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There’s a good reason why WordPress is the most popular digital publishing platform in the world: It’s free, it has a great set of tools, and can be extended – often at no or low cost – to do just about anything. It’s a digital Swiss Army knife.
The downside: Themes and plugins can bring your WordPress site to a crawl. And It’s a well-established fact that a slow website is bad for business. If your site takes over 4 seconds to load, 38% of your customers will probably walk out the door.
The good news: You aren’t helpless. These seven recommendations can help transform a sluggish WordPress site into a speedy one.
1. Upgrade your hosting
The web hosting business is cutthroat. With prices as low as $1.99 a month, it may be a tempting area to try to save money.
Don’t. Hosting is an area you don’t want to skimp on.
First and foremost, we recommend a host that specializes in WordPress. These companies understand the performance challenges with WordPress and optimize accordingly. Fast infrastructure, robust caching systems, and great management tools are critical. Don’t let price be a determining factor.
Our pick
- WPEngine – Technology, support, and tools make this our hands-down winner.
Also great:
2. Remove unnecessary plugins
Plugins are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they make it easy to add functionality or solve a problem. On the other, they can very quickly add bloat – slowing down your website.
If you use a lot of plugins, it’s time to trim the fat.
Find out what’s really needed and remove the rest and assure the plugins you do use are from quality vendors. Bad code can also hurt performance.
Themes often come bloated with plugins. Many of these plugins will be marked as “recommended” or even “required” but they can often safely be disabled if the functionality isn’t used.
And remember: Always test first on a non-live version of your website. And if you don’t have one, see the Web Hosting section above – all of our recommended hosts support adding a test copy of your website.
3. Optimize Website Files
WordPress websites are made of four primary components: HTML/PHP code (the page itself), CSS (page styles such as colors and fonts), JavaScript (creates interactive behavior), and media (images, video, etc).
Oftentimes (and especially when you have a lot of WordPress plugins!) the number of JavaScript and CSS files balloon. Each plugin often comes with its own CSS / JavaScript, and when a page loads it has to download each individually before the page can display.
The good news: There’s a — ahem — plugin for that! Well, several, actually. What these plugins do is grab all these files, put them into one file and make that file smaller. So, you can go from a dozen Javascript files, for example, to a second file.
Our pick:
- Autoptimize – Does a great job, with many configuration options, without being too complex.
Also great:
- WP Super Cache – Does mostly what Autoptimize does but has caching and more advanced features.
4. Optimize website images
You may have seen this one coming… but in addition to CSS and JavaScript, big images can really slow a website down. An image taken with a newer iPhone, for example, might be 10x the size needed to display crisply on a website. That’s a lot of toe-tapping waiting for a page to load!
Luckily (again) there are several great WordPress plugins to help trim file size (remember when we said plugins are double-edged swords?) By both resizing and compressing images, these plugins can reduce an image by 50% or more.
Our pick:
Also great:
5. Remove autoplay videos
Video “hero” images are all the rage, and we use them ourselves sometimes. They can have a great visual impact.
However, if your site is also struggling with performance, this is an easy call: Kill it. Background videos are several megabytes on the low end. Don’t let the desire to “wow” sap your performance and potentially your prospects.
And, critically: If you are using video of any kind, don’t upload it directly to WordPress. Instead, use a video service such as YouTube or Vimeo as a host. They have advanced features to adjust video size/quality dynamically based on internet speed and device.
6. Keep Your theme, plugins and WordPress up to date
Keeping WordPress updated can feel like a full-time job. Plugins, themes, and even WordPress itself are updated regularly – always nagging you to upgrade to the next Dot Something version.
But keeping your code up-to-date is critical both for performance and security. We recommend assessing plugin updates at least monthly and setting aside time to stay current.
Minor updates can usually be done directly on your live site (outside of business hours) but for major updates, you should use your test website first. This is especially true of upgrades to WordPress, updates to PHP, or new major releases of plugins that have critical functionality.
7. Change your theme
WordPress themes are the last refuge of the scoundrel. Sometimes, you can do steps 1-6 above and still have a slow site. WordPress themes sometimes try to be all things to all people – and end up delivering bloatware. We definitely have our opinions about WordPress themes – and the ones to avoid – but changing a theme is tantamount to launching a new website. It ain’t easy.
Still, given how critically important performance is, sometimes it’s necessary for the sake of the business. There are some good lists to help guide you. And if you need to bite the bullet, start planning – it won’t get better without making the jump.
