Increasing the speed of a WordPress site is one of the most important issues that an SEO expert or webmaster should pay attention to. This issue is of higher importance in the case of WordPress sites, because WordPress sites, in contrast, to ease of use, high features, and various plugins, always have the Achilles’ heel called “site speed” with them.
One of the most important reasons that the speed of WordPress sites is usually a little low is the presence of these plugins, which are generally required to work and implement our ideas on the web platform.
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So what should we do who have a WordPress site?
To answer this question and learn some important points, in the rest of this article, we will get comprehensive information about website speed analysis tools, and then we will look at the plugins that are effective in increasing the speed of the WordPress site and the methods of increasing the speed of WordPress.
Don’t forget this point that website speed is undoubtedly the most important factor of SEO and site optimization from Google’s point of view. Therefore, make sure to prioritize site speed analysis as one of the most important steps in reviewing a website (especially when receiving a new project) and have a detailed plan to improve it.
Website speed analysis (important tools)
There are different ways to analyze website speed. Currently, there are many sites that, by checking important site speed criteria, list various metrics for you and give you a score for each one.
What criteria do website speed analysis tools have?
Among the things that site speed test websites pay attention to, the following can be mentioned:
- Identifying scripts, fonts, and plugins that increase site loading time
- Analysis of HTTP headers
- Investigating the possibility of summarizing scripts
- Find large and bulky images that interfere with website loading
- Checking the accuracy of loading various elements
- Identifying the presence of disruptive JavaScript or CSS codes
- Analysis of the size of pages, the total time required for loading, and the number of requests for loading
- Check website performance from different geographical locations
- Checking the time to reach the first byte of TTFB
- Checking the speed of processing and displaying the website or its rendering in different browsers
- Checking CDN performance (meaning content distribution network)
The best site speed analysis tools
- PageSpeed Insights
- GTmetrix
- WebPageTest
The best Chrome plugins to check site speed
- Page Load Time
- Lighthouse
- Performance-Analyzer
Using these tools, you can fully analyze the speed of your site and follow your on-page SEO checklist with a better view.
It should be noted that it is not necessary to use all these tools to check site speed, because many of these tools have a common API and check the same factors. My advice to you is to use Gtmetrix (which was updated in December 2020 after 11 years) and Google’s Page speed insights for a detailed review.
Effective factors for increasing the speed of WordPress site
1) Using cache plugins
One of the best and easiest ways to improve site speed is to use website cache plugins. The main work of these plugins is to optimize the codes, files, and images on the site for you.
The best cache plugins to increase the speed of the WordPress site
If you do not have programming knowledge or are not familiar with CSS, HTML, JS, etc. codes, I recommend you leave this work to WordPress plugins. These plugins do all the work that leads to increasing the speed of your WordPress site precisely and optimally. One of the advantages of these plugins is the simple and practical management panel. In the following, we will review and introduce 3 suitable cache plugins.
WP Rocket plugin
One of the best WordPress cache plugins that have an easy user interface is a wp rocket. You can do the following in the settings of this plugin.
Compressing WordPress files (Gzip Compression)
Connecting the site to the CDN
Optimizing HTML, CSS, and JS files
Loading images (Lazy Loading)
WP-Optimize plugin
Another WordPress site cache plugin that has been installed by a million people so far
The plugin is WP-Optimize.
This plugin increases the speed of your WordPress site by compressing large images, caching site pages, and deleting unnecessary items in the database. Some of the features of this plugin are free, and to access all the parts, you need to buy the paid version. The free version is currently available in the WordPress repository and can be installed.
WP Fastest Cache plugin
If you are looking for a powerful yet simple cache plugin, we recommend installing this plugin. WP Fastest Cache plugin can optimize HTML, CSS, and JS files and clean the database. This plugin is available in both free and paid versions. The free version of this plugin can be installed and used through the WordPress repository.
2) Suitable hosting to increase the speed of WordPress
Another important factor influencing the speed of WordPress is proper hosting.
When a user enters your website and clicks on a part of your site’s menu, it means that they have a request from your site. The site sends this request to the server and the server forwards it to the database by making changes. Next, the database checks the answer and provides the result to the server so that the server can provide it to the user.
These transitions require high processing and response speed. Especially if there are a lot of requests from your site in a short period. You may be wondering what happens if the hosting site is not strong.
Very slow loading, 5xx series error, and errors are some of the most important problems that your site may face and will make the user leave your site faster than you think. Therefore, I advise you to be careful in choosing and buying a good host. Apart from creating a good user experience, this issue will also have a tremendous impact on your site’s SEO.
3) Optimization of js and css files
Today, all websites have fully understood the importance of user interface and for this purpose, they have turned to using CSS and javascript codes. Apart from improving the user interface and beautifying the website, these codes increase the loading time of your website. That’s why you have to optimize or so-called minify all these codes.
For this, you have two ways:
- Leave this task to the technical team.
- Use the plugins I mentioned earlier.
4) Use of content distribution system or CDN
As mentioned earlier, proper hosting is one of the most important factors that have a significant impact on the speed of your site. Although many domestic companies offer good hosting, some sites prefer to choose their hosts from different countries (mostly European) due to different business policies.
But what is wrong with this? The location of your host and server affects the speed of your site. So if my business is in Canada and my host is in Germany, the speed of my site for Canadian users is much lower than for users who search from my website element.
To solve this issue, you need to use a content distribution system or CDN.
CDNs are servers that are located in different countries and store and move all the elements and content that are on your site.
According to the previous example, if my host and server are located in Germany and my user is in Canada, after the user’s request, the content of the site will be sent to him from the nearest CDN, and this will effectively increase the speed of responding to the user.
Note: To use CDN, I recommend you to use Cloudflare’s free CDN. (According to studies conducted, Cloudflare’s CDN has good compatibility with different websites and is completely in sync with your site’s SEO process.)
Benefits of using a CDN
- Decreased site loading speed
- Use less bandwidth
- Permanent access to site content
- Increasing site security (preventing DDOS)
5) Optimizing images is a necessary way to increase the speed of a WordPress site
One of the most important topics that you should pay attention to is the optimization of the visual elements of the website. Images directly affect the speed of your site, so it is better to think about optimizing them (without reducing quality) before they slow down your site.
For this, apart from software such as Illustrator and Photoshop, there are also very good and powerful sites on the web. Just google the term compressed picture to access a long list of these sites.
Apart from the above methods, various plugins for WordPress can optimize the images on your site.
The most important of these plugins are:
- Optimole
- WP Smush