How to improve the speed of your WordPress website

Having a fast site is crucial for any project or business.

A slow web page not only leaves a bad impression on visitors, but also makes them more likely to abandon it. Pages that handle a load time between one and five seconds increase the probability of bouncing by .

Also, search engines like Google take the . Slow web pages will have more trouble being discovered organically.

Fortunately, there are ways to fix a slow site. In this guide, we will share 11 practical steps that can improve the speed of WordPress web pages. Backed by expert insights, you’ll learn valuable tips and techniques for a deeper understanding of WordPress speed optimization.

How to speed up WordPress – Video

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Choosing a suitable hosting plan for your WordPress site

First of all, make sure you use a reliable hosting provider and a plan that can meet the requirements of your site. A poor quality hosting provider and an inadequate hosting plan can make your page slow, among other problems.

The key is to do proper research when choosing a hosting provider and plan. Identify the needs of your site and find a provider and plan that suits them.

Make sure the hosting company you choose has a proven track record of delivering excellent WordPress performance and customer support. Some hosting providers offer unique features to improve the speed of WordPress.

, for example, has a cache management feature in the hPanel and uses it to optimize server performance and load times.

LiteSpeed’s asynchronous architecture can handle higher traffic and simultaneous connections better than web servers running Apache. Instead of creating a new request each time, LiteSpeed stores compressed cache files that optimize page load speed.

LiteSpeed also comes with a WordPress caching plugin that can speed up the speed even more. Unlike other caching plugins, LiteSpeed integrates directly with the web server, allowing it to remember entries and analyze dependencies for smarter cache management.

Once you have chosen a hosting provider, it is time to select the most suitable plan for your WordPress site. In general, hosting providers offer a variety of services, such as:

. A type of basic hosting that stores different websites on the same server, sharing their resources. shared hosting plans start from €1.49 per month.
. A type of premium hosting that offers dedicated resources from a network of multiple servers. It is as easy to use as shared hosting. ‘s range of cloud hosting plans start at €9.99 per month.
. A type of hosting that gives users root access and dedicated resources. It requires some technical knowledge to set it up and maintain it. VPS hosting starts at €3.49 per month.
. A type of shared hosting designed specifically for WordPress and optimized for site performance and security. Take a look at the following table for a detailed breakdown of ‘s WordPress hosting plans, from price to allocated hosting server resources:

WordPress SimpleWordPress StarterWordPress EnterpriseWordPress ProPrice€1.99€2.99€3.99€9.99Number of websites1100100300SSD storage30GB100GB200GB200GBBandwidth100 GBLimitedUnlimitedUnlimitedmonthly traffic~10,000~25,000~100,000~200,000free domain registrationNoYesYes Yes Free SSL CertificateYes Yes Yes Yes email accounts1100100100MySQL databases2UnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimiteddaily backupNoNoYesYesSubdomains2100100300

To get the best WordPress performance and load times from your chosen hosting plan, don’t forget to consider your goals, the amount of content you want to upload, and the expected amount of traffic beforehand.

While it’s natural to want to save money when you can, hosting should be top of your budget. It is a fundamental investment that will determine the performance of your WordPress site.

Ideally, the plan you choose has enough resources for daily use and leaves some room for upgrades and days when you might have unexpected traffic spikes.

This way, you won’t have to worry about suddenly running out of storage or your site crashing when traffic is high. Also, if you use shared hosting, exceeding the allotted resources of the plan can also negatively affect other sites on the server.

Choose the server location closest to your target audience

The location of your server determines how quickly it can transfer and receive requests to load your site. Although much progress has been made to improve connection speed, latency is still an issue.

Latency is the time it takes for web servers to receive and process a request for a web page. A very important factor influencing this is the physical distance from the server.

Requests and web data travel from server to server until they reach the user’s browser. If a server is far away, the latency will be high and it will take much longer to load the site in the browser.

High latency slows down web pages and worsens the overall user experience. It is worse if the site has a lot of heavy content, such as images, animations, and videos. Latency becomes a more serious problem for users with slow or unstable Internet connections.

has six data centers spread across the globe. When you sign up for a hosting plan, be sure to choose the server location closest to your target audience. If you already have a site and would like to change your server location, please contact support to do so.

However, you may not know the location of most of your audience. To see a detailed report about the , including the location of your visitors, use .

One of the most used Google Analytics plugins on WordPress sites is MonsterInsights. will add Google Analytics to your site and you will be able to view traffic metrics directly from the WordPress admin panel.

If you use and find yourself having to switch servers, follow these simple steps:

Log in to hPanel and look for the section Server in the sidebar.
Click on the Edit button.
A new window will appear. From the dropdown menu, select the server location you want to migrate to. Please note that you can only perform one server transfer per month. click on Following to continue.
In the last step, select Start.

Remember that the server migration can take up to 12 hours to complete. We do not recommend making any changes to your WordPress site during the process as they will not be saved.

Once the site is fully transferred to the new server, the IP address associated with your hosting plan will be renewed.

Use a content delivery network

A (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of servers that work together to speed up the process of delivering websites to users’ browsers.

It is the perfect solution for a global WordPress site with audiences located in different places. A CDN shortens the distance between the user and the server, significantly reducing latency and increasing page speed.

A CDN works by saving copies of the static content of a web page in the cache. When a user visits a page, the server closest to him loads the content, reducing the number of external HTTP requests.

There are different CDNs you can sign up to. Some WordPress hosts offer CDN packages with their hosting. If your hosting plan does not come with a CDN, you will need to purchase it separately before enabling it.

Content delivery via HTTP/2

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the basis of data communication on the World Wide Web. It is the way users and servers exchange information.

For example, when someone wants to visit yourdomain.comyour browser sends an HTTP request to a remote server that will process it and load content from the website.

The first iteration of HTTP, HTTP/1, is quite efficient. However, it is considerably slower compared to the most recent update, HTTP/2.

Here are some of the advantages of HTTP/2 over HTTP/1:

Efficient communication. HTTP/2 uses a binary protocol designed for communication between machines. Compared to using a text-based protocol of HTTP/1, binary data is significantly simpler to process content.
Weighted prioritization. With HTTP/2, the web developer can decide which content to load first. This feature allows browsers to load lighter content, such as text, first, giving the impression that the website loads faster.
Multiplexing. With HTTP/1, the browser can only load one element at a time. HTTP/2 improves on this by allowing browsers to load different types of content in a single connection.
Server Push. HTTP/2 allows servers to send content before the browser requests it.
Advanced compression. Compared to HTTP/1, the compression used by HTTP/2, HPACK, can eliminate redundancy in the HTTP packets exchanged. HPACK makes HTTP messages smaller, which shortens load time.

Fortunately, most WordPress hosting providers already use HTTP/2 by default. There is no need to manually start a migration because LiteSpeed, the web server software used by , natively supports HTTP/2.

WordPress hosting providers using Nginx servers also support HTTP/2 natively, while Apache servers have added support for it in 2015. If your web host uses Apache, contact them to confirm whether they support HTTP/2. HTTP/2 is available.

However, if you’re not sure if your WordPress website uses HTTP/2, use the and tools to check. If it turns out that your site is still using HTTP/1, check if your web provider offers HTTP/2 and contact them to start the migration.

Also, remember that it is highly recommended for HTTP/2, as most browsers only support HTTP/2 over an encrypted connection.

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