The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Performance Optimization

1. Go for a high-performance Web Hosting

WordPress hosting is a service that stores all your website data and makes it accessible on the internet. Think of it as rented accommodation for your website on the world wide web.

The WordPress host gives you an easy way to access the website data, manage it, and route it to your visitors. You should always go for a hosting plan that gives you high performance for your website.

Let us take a look at 5 different types of WordPress hosting plans so that you can make a better choice about the hosting plan that is right for you:

(a) Shared WordPress Hosting:

This is the cheapest hosting plan out there and is great for you if you are just starting a new blog or want to try out blogging. This is great for blogs and other less complex websites.

It’s called shared hosting because the user shares the server resources with another user. These plans are built especially for those who are looking for a basic plan without any high payment structure. You can check out hosting providers like HostGator, BlueHost, and GoDaddy for Shared WordPress Hosting.

(b) Managed WordPress Hosting:

If you are starting big and you want features such as automatic updates, website security, backups, and WordPress support, then you can certainly go for this option. In this case, you just have to worry about your content. Everything related to WordPress software will be taken care of by the hosting provider.

As compared to other hosting plans, websites running on managed WordPress hosting are faster and more secure. You can check out hosting providers like HostGator, BlueHost, and GoDaddy for Shared WordPress Hosting.

(c) Virtual Private Server (VPS):

In VPS hosting you pay for a virtual machine on a host machine. A host machine is a physical server that runs software that “splits” the server’s resources into multiple virtual machines with dedicated RAM, HDD space, CPU power, etc. So a VPS is like a virtual dedicated server.

It provides a much faster website experience than the other previous hosting plans. You can check out Digital Ocean, HostGator, BlueHost, and GoDaddy and more for Virtual Private Server hosting plans.

(d) Cloud Hosting:

A Cloud hosting plan can fit any type of your web hosting requirement and it will helpful for WordPress performance . You could be the owner of a small website or you could be running a big, feature-rich website, a cloud hosting plan will meet all your requirements in either situation.

A cloud hosting service offers a lot of flexibility and you can scale up or scale down the services as per your requirement. So even if you are planning to scale up your plan, you don’t need to go for another type of hosting altogether.

You can check out Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure for great Cloud Hosting services.

(e) Dedicated Hosting:

If you are planning to run a hefty web application on WordPress that requires high processing power and cannot afford to share the resource with any other user, then this is the type of plan that will benefit you.

A dedicated hosting plan implies that you have complete control of a server, and it is dedicated only to your website. So you don’t need to worry anymore about sharing the server resources with any other website.

We recommend AWS and HostGator for Dedicated Hosting plans.

You can also check out our guide on Best WordPress Hosting Providers of 2024 to learn more before making a decision.

2. Pick a Server closest to your Visitors

While hosting your WordPress website, you must determine where the majority of visitors or customers are coming from. This is because the location at which you host your website plays a significant factor in determining your overall network latency and TTFB. Simply put, it affects how quickly your website loads up for your users.

Network Latency implies the time and or delay involved in the transmission of data over a network. It is typically measured nowadays in milliseconds. But, it could be seconds also depending upon the network. The closer to zero the better.

TTFB implies time-to-first-byte. It measures how long the browser has to wait before it receives its first byte of data from the server. Again, the closer to zero the better.

So, all you need to remember is that you need to pick servers that have the lowest network latency and TTFB. Usually, these servers will be located close to your visitors.

3. Use a CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. These are a network of servers located around the globe. Their main purpose is to host and deliver copies of your WordPress web site’s static content such as images, CSS, JS, and video streams quickly and efficiently.

Don’t think of CDN as a replacement for your hosting provider, but rather an additional way to increase the speed of your site for increase WordPress Performance.

When you use a CDN, every time a user visits your website they are served the static files from whichever server is closest to them. Your web hosting server will also be faster since the CDN is doing a lot of its work.

So, a CDN ensures that your data flows between the server and the visitor through the shortest physical route to ensure the fastest delivery of content to the visitor. We recommend Amazon CloudFront or CloudFlare for CDN services

4. Use Lightweight Themes

When it comes to WordPress themes, there are a plethora of options available to you if you either want to shell out your hard-earned money or get something for free. The popularity of WordPress has ensured that there is no shortage of free and paid themes.

Now some paid themes can seem to come with all the fancy bells and whistles. But remember, that there is a price to pay with every shiny new plugin or new functionality that the theme offers. The said plugins and features impact the loading speeds of your WordPress website.

So, we advise you to go for a theme that is built only with the features you need and nothing more. Or, you can also go for a feature-rich theme but disable the features that aren’t in use.

Things such as Google Fonts, Font Awesome icons, sliders, galleries, videos and parallax scripts, etc are just a few of the many things that you should be able to turn off if you aren’t using them. You can turn these things off for WordPress speed optimization.

5. Use Optimized Plugins from Trustworthy Developers

Bad, unoptimized, and poorly code plugins load so much junk with your WordPress website that your website inevitably slows down.

You might have heard this nugget of wisdom, that you shouldn’t install too many plugins on your WordPress website. While it may be true in some scenarios, in most cases, the quality of plugins is more important than the number of plugins.

There is also another issue with uninstalling WordPress plugins. A lot of plugins leave behind additional files, folders, tables, and rows in your database even after uninstalling them from the Dashboard. This can add up to a lot of data over time and even slow up your site.

So, make sure that you are using authentic plugins from good developers and keep cleaning old files of deleted plugins from your FTP. Also, remove all the unused and unwanted plugins promptly.

6. Enable Caching

Caching is one of the most important and easiest ways to speed up your slow WordPress site.

What caching does is essentially save an HTML copy of the website for a specified time. For a website, we could set the cache to expire once a day. This means that once a day the website will load normally; it will detect a request, get the server to process the code, and show the result as HTML. It will also save the resulting HTML in memory.

The next time when someone loads the website, the cache would load the HTML from memory instead of getting the server to process it.

It reduces the amount of work required to generate a page view. As a result, your web pages load much faster, directly from the cache.

You can check out WP Super Cache if you’re looking for a free WordPress caching plugin for better WordPress Performance. You can also read our guide to the Best WordPress speed optimization plugins in 2024 to learn more.

7. Enable Compression

This is another potentially huge speed gain for your WordPress website. Compression reduces the size of various assets before sending them to your browser for interpretation.

The reason this is so helpful is that HTML and CSS uses a lot of repeated content. The more patterns you have in your content the better it can be compressed.

This is something that needs to be set up on your server through the FTP. You can check out this GTmetrix article for a quick tutorial on how to enable compression on your WordPress website.

8. Keep your WordPress Images optimized

According to studies, images account for about 50% of the average website’s page size.

If you are using camera raw images that are over 2-3MBs in size, then we must warn you. You are making your site load larger files than it needs to, which will inevitably slow down your website’s load time.

To optimize images for your website for best WordPress performance, you need to resize your image dimensions as well as compress image size. There are several plugins available that will automate this task for you and optimize all the images on your WordPress website.

Smush and reSmush.it are such free plugins (with pro versions) which will optimize and compress all the images on your WordPress website.

You will get the option to automatically serve scaled images to your visitor’s device, serve your images from a global CDN, and Lazy Load images to improve the perceived loading time.

9. NEVER UPLOAD AUDIO & VIDEO FILES DIRECTLY TO WORDPRESS WEBSITE

WordPress allows you to upload audio and video files to your WordPress dashboard and then add them to your website. Even though it might seem harmless, you must avoid doing this at all costs. So these audio and video files affect the WordPress Performance in page loading.

Please understand that uploading audios and videos to WordPress requires a lot of bandwidth. Your hosting provider could either charge you a hefty fee for going beyond the bandwidth permitted with your hosting plan or may even shut down your site entirely.

Hosting large media files puts a lot of strain on your server resources and increases the page size of your WordPress website. Instead, you can host your audio and video on platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, DailyMotion, Vimeo, etc, and then embed the said audio or video wherever they want in the form of a simple link.

Point to remember: Never host audio or video on your WordPress site. Use specialized platforms to host your audio or video and then embed it on the pages of your website using URLs.

10. Update, Update, Update

As a website owner, it is your responsibility to keep your WordPress site, theme, and plugins updated to the latest versions. If you do not do that, it will most likely make your website slow and unreliable. This will also make you more vulnerable to security threats.

So, it is advisable to update your themes, plugins, and WordPress site as soon as possible after an update is available.

Practical Tips for WordPress Speed Optimization

Now that you know the best practices to follow while setting up and building your WordPress website, we can delve a bit deeper into optimizing your slow WordPress site for fine WordPress Performance.

In this section, we will deal with the technical aspects of optimizing a WordPress website and provide tips to optimize various aspects of your WordPress website.

If you follow all these tips and apply the suggested optimizations, you will see a significant improvement in your WordPress website load speed.

Let us take a look at all the WordPress performance optimizations that you can apply to your slow and laggy WordPress website!

1. Ensure that your Website and the Database are in the Same Data Center

You must check if your WordPress site and the database are located in the same data center. The vicinity factor is always important when talking about servers and hosting. Having the website and its database in the same data center is a healthy thing for WordPress Website performance.

This will make fetching posts and working with the database much efficient and smoother.
To find out the location of your server, you should ask your hosting providers. Sometimes, brands display their server locations in the signup process as well.

2. REDUCE MISCELLANEOUS HTTP REQUESTS

Themes and Plugins in WordPress can load all kinds of files from other websites. These files can contain scripts, sheets, images, and other resources from external sources like Google, Facebook, Analytics platforms, and more.

If your plugins are making a lot of these requests, then it can slow down your website significantly. Decreasing the number of HTTP requests that WordPress makes is very important.

You can use the waterfall analysis of the GTMetrix website performance report to know exactly how many unnecessary HTTP requests is your website making.

You can reduce the number of external HTTP requests by disabling styles and scripts or by merging them together in one file. Also, delete all unnecessary images and files, create CSS image sprite, do lazy loading, ignore irrelevant assets, and combine CSS & JS files. Some of these optimizations are discussed below.

3. Minify and Combine CSS & JavaScript files

Minifying and combining CSS & JS files can have a big impact on the WordPress performance and page load speed.

Minification of resources means removing unnecessary characters from your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that are not required to load, such as white space characters, new-line characters, comments, block delimiters, etc. This increases your loading speeds as it decreases the amount of code that has to be requested from the server.

Concatenation is the process of combining your JavaScript and CSS files into one file with the object of reducing the HTTP requests. In some cases, this can increase the download time of your file, but it is usually better than having additional requests.

There are some plugins available that can automatically minify and combine CSS & JS files. Autoptimize is one such free plugin.

You can read our guide on Optimizing WordPress code using Minification, Concatenation, and GZIP Compression to learn more.

4. Disable Hotlinking

Doing this may not have a direct impact on your website speed, but it takes some pressure off your server. Hotlinking is when an image is served on a different website from your server, instead of uploading it on that website’s server.

In other words, instead of saving your image and uploading it to my server I just link to it on your server. This effectively means that I am stealing your bandwidth and you don’t get any traffic to show for it.

You can add this code to your .htaccess file to block hotlinking of images from your WordPress site.

#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

PS: change “yourdomain.com” in the code above to the URL of your website.

5. Use a DNS level Firewall

A firewall helps you avoid brute force attacks, hacking attempts, and malware on your WordPress website. DNS level website firewall routes your website traffic through its cloud proxy servers. This enables them to send only genuine traffic to your server.

DNS level firewall is exceptionally good at identifying genuine website traffic in contrast to bad requests. They also significantly reduce the load on your WordPress hosting server which makes sure that your website does not go down and it will give a strength to WordPress Performance.

We recommend using DNS level firewalls like Sucuri or Cloudflare. These firewalls block malicious requests even before they reach your website.

6. Add Cache-Control and Expires Header

While the Cache-control header turns on client-side caching and sets the maximum age of a resource, the Expires header is used to specify a specific point in time at which the resource shall no longer be valid. While both the headers can be used together, you don’t necessarily need to add both of the headers. Cache-control is newer and usually the recommended method.

If your server is missing these headers, you can add them manually.

• • Adding Cache-control header in Nginx: You can add cache-control headers in Nginx by adding the following to your server config’s server location or block:

		location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|svg|ico)$ {
		expires 30d;
		add_header Cache-Control "public, no-transform";
		}

• • Adding Expires header in Nginx: You can add Expires headers in Nginx by adding the following to your server block. In example given below, you can see how to specify different expire times based on different file types:

	location ~*  \.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|svg)$ {
	        expires 365d;
	    }
	location ~*  \.(pdf|css|html|js|swf)$ {
	        expires 2d;
	    }

• • Adding Cache-control header in Apache: You can add cache-control headers in Apache by adding the following to your .htaccess file. Snippets of code can be added at the top or bottom of the file (before # BEGIN WordPress or after # END WordPress):

			<filesMatch ".(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|svg|js|css|swf)$">
			Header set Cache-Control "max-age=84600, public"
			</filesMatch>
		

• • Adding Expires header in Apache: You can add Expires headers in Apache by adding the following to your .htaccess file:

		## EXPIRES HEADER CACHING ##
		<IfModule mod_expires.c>
		ExpiresActive On
		ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
		ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
		ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
		ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
		ExpiresByType image/svg "access 1 year"
		ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
		ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
		ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 month"
		ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access 1 month"
		ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
		ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
		ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"
		</IfModule>
		## EXPIRES HEADER CACHING ##

7. Change WordPress Memory Limit

As specified by the WordPress Codex, with WordPress Version 2.5, the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT option allows you to specify the maximum amount of memory that can be consumed by PHP. This setting may be crucial if you receive a message such as “Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted”.

By default, WordPress will attempt to increase the memory allocated to PHP to 40MB for a single site and 64MB for multisite. If you’re running into the memory size exhausted error you can try increasing the PHP memory limit in WordPress.

Add the following to your wp-config.php file, just before the line that says “That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging.”:

define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' );

8. Eliminate Render-Blocking JavaScript and CSS

You might see a warning about render-blocking JavaScript and CSS while checking your website’s performance in Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix. This warning appears when you have files preventing the page from loading as fast as possible.

Some specific JS and CSS are sometimes conditional, meaning that they are not required to display above-the-fold content. You can prevent them from becoming render-blocking by using async and defer attributes.

To eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS for better WordPress Performance you need to do the following:

Clear JS from Critical Rendering Path: You can move JavaScript out of the critical rendering path by adding either the ‘async’ or the defer’ attribute to the script HTML elements that call JavaScript resources.

The ‘async’ attribute instructs the browser to start downloading the resource right away without slowing down HTML parsing. Once the resource is available, HTML parsing is paused so the resource can be loaded.

The ‘defer’ attribute tells the browser to hold off downloading the resource until HTML parsing is complete. Once the browser has finished with the HTML, then it will download and render all the deferred scripts in the order in which they appear in the document.

Optimize Delivery of CSS Resources: Optimizing the delivery of CSS essentially means you need to figure out how to make it non-render blocking.

You should identify the styles that are required to render above-the-fold content and deliver those styles inline with the HTML. You should use CSS conditionally on devices only when needed. Also, load the remaining CSS asynchronously.

Alternatively, you can also use WordPress plugins like Autoptimize and Hummingbird to Optimize the Delivery of CSS Resources.

9. Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

We can reduce the amount of data the browser has to download by minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources. Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters like comments and whitespace from the source code. These characters are extremely useful in development, but they’re useless for the browser to render the page.

You can check out our detailed guide on Optimizing WordPress code using Minification, Concatenation, and GZIP Compression to learn more.

10. Control and Limit Post Revisions

In Post revisions, every time you change the content, a new copy of the post is saved in the database instead of deleting and replacing the previous one. This is to ensure that you always have a chance to revert. But, it increases the database size, and a large size database can cause many problems.

To check this, you can limit the frequency to autosave a post. From the root folder of your WordPress installation, open wp-config file with any file editor and write the code given below before the code require_once(ABSPATH . ‘wp-settings.php’);

define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);

It will limit the number of revisions to 3. Meaning, your WordPress will confine itself to save only three revisions, thereby reducing the burden on your database.

You can also set the frequency to autosave a post using the following code:

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300 ); // seconds

Here, 300 seconds means, your post will be autosaved every 5minutes rather than the default settings.

You can also completely disable post revisions in WordPress using the following code, although it is not the best practice to completely disable them:

define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

11. Delete old WordPress revision from your Database

After you have disabled or limited your post revisions, you will also want to clean up and delete old revisions. We recommend temporarily installing the free WordPress plugin WP-Optimize for this task.

With this plugin, you can clean all auto-draft posts, post revisions, remove spam comments, remove unapproved comments, transient options, trackbacks, and pingbacks. In the latest version of WP-Optimize, you can also schedule auto-cleanup as per your requirements.

Once you are done cleaning up your WordPress database, you can remove this plugin from your WordPress website.

12. Load Scripts in the Footer

Make sure to load scripts in the footer, unless you absolutely must use a script in the header. When using the wp_enqueue_script() function set the fifth parameter to true to get the script to load in the footer.

This will increase the apparent speed of the website and also helpful in WordPress Performance. It doesn’t decrease requests or file sizes but it does make sure that the essential content is loaded first. Besides, if a script gets stuck, it doesn’t prevent the content from being loaded.

13. Prefetch commonly used Domains

Prefetching is similar to caching in the fact that you are telling the browser to look up the DNS settings a little before they are actually needed. It combs the page and queries any prefetched domains that are not already cached so that they load quicker subsequently.

You can prefetch domains in WordPress by adding the domain syntax to your header.php file between the

<head>``</head>

tags. This process will only be performed when possible and is non-blocking. Let us take a look at some examples:

• Prefetch Google Fonts:

<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//fonts.googleapis.com">

• Prefetch Google Code (jQuery):

<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//ajax.googleapis.com">

• Prefetch Google Analytics:

<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//www.google-analytics.com">

14. Gzip and Brotli Compression

Gzip is a type of compression that compresses web pages, JavaScript, and CSS at the server level before sending them over to the browser.

To apply Gzip compression in Apache, add the following command to your .htaccess file:

		<ifmodule mod_deflate.c="">
			# Compress HTML, JavaScript, CSS, 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 required 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>
	

To apply Gzip compression in Nginx, you can add the following code to your nginx.conf file:

	gzip on;
	gzip_comp_level 2;
	gzip_http_version 1.0;
	gzip_proxied any;
	gzip_min_length 1100;
	gzip_buffers 16 8k;
	gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
	gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6].(?!.*SV1)";
	gzip_vary on;
You can check out our detailed guide on Optimizing WordPress code using Minification, Concatenation, and GZIP Compression to learn more.

Final Words

As you might have already guessed, we are obsessed with all the different ways you can speed up a WordPress website. Having a fast site helps boost your rankings, improves crawl-ability for search engines, improves conversion rates, increases time on site, and decreases your bounce rate. Not to mention the fact that everyone loves visiting a fast website and visitors consider it as a part of great user experience.

We hope that this WordPress performance optimization guide was helpful and that you were able to learn a few important things and apply them to your WordPress site. If so, please take a moment and share it. It’ll help more people like you who want to speed up their WordPress website.

Did we miss anything important? If yes, then we’d love to hear about it. Let us know your tips for speeding up a WordPress website in the comments below.