Top 10 WordPress Speed Tips for Small Business Success

Is a slower website preventing your company from achieving better rankings and conversions? To help you improve your WordPress site faster, here are our top ten recommendations.

It's crucial to maintain your WordPress website operating swiftly and effectively since it serves as the public face of your small company. Despite WordPress's proud claim that it powers 43% of the web (including blogs, small company websites, major e-commerce businesses, and apps), it may be challenging to get your site to function as quickly as possible.

We've compiled the best 10 techniques for mastering WordPress speed optimization after your site has been developed to help you retain visitors to your site.

How to check your WordPress site’s speed

You may check the loading speed of your WordPress site using a variety of tools, such as Google's PageSpeed Insights.

Step 1: Enter the website for PageSpeed Insights.

Step 2: In the space, type your URL and choose "Analyse."

Step 3: A score out of 100 will be shown for both desktop and mobile speed performance in the report.

First Contentful Paint describes the speed at which a page starts to load.

Total Blocking Time represents the amount of time it takes for the page to load all of its information and become interactive.

Step 4: Additionally, a list of tips on how to enhance your speed performance will be given to you.

The free WordPress performance Tester from the website performance test from GTmetrix is an alternative to Google's PageSpeed Insights, which is included with the Site Kit plugin or may be accessed separately. Google also suggests Catchpoint's WebPageTest as a dependable and capable speed-testing tool.

10 simple techniques for 2023 to speed up your WordPress website

Choose a fast web hosting

Any website of a small to medium-sized company (SMB) needs a dependable web host. The greatest choice for those on a tight budget is shared hosting. But if you value website speed, choose VPS or managed WordPress hosting options. The WordPress hosting service from Hostinger employs LiteSpeed servers and comes with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin to make your site four times quicker than with standard hosting.

Use a content delivery network (CDN)

The servers for your website are in a single place, but the people who view it might be anywhere in the globe. The slower your page loads, the further away your visitor is. A CDN is a worldwide network of servers used to store and deliver copies of the material from your website.

Use a lightweight, fast-loading theme

It's crucial to have a stunning website that leaves a good impression. However, having a theme that loads quickly is equally essential if you want your website to function smoothly. Look for themes like Astra, Neve, or OceanWP that are designed for WordPress site speed optimization.

Optimize your website design

After deciding on a theme, you must optimize your website's design. This involves minimizing the amount of plugins and other scripts, such as widgets that are executed on each page of your website. Your homepage is very significant. Make it tidy and simple to load.

Compress your images

Any contemporary website must have high-quality graphics, but if you don't correctly compress them, they may dramatically slow down the pace at which your site loads. Look at programs like Compressor or Kraken.io to reduce picture sizes without sacrificing quality.

Avoid page redirects

When moving your website from one domain to another or directing readers from an outdated link to a more recent one, redirects may be required. However, you should always try to avoid them since they may considerably slow down how quickly your page loads. If a redirect is necessary, be sure to utilize an HTTP 301 permanent redirect. This will instruct search engines to update the URL in their index from the previous one to the new one.

Update your PHP version

WordPress' foundational programming language is PHP. Using an outdated version of PHP might cause your website to load slowly, so be sure you're using the most recent version. Using the Version Info plugin, you can determine which version of PHP is being used on your website.

Perform a plugin cleanup

If your site has too many plugins, they may slow it down and interfere with one another. Delete any plugins you no longer need after going through your list of plugins. Then maintain the ones you already have updated, since outdated plugins may also make your site load slower.

Embed videos instead of hosting them

It is preferable to embed videos on your website rather than host them. This indicates that rather than being stored on your servers, the video is really housed on a different website, such as YouTube or Vimeo, and you are just connecting to it. As the video files won't be taking up storage space on your server, this will aid in WordPress site speed optimization and speed up page loading.

Perform background processes during low-traffic times

Background processes are used by many WordPress websites to carry out operations like email sending and automatic backups. If these tasks are carried out while there is a high volume of visitors, they may cause your site to load slowly. Consider scheduling these background procedures to run during times of low traffic to lessen their effect.