Does your WordPress website seem to take forever to load?
Wouldn’t you love it if it came up super-fast — for you and your visitors?
WordPress is a fantastic platform with amazing features, but all those features can come at a cost: speed! I’ve seen many otherwise great WordPress websites deliver a painful experience, simply because they take ages to load.
And it’s not just website visitors that are affected. Slow websites can also rank lower in Google search results, and are less likely to appear near the top of Facebook news feeds. And that’s not good!
So it’s super-important to make sure your WordPress site is as fast as it can be.
In this step-by-step guide, I’ll show you exactly how you can speed up your WordPress site.
You’ll learn how to:
- Measure your website’s current speed
- Back up your site (very important before making any changes)
- Install a caching plugin to take the pressure off your server
- Use an optimisation plugin to streamline the data that travels between your site and your visitors
- Resize your images so they load more quickly
- Speed up your images even further with some clever tools
- Optimise your WordPress database to remove the cruft
- Deal with unwanted plugins that can slow down your site
- Upgrade your server to make it faster
- Move your server nearer your visitors for better responsiveness, and
- Use a content delivery network to speed up your site for visitors around the globe.
If you have any questions or tips on speeding up WordPress websites, let me know in the comments below!