Maintaining a successful website requires developers to stay a few steps ahead of their competitors. One way to do this is to optimize your WordPress website for high performance. This means fast response times for users, regardless of where they are.
Fortunately, if you’re running a WordPress website, there are a few ways to improve its performance relatively easily. In this guide, we provide some general tips to keep your WordPress sites running smoothly.
Why the performance of your website is more important than ever today
Paradoxically, web users are becoming more impatient as the Internet gets faster. When it comes to retaining new visitors, every millisecond counts, so you need to make sure that every aspect of your website responds immediately to user requests. You may have heard some of these web performance statistics before, but they bear reiterating:
- A single second of delay in page response time can cause a 7 percent drop in conversions.
- More than half of mobile websites are abandoned after just three seconds.
- The BBC recently reported that it was losing 10 percent of visitors for every second that its home page took to load.
- AliExpress saw a 10.5 percent increase in orders and a 27 percent increase in conversions after reducing its home page load time by 36 percent.
Before beginning any optimization effort, you should take as many measurements as possible so that you can quantify your progress. Now, let’s explore some general ways to optimize your WordPress website.
Tips to Optimize WordPress Performance
Here are 5 tips that will help you improve the performance of your WordPress site.
1. Deliver content over HTTP/2
If you’re not already using HTTP/2, you should do so now. The HTTP/2 protocol supports superior multiplexing, parallelism, and HPACK compression among other features that make it an improvement over its predecessor. To implement HTTP/2, you must first enable HTTPS. Fortunately, HTTP/2 removes the TLS overhead that is typically required when using HTTPS.
The new protocol makes websites faster and more secure in many ways. For example, if you’re using the server’s push function, you can bypass the HTTP request/response cycle by retrieving certain files even before your HTML is parsed. That way, imported elements like logos, banners, and CSS will show up before anything else.
2. Use a CDN
A , or CDN, is a network of strategically placed servers that facilitate rapid delivery of web resources around the world. These points of presence, or POPs, host cached versions of your assets for delivery to users that are geographically far away from your host server. This is how CDNs reduce latency, or the time it takes for data to travel through a network.
When a user from another country requests your page, the CDN detects the user’s location and loads your website from the nearest POP. Therefore, foreign visitors do not have to wait any longer than local users to receive content.
CDNs can also offload CPU and resources from the origin server so that the host is not overwhelmed by spikes in traffic. Therefore, having a CDN protects you from using too much bandwidth while at the same time ensuring a smooth experience for every visitor. If a server goes down, your CDN will automatically redirect traffic to the next closest POP.
Using a CDN also comes with SEO advantages. Google and other search engines take website speed into account in their rankings, so anything you do to speed up your website will bring you closer to the top of search results. Additionally, CDNs can make your images and other media files more crawlable so they are more likely to show up in Google image searches.
Having a CDN from the start makes it easier to scale your website as your user base grows. Since commercial CDNs are built for speed, having a reliable CDN provider takes a lot of the guesswork out of website optimization. In some cases, having a CDN also makes it easier to implement HTTP/2 and deliver content over HTTPS. With that said, choosing a CDN is just one step in improving website performance.
3. Use Brotli Compression
Google’s Brotli compression algorithm is known to outperform Gzip in terms of size savings.
To take advantage of , your origin server must have it enabled. Since Brotli is still in the process of catching on, not all browsers support it. However, you can implement alternative mechanisms so that a supported browser requests Brotli assets, while an unsupported browser requests Gzip assets.
Like , Brotli should only be used to compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other text-based files. Attempting to compress binary files, such as JPEGs and MP4s, can actually result in larger files. has an in-depth article (and in English) that describes the process of deploying Brotli to your origin server and measures the effects of Brotli compression on a WordPress site.
4. Use resource suggestions
Asset Suggestions speed up content delivery by optimizing how assets are loaded. They allow the user’s browser to start downloading files before they are actually needed. For example, “prefetch” allows developers to prioritize certain resources, and “prefetch” tells the user’s browser to unload resources during idle time. Therefore, the number of round trips required to load the page is reduced, and responses to user input appear more instantaneous. WordPress introduced support for resource suggestions in 2016 with WordPress 4.6. If your website is running an older version of WordPress, now is the perfect time to upgrade.
5. Use next generation image formats like WebP
JPEG and GIF files are slowly becoming obsolete. New image formats like FLIF, WebP, and HEIF use innovative compression algorithms to pack higher quality images into smaller file sizes. Therefore, converting your images to one of these formats can lead to a significant increase in the speed of your website.
The only downside is that not all browsers support these formats, so you may need to provide an alternate format for some users. That said, WebP does have a fair amount of browser support, and certain browsers that don’t currently support this new image format plan to roll out support in the future. If you want to see for yourself which browsers support these new image formats, check out the .
In case you are not ready to try the new image formats yet, you should make sure that your .
further reading
If you are looking for more ways to optimize WordPress, these articles will guide you to the right path:
How to speed up WordPress – Video
We also recommend following the tips in this video to optimize and speed up your WordPress site.
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academy
Building WordPress Websites for the Future
Websites that are able to adapt to technological improvements are more likely to survive into the next decade. Likewise, successful developers must learn to embrace change.
You should always keep an eye out for new WordPress updates, plugins, and optimization trends so you can stay ahead of the game. Optimizing WordPress can be tricky at times, but by implementing the 5 tips above, you will have a competitive performance advantage over your competitors.
Deyi is a digital marketing enthusiast, with a background in web design, content creation, copywriting, and SEO. She is part of ‘s SEO & Localization team. In her free time, she likes to develop projects, read a book or watch a good movie.
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