Steps to Speed Up Website (WordPress)

[Neha]

You can check your website current loading time via Pingdom or Google PageSpeedInsights. There are many factors which helps us to improve the Website loading time:

Steps:


1. Remove Unnecessary Plugins and Addons:

Unnecessary Plugins and Addons should be removed on the website.By installing 50 plugins on the
websites does not make the site spead load fast.

Generally avoid the plugins that have lots of scripts and styles and that add extra database
queries added to the webpage.



2. Remove Social Sharing Buttons on Website



Do not share like 100 of Social Sharing Buttons on the Website beacuse some of the Sharing Buttons
use Javascripts and it makes the site slower.

The solution is that either limit your social sharing buttons or remove it.





3. Enable Expires Headers

As the more request is made to the server the slower it will take the website to load.

Expires Headers is used not only to used to reduce the downloads from the server but it is also used to
reduce the number of HTTP requests from the server.

It tells the browser that how long the file should be stored in the cache so subsequent page views and visits
they don't have to download the file again.

Enable Expires Header is important because it also allows your users to reuse the cache files
that have been stored in the browser to reduce the amount of files they need to download.

Add below code in .htaccess

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
# Enable expirations
ExpiresActive On 
# Default directive
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
# My favicon
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
# Images
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
# CSS
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
# Javascript
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"
</IfModule>

4. Enable Caching

Enabling the Cache for your website improves the loading speed in the website.

There are different ways to enable cache:

Following plugins are used in WordPress to enable cache:
W3 Total Cache
W3 Super Cache


5. Your Website Theme


Sometimes changing the theme of your website improves the website speed performance.

Only consider performance when looking for the website themes.








6. Optimize and Reduce Image Size
Un-optimized image can be very heavy.
As the image is not optimized it takes lot of time to load the website. If the image size on your website is 1 mb or 2 mb significantly try to optimize the image.

Following Plugins can be used to optimize the website:
WP Smush
Image Optimizer




7. Enable Gzip Compression

Enable Gzip Compress on your website because it works in very great way. Compressing 70 mb file on the computer it makes the file just 6 mb.

Add the following gzip code in .htaccess :

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
  # Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

  # Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
  Header append Vary User-Agent
</IfModule>

8. Optimize the Database


If we use WordPress or any other CMS that totally rely on database.

You can make your website speed faster by regularly cleaning your database files.

WP-Optimize Plugin is used.





9. Minify Javascript and CSS Files

If the website is using lots of Javascript and CSS files .

Minifying Javascript and CSS files reduce the number of individual Javascript and CSS files.

10. Fix All Broken Links on Your Website

Broken Links inside the content dont affect the website but it makes a bad user experience.