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You are here: Home / Blogging / How To Increase Your Website Speed With 5 Easy Steps

How To Increase Your Website Speed With 5 Easy Steps

September 13, 2015 By Robin McDonald 19 Comments

No one likes to go to a website and slowly wait for the pages to load. Often times, if that happens, visitors will cancel the load, and just move on to the next site.

The great thing about using WordPress, is there is usually a plugin for everything. In this article I explain to you how to increase your website speed with just a few simple plugins.

5-easy-ways-to-speed-up-your-website-feature

Increase Your Website Speed With WordPress Plugins

As a blogger, your website is your biggest asset. One of the reasons you started is because you wanted to tell the world about your passion.

And you want people to come to your site and read your content. Well what if you have done everything correctly as far as SEO to get someone to come to your site, and then they get there and your site loads too slow.

No one wants to land on a website and then have a poor user experience with a slow loading site. Also, you don’t want Google penalizing your for this, as site page speed is one of the criteria they use to rank you site.

[clickToTweet tweet=”No one wants to land on a website and then have a poor user experience with a slow loading site.” quote=”No one wants to land on a website and then have a poor user experience with a slow loading site.”]

Let me say up front that there are affiliate links in this article that when clicked on, I could receive a commission for but at no extra cost to you.

Performance Reports To Diagnose Your Website

What I want you to do first, before you start making any changes with your site is I want you to go and run some performance reports on your website to see what the speed is right now. This will give you a starting point to base any improvements on, and also see any issues that the website may have that are preventing it from loading timely.

Here are 3 different methods you can use to test you site speed.

  • Google Page Speed Insights
  • Pingdom
  • GTMetrix

All you have to do is go to these sites and put in your site URL and they will analyize your site. I would use Google first, as they use these insights when ranking your page. If you get a low score here, this could affect how your site comes up in the search results. Just to keep it simple, I am going to use Pingdom, as my example in this article.

Here is an image below of what this report looks like:

Screen-Shot-pindom-my-site-final-score

Taking a look at this report, you can see that my site received a score of 95 and a load time of 529 milliseconds. This came after I implemented the steps I am going to show you.

Did you run the report for your site yet? If you received a load speed of 2 seconds or lower than, your site speed is ok, but it could be better. Anything 3 seconds or more than you have a problem.

When I starting working on my site speed, I was getting a score of 85 and load speed of greater than 4 seconds. From what I understand, if your site speed is greater than 3 seconds, your visitors will leave your site and move on to the next.

5 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

Web host

Before I get into the nuts n bolts, I want to mention that your site speed starts with you web host. I know there are a lot of different options and opinions out there about hosting, but I use shared hosting with HostGator. I have used them for years on my sites and have never had a problem. They also have good customer service and that is important if you need help.

Check with your host to see if they have any suggestions for optimizing your site. With Hostgator, they have an entire page dedicated to just that.

I am going to be talking about installing plugins below, and your host may have suggestions of which ones to use, as not all are compatible with all hosts.

The plugins that I am going to be talking about were all suggested by HostGator.

Also, before you make any changes to your site, I would suggest that you back it up. I ran a full site backup with my host before making any of these changes.

There are several plugins out there that will do this for your. Most of the good ones are Premium, and can be pricy, but if you have a host that has Cpanel, then you can easily use them at no extra cost.

Solid Framework-Genesis

You also need a good solid site foundation. I use the Genesis Framework by StudioPress. It is built very tight and light with the code being optimized to run fast and efficiently.

Genesis Framework for WordPress

Optimize Your Database

Over time you site database can get cluttered with post revisions, trashed items, and spam comments. I use the WP-Optimizer plugin, as it can be set to routinely clean up your database so it’s not weighed down by all that garbage. Once it’s installed, just go to Settings > Optimize Database to configure the settings you want.

Screen-WP-Optimize-plugin

Optimize Images

Image size can severely reduce your sites loading time. Any image on your site should be optimized to the smallest file size possible while retaining quality.

I optimized all of my images before uploading them to my site, using Photoshop, yet I still received an error on the page tests to “optimize my images.”

Screen-Shot-EWWW-Image-Opt

The EWWW-Image plugin works great for this. You can use it for the first time and it will go through all your images and optimize them for you. This does take a little time at first, but from then on, when you upload an image, it will do it as you upload it.

Leverage Browser Caching

When you run the speed speed reports you may see a recommendation to leverage browser caching on your site.

This was confusing to me at first, as I thought if I just used a page caching plugin, like WP-Super Cache, or W3 Total Cache, that this would take care of this problem for me. It seems that neither one of these plugins do this for you. I installed the Leverage Browser Caching Ninja plugin, and this worked like a charm. I no longer get this recommendation on the speed tests.

Initially, this was the only caching plugin I used, as I felt that it would cache the pages as well, but I was wrong. My site speed did go down to 2 seconds at this point, but still I wanted more speed and a better score.

This brings me to my last step and plugin WP-Super Cache

Screen-Shot-WP-Super-Cache

Using A Caching Plugin

Caching plugins work by generating static html files from your dynamic WordPress site. After this is done once, then going forward, the web server will process this file, located on your hard drive, rather then pulling it from the host, which could be anywhere in the world.

W3 Total Cache and WP-Super Cache are the two most poplar free plugins and I have tried both of them. In the end, I went with WP-Super Cache as it was the easiest to use and worked best with my site. W3SC actually slowed down my site, where WPSC made it faster.

Now I am not knocking W3SC, as it could be because I did not understand fully how to set it up properly. W3SC is a very complicated plugin with a lot of features, and it can be very confusing to understand what settings to apply.

It is very important, whichever one of these plugins you use, that you set it up to work properly. This is VERY important if you want it to work correctly. For me, it was just reading my hosts documented setup for WPSC. You can also watch this video below and it will show you how to set up WPSC.

This plugin works great with another one called Autoptimize. WPSC does not minify CSS, JavaScript, or HTML, and Autoptimize does. You will also get this as a recommendation with your page speed tests.

Compressing your site also helps with the load time. WPSC uses Gzip compression, but sometimes it will not work correctly if you host does not use this feature as well. You can check to see if your site has been compressed with Gzip by going to this site. Check GZIP Compression. If enabled, it will show you how big your site was before it was compressed.

Installing WP-Super Cache and Autoptimize were my final steps in speeding up my site. Before installing these two plugins, my page speed had reached around 1.5 seconds, see below:

Screen-Shot-my-site-speed-improved-to-1.5-seconds

After installing these two plugins, the speed went under a second. See below:

Screen-Shot-pindom-my-site-final-score

Final Thoughts On Site Speed

As I was doing all of this testing and tweaking of my site, I did take account of all the plugins I had on my site. Knowing some plugins can adversely effect the page loading time of your site, I installed another plugin, P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler).

Screen-Shot-P3-Plugin

P3 shows you which plugins are impacting your page load time. Once you determine which plugins are slowing down your website, you can then decide whether or not those plugins are worth keeping. If not, get rid of them. A couple worth noting here for me, was the Contact Form 7 and the SUMOME plugin. I was already using Fast Secure Contact Form, which I liked better, and the SUMOME one was just not working for me, so I deleted both, and received an increase in page speed.

After you are done using the P3 plugin, go ahead and delete it, as it will also slow down your site.

If you opted to use a plugin to update your database, I would delete it when not being used, as it will also slow your site down. Thats why I recommend that you use your web hosting service to do this, rather than using a plugin.

Its good practise to choose your plugins wisely. I have about 30 plugins on my site, so now I make sure that each one provides the functionally that is needed, and that there are not any other ones doing the same thing.

How Do You Optimize Your Site?

I hope this article gives you the tools needed to help improve your website’s speed and performance. Do you use any of these plugins? If not, which ones do you use to optimize your site, if any? I would love to hear about them in the comments.

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Robin McDonald

WordPress Web Developer at Robs Web Design
My name is Rob McDonald and I am here to help you start your own Blog or Website. I want to teach you how to design and develop your site so that it is truly unique and awesome, just like you. Then I want to show you how to use SEO, Social Media Marketing and Branding, to make your site successful.
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Filed Under: Blogging, Web Design, WordPress Tagged With: Blog Design, coding, Web Design, Web Site Design, WordPress

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Enstine Muki says

    November 26, 2015 at 9:13 am

    Hey Rob,
    This is one important SEO factor so many people neglect.

    They talk of On page and Off page. The only place I have read about speed as a foundation of SEO is quicksprout of neil. If you all the Page SEOs (On and Off) with a sluggishly slow blog, you’re going to still run into some problems with search engines.

    Happy thanksgiving
    Enstine Muki recently posted…CommentLuv Black Friday Discount 2015 – Up To 50% OFF!My Profile

    Reply
    • Rob says

      November 27, 2015 at 2:24 pm

      Hey Enstine,

      Websie speed is an important part of SEO, but importantly, for the user experience. No one wants to navigate around a slow loading site. They will just move on to the next one.

      Thanks, Enstine for commenting and Happy Thanksgiving to you as well.

      Reply
  2. Mark says

    November 10, 2015 at 4:52 am

    Holy smokes Rob!

    Let me catch my breath first, okay?LOL! This post is definitely
    proof positive why I’m so grateful there are tech experts around such as yourself!

    This is the side of the Internet, I only wanna who to turn to so they can get things
    in order asap!

    Truthfully, I am able to follow some of what you’re sharing, but not enough for me to want
    to get too fluent in it!Thank you very much!LOL!

    But thanks for explaining “how to” do what definitely has to be done! Greatly appreciated!

    Reply
    • Rob says

      November 12, 2015 at 12:21 pm

      Hey Mark,

      Yeah I think this a common problem that most people have with the speed of their site, especially if they are on shared hosting. Using these tools I listed can certainly increase your speed greatly.

      Thanks for the comment, and I hope you have a wonderful week!

      Reply
  3. Brent Jones says

    September 17, 2015 at 9:05 pm

    Hi there Rob,

    Love this topic…

    Because I know there are about 100 things I could to make my website faster… and you know how many I’ve done? Zero. Pretty pathetic, right?

    Thanks for the gentle reminder. Some neat plugins listed there, too. Some I’ve heard of and some I haven’t.

    Best,

    Brent
    Brent Jones recently posted…Publish Your Writing with Don EastonMy Profile

    Reply
  4. Adrienne says

    September 16, 2015 at 6:19 pm

    Ding ding ding ding…. I’m doing all of this Rob but I still don’t think my blog loads that fast. You and I have had this discussion though, I think a lot of it has to do with my theme which I’m still trying to figure out which one I want to use. I’m getting closer so I think that will help.

    For my hosting service though I use a VPS and I’ve not had any problems with them since changing. I did have problems with a shared hosting service though. I was getting too much traffic to my site and it was dragging my database down along with my apparent shared space. Everything is great now.

    Great tips and I do know them to work so wonderful advice.

    Hope you’re enjoying your day and I’m off to share your post.

    ~Adrienne
    Adrienne recently posted…How To Write For Your Target AudienceMy Profile

    Reply
    • Rob says

      September 16, 2015 at 8:56 pm

      Hi Adrienne,

      Thanks so much for commenting on my post. I hope your week is going good, mine seems to be just jetting along. Well enough of that.

      I have been told, that once you reach about 10 thousand visitors a month, that shared hosting is not a good idea. When this site reaches that kind of traffic, I want to see how it goes, and then if I start to have problems, I will probably go with a VPN first, probably with HostGator, as they seemed to have worked well for me so far.

      I think I get a lot of benefit from the Genesis Framework, as do others, as it is really built well and doesn’t have a lot of excess coding. I have heard that some people also use Thesis, and have done well with it as well. I have never used it, so I can speak for it.

      Thanks, again for the comments. I will talk to you later……

      P.S. Thanks for the share 🙂

      Reply
  5. Hassaan Khan says

    September 15, 2015 at 3:02 pm

    Hi, Rob!

    I’m glad you wrote this article. I want to try ‘Plugin Performance Profiler’… this is something I really need. I hope I will figure out something on page loading speed. Will try to improve that.

    Thanks

    Reply
    • Rob says

      September 15, 2015 at 10:01 pm

      Hi Hassaan, sorry the long response time. For some reason you comment went to spam. Not to worry, it’s free now.

      Thanks for the comments and I would really like to know how the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) works for you. Were you able to find some plugins that were slowing your site down?

      Talk to you later.

      Reply
  6. David Hartshorne says

    September 14, 2015 at 1:07 pm

    Hi Rob,

    There is some solid advice here on how to increase your website speed, and I’m pleased to see how you have benefitted.

    I’m not so sure about HostGator. I’ve not used them myself, but when I did a roundup post earlier in the summer they did not rank too well with my guests. I guess we all have different experiences!

    When I addressed my site speed a few months back I decided to choose Pressidium Managed WordPress Hosting as it comes fully optimized with built-in caching — and they have great support too. If I’d stayed put I would have been looking at one of the caching plugins like W3TC.

    Thanks for sharing your experience!
    – David
    David Hartshorne recently posted…Pressidium Managed WordPress Hosting – Join The Revolution!My Profile

    Reply
    • Rob says

      September 14, 2015 at 1:34 pm

      Thanks David for your comments. Yes hosting is very important and it seems that everyone has had different experiences with different hosts. Some good and some bad, before they decided on the host that they are with now.

      I think that it depends too, on how much volume you have. If you are getting more then 10,000 hits a month, then shared hosting is probably not the way to go. Then you are looking more at some type of managed hosting, or content delivery network.

      Thanks again for your comments and will talk to you soon.

      Reply
  7. Mairaj says

    September 14, 2015 at 4:47 am

    Hi Rob,

    Well you have shared with us all the useful ways which help out to increase the speed of websites. Infact i am using most of these plugins for optimizing the speed of my blog.

    Thanks for sharing nice list of plugins 🙂

    Reply
    • Rob says

      September 14, 2015 at 9:49 am

      You welcome Mairaj.

      Reply
  8. Nikhil says

    September 14, 2015 at 1:18 am

    Hi Rob,
    This Article is very helpful for me. I would like to ask one question to you. The minify feature of W3 total cache plugin is not working with my theme. Can I use Autoptimize with W3 total cache. Please guide me in this regarding.

    Have a great day bro…:)
    Nikhil recently posted…How to Get Your Blog Noticed by Influential BloggersMy Profile

    Reply
    • Rob says

      September 14, 2015 at 9:48 am

      Hey Nikhil and thanks for commenting. Yes, you should be able to use Autoptimize with W3TC. I never used it when I tested W3TC for my site. But, if it doesn’t work, then you can always delete it.

      Reply
  9. Adeel Sami says

    September 13, 2015 at 11:45 pm

    Hello Rob,

    I am very shocked.. seeing your great page load speed! Congrats! 🙂

    I just tried WP Super Cache but it didn’t work very good for me. Though the thing seems related to I am using a free theme. But W3TC seems to be helping me much, I am down under 1s to 500ms with shared hosting. I hope switching the theme can play a major role bringing down the load speed.

    Thanks for sharing what’s working for you! And that’s awesome speed! 🙂

    Happy to share it on my social life so it reaches to more people in need!

    See me often!

    ~ Adeel

    Reply
    • Rob says

      September 14, 2015 at 9:53 am

      Thanks for the comments Adeel.

      Glad to hear you are getting an awesome speed as well! I think that W3 Total Cache is probably a better plugin to use, as it has more features, I just couldn’t get it to work for me. The settings were just to complicated. But, if it works for you, then great!

      Thanks for sharing my content Adeel, I really appreciate it!

      Talk to you later.

      Reply

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