How To Speed Up Your Self-Hosted WordPress Site?

WordPress empowers more than 18% websites on the internet. And if you are here and reading this post this means that your website or blog is too developed on WordPress.

If you are using WordPress then you must have noticed that your site speed has slowed down after certain usage or after certain tweaks. So today in this post I am going to tell you how to speed up your WordPress site. 

Why Site Speed Is Important?

Suppose you are searching something on google and you find a link and you open it.

If the website you open from the link takes a long time to load would you like to visit that website again?

Of course not. Similarly, this thing will happen with your website too. Because everybody likes a faster loading website.

According to a report by the Microsoft Bing search team, a 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and a reduced clicks by 4.3%.

Not only that, but Google now includes site speed in it’s ranking algorithm. That means that your site’s speed affects SEO, so if your site is slow, you’re now losing visitors from impatience and reduced rankings in search engines.

[bctt tweet="It is the Era of 4G so make your website loads at 4G speed. " username=""]

But before I begin the process of speeding up your WordPress site let me tell me you first how can you measure the speed of your website.

Below I am mentioning three tools which are useful in measuring the speed of your website and analyzing some important points about your website.

• Google Page insights


• GT Metrix


• Pingdom

You can also install GT Metrix WordPress plugin to test your website speed on the regular basis directly in your WordPress Admin.

To Speed Up your WordPress website you can follow the points mentioned below:

[su_note note_color="#4494CD" text_color="#ffffff"]Choose a Good Hosting Provider[/su_note]

Hosting providers play an important role in loading time of your website. Especially when you are on shared hosting.

It's not bad to start with a shared hosting package. But once you have a fully furnished website and you start receiving some traffic you should move to VPS hosting for the faster website.

The reason behind moving to VPS hosting is when you opt shared hosting you see that there is unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth but all the resources are shared among all users making your website loading time slower.

But when you use VPS you have full control over your resources and your website will load ultra fast.

[su_note note_color="#4494CD" text_color="#ffffff"]Choose a Solid Theme Framework[/su_note]

A theme framework speed depends on its coding. The cleaner the code the faster website will load.

So I will recommend the world's no. 1 theme framework Genesis by StudioPress. Genesis is not only ultra fast loading theme framework but also SEO optimized and highly customizable. The websites made with Genesis are shown higher in search results.

Also read : Top 5 WordPress themes to boost your search engine rankings.

[su_note note_color="#4494CD" text_color="#ffffff"]Use an Effective Cache Plugin[/su_note]

Yes in order to serve your website elements faster to your visitors you must install a cache plugin.

 The cache plugin I am using and I personally recommend is WP Super cache by Automatic.

It is easy to use make caching and loading faster. Just install and use it.

[su_note note_color="#4494CD" text_color="#ffffff"]Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)[/su_note]

All big blogs and websites use the content delivery network (CDN) so that people around any corner of the world can have the fast access to the website.

a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all your static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.

I personally use the Max CDN Content Delivery Network on my WordPress sites, as I’ve found that they have the most reasonable prices and their dashboard is very simple to use (and comes with video tutorials to setting it up, takes only a few minutes).

I also use Cloud Fare CDN as it is free and use of multiple CDN makes website loading much faster.

[su_note note_color="#4494CD" text_color="#ffffff"]Optimize Images to Load Faster[/su_note]

Your large size of the image can take lots of time to download on users computer or mobile. So in order to improve the loading time faster, you need to optimize your images by reducing the size.

So to compress your images the best plugin available is ShortPixel. It is the best plugin as it can compress the images in both lossy and lossless way. And the best thing is that it does not slow down the website as other similar plugins do so.

To use this plugin, you have to download and register here to get you api key.

[su_note note_color="#4494CD" text_color="#ffffff"]Optimize WordPress Database[/su_note]

LOts of Database can result in slow loading of website.

So to delete the unused database and optimize other databases you can either use WP-Optimize or WP-DBManager.

These plugins can be used to optimize,delete,repair,restore or backup or your database.

[su_note note_color="#4494CD" text_color="#ffffff"]Disable Hotlinking[/su_note]
Hotlinking refers to display an image on a website by linking to the same image on another website instead of downloading that image and uploading it to own server.

How can Hotlinking affect you?

If someone links your image on his website it can affect you in these ways:

• Your bandwidth will be used by others resulting in slow loading of your website.


• IF you are on a limited bandwidth plan it can cost you more money.


• If your hosting provider is not having good resources it can lead your site to down.

How can you disable Hotlinking?

You can disable hotlinking by any of the following ways:

1. Go to your Cpanel.


2. Click on Hotlink Protection and click enable.

or you can copy and paste the following code in your .htaccess file present in your root directory.

[su_highlight background="#000000" color="#ffffff"]disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feedbackonline.co [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)? feeds2.feedburner.com/feedbackonline [NC] RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L] [/su_highlight]

You’ll notice I included my feed (from FeedBurner), you’ll need to replace it with your feed’s name, otherwise your images won’t appear correctly there.

[su_note note_color="#4494CD" text_color="#ffffff"]Turn off Pingbacks and Trackbacks[/su_note]

By default, WordPress interacts with other blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.

Every time another blog mentions you, it notifies your site, which in turn updates data on the post. Turning this off will not destroy the backlinks to your site, just the setting that generates a lot of work for your site.

[su_note note_color="#4494CD" text_color="#ffffff"]Go For Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)[/su_note]

If you have to increase the number of visitors on your blog then you must have to take care of the people on the phone or with slow internet connection.

As I have mentioned earlier that people and Google loves fast page loading so going for AMP will be a very good step for SEO,fast site,and more organic traffic.

To enable AMP for your WordPress site download this AMP Plugin from here .

Go for AMP boost your SEO,Increase your site speed and increase your visitors.

Related Searches:

Speeding up WordPress Website

Fast up WordPress

Webiste speed test

page speed test

site speed test

pagespeed

web speed test

website performance

website performance test