WordPress Speed: How to Increase Your Website Loading Times

Page speed is crucial to the success of your website. For starters, it is one of the main Google ranking factors. If you want to boost your SEO rankings, then you must make every effort to optimize your WordPress website for speed.

A slow loading website increases bounce rate and gives an overall bad user experience. In addition it, decreases your website conversion rate.

WordPress is a great content management system (CMS), but it comes with so much bloat that can slow than your page speed dramatically. If you don’t take care of this, it will hurt your entire website performance and online business effort.

So, how do you supercharge your WordPress website for top speed and performance?

7 Simple Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Website (without breaking the bank)

Here are some simple tips to help you significantly increase the speed of your WordPress website.

1. Get quality web hosting

The first and ultimate thing to consider if your WordPress website loads slowly is the quality if your web hosting.

I cannot overstate the importance of quality WordPress hosting as every other efffort depends greatly on it.

This is because if you are using some cheap shared hosting service, your website is usually tied to a particular server, together with thousands of other websites. The servers get so overloaded and over-burdened, eventually slowing down the speed and performance of all websites on that server.

If this is the case, there is no optimization you can do that will save you. You will need to either upgrade to a VPS or cloud hosting. Or alternatively, switch to a superior dedicated WordPress hosting solution, like what we offer here at Kobopress.

Speed, not price, is everything to consider when choosing a WordPress hosting platform. Our managed WordPress hosting plans give your website access to our entire hosting platform, not just one server. This means you can achieve the same incredible speeds no matter how popular your website gets because we use auto-scaling cloud hosting technology.

In addition, our WordPress hosting platform comes with Edge Caching and Global CDN inbuilt so your website loads consistently fast irrespective of where your visitors are located. You don’t need any other third party caching and CDN solution to speed up your website.

If you want to give your website some extra wings to fly, then check out our WordPress hosting plans and get started.

2. Maintain the latest PHP version

PHP is the programming language that WordPress is built on. New releases of PHP come with improved performance and speed.

Always make sure your WordPress hosting platform is powered by the latest PHP version, which as at the time of publishing this post.

To check (or change) your PHP version, log into your web hosting control panel and click Change PHP Version icon.

In the Kobopress Hosting platform, you will find that under Web tools.

Choose the latest PHP version (currently 8.3 as at the time of writing this post) and click Change PHP Version:

Again, always make sure your web hosting provider supports the latest version of PHP. At Stackpress, we support the latest version of PHP so you can always switch and improve the performance of your WordPress website.

Maintaining the latest PHP version is one of the simple tweaks that can help speed up your WordPress website and improve your page speed score.

3. Use a caching plugin

Caching is critical to the performance of your WordPress website, as it greatly increases load times. But what exactly is caching and how does it work?

Caching is reusing data from previous requests to speed up any future requests. It minimizes the amount of data that needs to flow between the browser, the database, and the web server which translates into faster loading times.

When someone visits a page on your website, they request a lot of information from your web host. These requests may include images, Javascript, and CSS; and they also need to retrieve your content from the WordPress database.

Typically, here is what happens:

• A user from anywhere in the world visits your website and their browser contacts your Web server. Your WordPress installation contacts the database where it’s installed to fetch your posts and other stored data. The Web server then compiles this data into an HTML page and returns it to the user.

Since WordPress generates content dynamically, this means that it requests fresh information about a page every time a visitor views a page. In most cases, this is unnecessary as your blog posts and pages don’t change once they are published unless you manually go and edit them.

When you use a caching plugin, it creates a static version of your content and delivers it to your visitors, which means that when the same visitors come to your website again, they will see the cached version, which is a lot faster.

There are lots of freemium caching plugins in the WordPress repository to choose from, such as WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, WP Fastest Cache, W3 Total Cache, etc.

However, if you are a Kobopress customer, you don’t need any of these third-party caching plugins to make your website faster. This is because our hosting platform already has Edge Caching inbuilt, plus our proprietary StackCache plugin which comes pre-installed with WordPress. This saves you a lot of costs and tut of the box optimizes your WordPress website for speed.

4. Use a powerful CDN

Your web hosting server may be physically as close to your visitors as the next restaurant to them, or as far as thousands of miles away. This causes differences in load times.

For instance, if your hosting server is in the UK, your website will load a lot faster for your visitors in the UK and Europe. But it won’t load much as fast for those in the United States. This is where content delivery networks play a huge role, and they are increasingly becoming more popular by the day.

CDN (short for content delivery network) allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. 

CDN is a powerful content distribution network (or content delivery network) that uses physical, highly optimized servers across the world to cache the content of your websites. Cached content of the data is stored at multiple CDN nodes so global customers will connect directly to CDN nodes instead of directly to your hosting, resulting in content being served faster and your websites loading quicker. 

There are some great WordPress CDN you can choose from, with most starting at $20 per month for a single website.

However if you are a WPBreezy customer, you don’t need an external CDN service as our WordPress hosting platform is already integrated with a Global CDN to speed up your website irrespective of where your visitors are located.

Our CDN comes with a website acceleration suite to help you optimize and speed up your WordPress website. All you need do is log in to your Kobopress Client Area to manage your hosting package. Head to CDN > Web Optimisation and either select One Click Optimisation or manualy select the optimisation options that suit your needs.

All these powerful WordPress acceleration features come free of charge with any of our WordPress hosting plans.

So, one of the sure ways to dramatically improve the speed of your WordPress website is to use a CDN to serve content to your visitors from the closest node to them.

There are lots of benefits of using a CDN.

Content is actively cached: Every global CDN node actively caches static files. This offers an enhanced and consistent user experience to visitors everywhere – at the same time, page speed is improved and you’ll deliver better-performing sites to your users.

Latency is reduced: The Stackpress CDN has highly connected CDN nodes globally – this means your users will always reach a CDN node close to them, reducing latency and improving website load times. 

Improved SEO: With Stackpress CDN, you’ll get a Website Acceleration Suite which gives you the tools to help get your Google PageSpeed Score to 100/100. You’ll be able to select the One Click Optimisation section to add the recommended settings which should add the ideal, safe settings to improve website load times. Because page speed is a direct ranking factor for your websites ensuring these options are selected within the WP Stackpress’ control panel can help ensure your websites are optimised for SEO.

You can power-up your websites using Stackpresss CDN from within your client account.

5. Keep plugins to a minimal

While there is no limit to the number of plugins you can install on your WordPress website, it is always advisable to keep plugins to a minimal to avoid the bloat that comes with most of them.

Some plugins may load scripts that slow down the speed of your website. Besides, having loads of plugins on your WordPress install will increase the chance of plugins incompatibility which may decrease the performance of your website.

6. Choose a lightweight theme

A theme can make or break your website. While the temptation is always there to choose a nice looking theme for our website, priority should be given to the speed of the them.

A theme that is clean-coded and lightweight ensures that your website loads fast. On the other hand, a heave and poorly-coded theme can slow down the speed of your WordPress website.

So when choosing a theme for your WordPress website, go for the type that is light-weight and fast, such as Blocksy, or any of the WordPress default themes.

7. Avoid page builders (when possible)

Page builders such as Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, etc are great for visually designing your WordPress website and landing pages. But most of them come at the expense of one crucial thing: SPEED.

If you don’t have any need to design your landing pages, then avoid the use of these page builders by all means. If you must use any page builder to design your content, keep the design minimal.

Any page of your website that you want to rank, by all means don’t design it using any page builder.

There are lots of other ways to increase the speed of your website, but following and implementing these simple tips will tremendously increase the load times of your WordPress website, as well as improve your search engines rankings.