Due to its great versatility, ease of management, the large number of plugins (free or low-cost), and its enormous possibilities, around 35% of current websites use WordPress as their main CMS, according to the latest data.
However, it’s not all positive. WordPress can be a bit slow in some environments, and here we explain how we can optimize it and improve its speed. Some steps can be complex, so programming or web functionality knowledge may be required.
Why Improve the Speed of My WordPress Website?
There are several reasons to improve your website’s speed. The first and most obvious is user experience. The latest data indicates that a user, on average, does not want to wait more than 4 seconds for a web page to load. If our WordPress takes longer to load, we will likely lose that visit, which can lead to lower conversion (fewer purchases, fewer contact forms, less interaction…).
The second reason is that, partially, it influences your website’s positioning in search engines like Google. We can confidently state that Google increasingly prioritizes the mobile version of a website and, therefore, pays more attention to loading speed among other factors. We say ‘partially’ because, for now, it is not a decisive factor for positioning, but it can help us break ties with our competition. Although nothing guarantees that it won’t be in the future (in fact, everything suggests it will).
Here’s an example of one of our clients, Ibaica, with an excellent score. Achieved thanks to the efforts of Cactus Seny Gràfic.
How to Improve the Speed of a WordPress Website
The first thing we’ll need is to know how to measure speed, as it can be somewhat subjective. For this, we use tools like Google’s Pagespeed Insights. This tool will show us the status of our website and whether it requires action. Achieving an excellent score in Pagespeed Insights is quite complex, and not all environments will allow us to do so. We will always aim for the best scores without sacrificing other elements like performance and user experience (how elements load and appear during loading).
Optimize Images on Your WordPress Site
A key point is image optimization. Depending on the website, images can account for 70% of its load, so it’s important that they are well optimized.
We can optimize images by adjusting their size and quality: at Cactus, we recommend uploading web images that do not exceed 1920px in width (if they are to be viewed full screen) and reducing quality, ensuring they weigh no more than 500kb.
Another way to do this (complementary to the previous one) is by using new image formats like WebP or AVIF: these new lossless formats allow images to be reduced without visible loss of quality. This modification will need to be applied to pass the Pagespeed Insights audit. Plugins like Imagify.io or Smush perform such functions and can be useful.
Use a Cache Compression System on Your WordPress Site
What is a cache compression system? To put it simply, we can compress our entire website (or page by page) into a single file. The user’s browser downloads, decompresses, and interprets it directly.
This is very useful, as many files do not change throughout the life of the website (for example: fonts, some images like the logo, some styles like those of the menu, footer…). So the browser doesn’t need to download them every time, but already has them stored in cache, significantly reducing loading time.
Plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket enable these functionalities, but they are extremely sensitive plugins that can break your website (styles and scripts) if not handled carefully.
Use the Latest PHP Version on the Server
In summary, WordPress relies on MySQL technology for data storage and PHP for reading it. Having the latest PHP version ensures we work with the most optimized and, therefore, fastest version (currently 8.2). We can significantly reduce server response time, serving requests faster.
Our hosting provider should offer the option to change the PHP version from the control panel, but again, caution is needed, as our WordPress, plugins, and themes must be updated to the latest version. Additionally, if your website has custom development, it may also be affected by this change.
It’s important to consider that WordPress is constantly updated, and over time, the PHP version we work with may become obsolete, so it’s advisable to update progressively. Otherwise, we won’t be able to update our WordPress, which can pose a significant security problem.
Minify and Unify Styles and Scripts in Your WordPress
Mini… what? Minify means to compress. Generally, any type of programming is written with spaces and line breaks, similar to normal writing. Minification removes these unnecessary spaces, tabs, line breaks… Converting our styles and scripts into, literally, an endless and quite difficult-to-read line. However, this reduces the weight of our document by 30, 50, or 80%. Furthermore, if instead of relying on 10 documents, we rely on just 2, the server will reward us with a better response time and, therefore, greater speed on our website.
The aforementioned W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket can minify our styles, but since web programming sometimes depends on what loads before or after, we might find that our website doesn’t display correctly. We may not be able to minify and unify all styles and scripts and might need to create certain exceptions.
Optimize Content for Desktop and Mobile
Undoubtedly, one of the most complex tasks. Obviously, we need our website to adapt to different devices and display correctly (what we understand as responsive behavior), but we are not talking about that at this point.
Google Pagespeed Insights often asks us for the mobile version to have less content and is not satisfied with merely hiding it; it doesn’t want it in the code at all. This implies removing complete blocks (from the server-side, i.e., in PHP) to minimize the amount of code on the page.
Finally, Keep Your WordPress, Theme, and Plugins Updated
Keeping all WordPress elements updated ensures we work with the most optimized versions of plugins, WordPress, themes, etc. Both WordPress developers and those of third-party plugins and tools are constantly optimizing to offer the best service. Keeping your WordPress updated will guarantee a small improvement in loading time.
How Can We Help You Improve Your Website’s Speed?
At Cactus, we can help you improve your website’s speed by applying all these mentioned improvements (and much more). Our clients enjoy premium versions of the plugins we’ve cited, at no cost to them, as we, as an agency, have unlimited licenses for countless websites. If you want us to help you improve your WordPress loading speed, you just have to contact us.
Optimizing the speed and performance of your WordPress is one of the regular tasks of our web programming service.
