped you optimize your site load times to provide a faster experience for your website users. If you have any further questions, let us know in the comments.