All of the Top Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

2. Start With a Solid Framework/Theme

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The speed of your website really comes down the the code installed on your domain. Some themes are very fast, and some are super slow.

Fast themes are minimal, they don’t have a lot of extra features or shiny objects, they get the exact job done without loading anything extra that you may not be using. ?

Slow themes brag about their hundreds of features, of which you only end up using two. Then you have a theme that loads a bunch of stuff you’re not even using. ?

What is a WordPress framework?

A WordPress framework is a lot like a parent theme on wordpress, but is used in a different way.

A WordPress framework is a set of code that provides new functionality and resides between the code from WordPress and the code provided by the theme developer.

Here’s a visual:

Is a WordPress framework for everyone?

This is where I’ll give an enthusiastic NO. A framework is not for everyone, especially if you’re on a budget and looking to snag a $40 theme and be done with it.

But for those building a solid online reputation that is going to last for a long time… Yes, a framework is the way to go.

Top WordPress Frameworks to Consider

• Genesis (by StudioPress)
• Thesis
• Canvas (WooThemes, great for ecommerce)
• Gantry (Twitter Bootstrap)

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3. Optimize Images (automatically)

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One of the top reasons for slow websites online is bad image optimization. Aint nobody got time for that!

There are two ways to optimize an image, file size or image dimensions. We’ll look at both.

How to Compress (or Shrink) the Image File Size on WordPress

The quickest way to shrink the file size inside of WordPress without sacrificing image quality is by using the Kraken Image Optimization plugin. Just check out their demos and you’ll see how glorious the picture can still look while stripping out all the fluff that makes the file size too big.

Other options:

• Photoshop, Save for Web
• EWWW Image Optimizer Plugin
• WP Smush Plugin

How to Properly Adjust the Dimensions of an Image on WordPress

With the advent of mobile cameras, everyone can take an awesome picture. But guess what, by default your phone is taking pictures that are WAY too big for the web. For comparison’s sake:

And those screen sizes are the edge-to-edge dimensions of the screen. How often are people blowing up your pictures full screen? Not very, I promise.

Fact: Your images should usually max out around 1500 – 2000 pixels wide.

Fact: Your images should usually max out around 1000 – 1500 tall.

Tools to get it done:

• Photoshop, Save for Web
• Imsanity (resize on upload)
• Paint (Windows) or Preview (Mac)

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4. Resize Images for Mobile

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In case you weren’t aware, phones are smaller than desktops… big surprise, I know. ? So why load a big ol’ pretty image on the phone when it really doesn’t do you any good?

Quickest way of getting this done is, of course, via a plugin. Two recommendations here:

• Hammy plugin
• Adaptive Images for WordPress plugin

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5. Use Properly Sized Images Inside Your Posts

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With the vast amount of foresight put into WordPress development, they foresaw the problem with image sizes and load times. So what did they do? They gave us a slick way to load different-sized images right within the post editor. If you haven’t seen that before, here’s a gif:

The forethought here was that if you’re only going to show a little image to the right of your text, there’s no reason to load a big image that is then resized down smaller.

WordPress actually creates more than one version of your image every time you upload. So when you choose the medium sized image, the maximum width of that image is literally only 300 pixels wide. Perfect for most situations.
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6. Use the Correct Image Type

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JPG files have the highest compression rate, so they’re the most easily compressed file type. Make this your default, unless your image isn’t only an image.

If your image has text on it, or if you’re uploading a logo that has transparency, you’ll want to use a PNG file format. JPG’s tend to make blurry and they.

If you’re uploading an animated image, GIF is the only option for you here. But be sure to minimize them as much as possible in order to get the smallest file size. Also be sure to limit the dimensions as small as possible to help decrease size too, usually a max width of 700px is plenty.
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7. Use an Effective Caching Plugin

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For the record, cache ≠ cash. ? Two very different things. If you took the earlier advice on getting WordPress managed hosting, then your host is probably already doing an awesome job at caching your site for you.

When you cache your website, you are essentially allowing for your visitors to open a smaller and faster version of your website.

If you still have a regular host, then no worries. There are of course some plugin options out there:

• W3 Total Cache (Best free option)
• W3 Super Cache (Not as many options)
• WP Rocket (Premium $$)

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8. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

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A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, helps load your website as fast as possible for people located in different geographic locations. Picture how Amazon fulfills orders:

9. Control the Amount of Post Revisions Stored

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10. Limit and Remove Spam

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This one is a no-brainer, but often overlooked. We recently inherited a site that had no spam-prevention measures put in place prior to our involvement. The database was a whopping two gigs! After removing THOUSANDS of spam comments, the database was a nice few hundred megabits. It’s much quicker for your site to skim through a few megs of data, versus gigs of crap!

Akismet is the Automattic solution to comment spam, and I’d say it does a decent job at catching most comment spam.

We sometimes take things one step further and on top of Akismet we install the Stop Spammers plugin. This plugin gives numerous more settings to really bring comment spam to a complete hault.
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11. Delete Trash after a Certain Number of Days

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Another nice feature of WordPress is that it keeps a trash file for those times when you accidently delete a post instead of saving it…

12. Add LazyLoad to Your Images

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Lazy Load delays loading of images in long web pages. Images outside of the viewport are not loaded until the user scrolls to them. This makes the top of your page load quickly because the images down at the bottom don’t get rendered right away; it’s pretty awesome.

Of course there are some plugins for this:

• jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin (very old)
• Hammy plugin (used for mobile optimization, but also has a lazy load component!)

Or for the real nerds in the room, straight up jQuery option found here: Lazy Load Plugin for jQuery
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13. Optimize Your Homepage to Load Quickly

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Since a lot of visitors come by way of the homepage on your website, it makes sense for it to be possibly the fastest page on your entire site. Here’s a short (not all-inclusive) list of things to consider when trying to speed up your homepage:

• Remove anything not considered relevant to the visitor on first visit
• Remove auto-play videos
• Show fewer blog excerpts
• Remove share buttons
• Limit queries to the database
• Shrink down images
• Use CSS styling whenever possible

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14. Optimize Your WordPress Database

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15. Add an Expires Header to Static Resources

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Setting expires headers on your website can help with speed, but also must be used cautiously.

The purpose of expires headers is to limit the number of http requests your site has to make when loading on your visitor’s computer.

Setting expires headers on inappropriate resources could really cause issues, so be cautious when adding them.

I’ve found that setting expires headers on images is typically a safe idea, and is pretty quick to apply with a plugin or manually:

Far Future Expiry Header

The plugin works its magic and does all the work for you. Easy to use.
Far Future Expiry Header Download

Manually Add to HTACCESS

Make sure to create a backup of this file before proceeding! Add this to the bottom of your .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On
      ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
      ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
      ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
      ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

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16. Use CSS Sprites

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This is a really great way to reduce the number of images you load onto your webpage, although it’s slightly complicated to implement.

When using CSS sprites, you essentially combine images into one file and load the one file via your stylesheet, thus turning five, six, or fifty images into a single image call. Then you use the background-position property on the individual elements to only show the part of the larger image that applies to that one item.

I know, it’s a little confusing and will take a lot more to explain in detail. For now, here are a couple tools to help you on your learning adventure:

• CSS Tricks
• W3 Schools
• Sprite Generator

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17. Load Code Libraries from Google

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This is a pretty slick one, as it relieves a lot of stress from your site’s servers and puts it onto Google’s servers. They can afford it!

Of course, the quick way is to use a plugin: Use Google Libraries

That plugin is pretty slick because it lets you pick which of the numerous code libraries you want to swap out with Google’s version.

If you want to go the manual route, just throw this in your theme’s function.php file (snipped only for jQuery library):

//Making jQuery Google API
        function modify_jquery() {
        if (!is_admin()) {
        // comment out the next two lines to load the local copy of jQuery
        wp_deregister_script('jquery');
        wp_register_script('jquery', 'https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.1/jquery.min.js', false, '1.8.1');
        wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
      }
    }
    add_action('init', 'modify_jquery');

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18. Keep Everything Up-to-Date

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I know, everyone is scared to update their WordPress sites. Good job developers into creating this horrible situation. Updating is an essential thing to do for a ton of reasons, speed being one of them!

An obvious disclaimer, be sure to backup your site before running updates. That way if your developer changed the core files to a plugin, them or WordPress core, you can at least quickly roll back to the previous version and figure out what caused the issue.
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19. Host Videos Externally

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Turns out your server isn’t optimized for hosting video files, but there are sites that are GREAT at it. Namely:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Wistia (great option if you don’t want people to browse your videos off of your website)
• Facebook

Whenever possible, use one of these sites to host your video files as this will help reduce the server load on your site.
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20. Fix Any 404 Errors in the Code

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Your website loads a bunch of files every time it is displayed. Sometimes one of those files may get deleted and you won’t even realize it. But every time your site loads, it still tries to load that one file that doesn’t exist, wasting seconds of valuable load time.

Using Google Chrome, right click anywhere on your website and click the “Inspect Element” button. This will bring up a little window at the bottom of your page. Now click on the “Network” tab. With the network tab open, refresh the page. You’ll get a result like this:

Anything in RED is going to be slowing you down. Fix it!
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21. Disable Pingbacks

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Here’s a quick one for ya: just go to Settings -> Discussion and uncheck the box that says, “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles,” like this:

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