WordPress is an open source system (Open Source Software) used to publish Blog or Website written in PHP programming language and MySQL database. WordPress written by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, launched on May 27, 2003. Since then, WordPress has been open source for the ultimate support for personal blogs. It is also used to set up websites and is widely used around the world.
Why is website speed so important?
Gomez.com recently did a study that found that more than half of internet users expect a website to load within 2 seconds. If it’s been longer than that, they may start touching the clock, getting frustrated, and clicking exit the website to see if one of your competitors offers a better site-load performance experience.
A study by Akami shows that about three-quarters of website users will not return if in their experience it takes more than four seconds to load a page.
Research results of Gomez.com and Akami.com.
So if you are to fulfill those wishes, it is important to make sure that all pages on your website load within a maximum of 2 seconds.
The causes of slow WordPress website
The slow loading of the WordPress website has a huge impact on online business.
WordPress website loading slowly due to: Install too many plugins.
Plugins are plugin that complement and complete the great WordPress features. The abuse of too many plugins is also a cause of WordPress website loading speed slower. Plugins are installed to operate based on the mechanism of linking to functions in the WordPress kernel. Joining too many functions like that causes WordPress to perform too many tasks before displaying the content of the website.
WordPress website loads slowly due to: The images are not optimized.
Images are also factors that affect website loading speed. If your images are not optimized, it will slow down the website a lot.
WordPress website loads slowly due to: Using old version plugins.
The old plugin means that it has not been updated, has not yet been optimized, so its performance is not high. This is also the reason for slow loading website.
WordPress website loads slowly due to: Using external widgets.
Just like using plugins, the use of external widgets can also make your website load slower. Unlike the default WordPress Widgets, these Widgets can use external resources so it will take time to load these additional content to display on the user machine. If these Widgets are broken, the browser still has to process them until timeout.
WordPress website loads slowly due to: High traffic volume and too much data.
This obviously will greatly affect the loading speed of your website and can also cause the website to die server because it cannot respond to the requests at the same time. The hits are too high, resulting in not enough CPU and RAM to handle or too many connections. This usually happens with large websites. WordPress running slowly is inevitable when the traffic is too high.
WordPress website loading slowly due to: DDos / Botnet attack.
This is also a sudden increase in traffic, but this is deliberate behavior and bad play from other competitors.
WordPress website loading slowly due to: Using too low WordPress version.
Each updated WordPress is a patch for the WordPress system. Old WordPress is always looking for hidden security bugs that developers may not even know. There are also the unoptimized parts, that’s why WordPress always releases new updates, every time in the Change log of the development team, we all see the mention of WordPress Performance.
WordPress website loads slowly because: Theme is not optimized.
This is also one of the main causes of slow loading WordPress website. With unoptimized themes, that means your theme may contain malicious code or use things that consume system resources such as jQuery, images …. We recommend that you use as little jQuery as possible, greatly speeding up WordPress.
How to tell if your WordPress website is loading slowly?
Testing your page load speed is actually pretty straightforward, especially since GTmetrix has provided free online tools to let you do that quite easily.
This is a tool developed by GT.net. You can integrate this tool into your WordPress website as an extension or you can use it online right on the website https://gtmetrix.com/.
The results after the test will be provided fully through statistics as well as suggesting some options to improve page load performance.
How to tell if your WordPress website is loading slowly?
Testing your page load speed is actually pretty straightforward, especially since GTmetrix has provided free online tools to let you do that quite easily.
This is a tool developed by GT.net. You can integrate this tool into your WordPress website as an extension or you can use it online right on the website https://gtmetrix.com/.
The results after the test will be provided fully through statistics as well as suggesting some options to improve page load performance.
Note:These plugins only solve the problem of optimizing the UI. If your website still takes a long time to load, an improved server or optimized back-end code is what makes a real difference.
Install and activate All-in-One WP Migration.
It’s important that you back up your WordPress settings before optimizing (and often!). All-in-One WP Migration provides a simple and effective way to backup your entire WordPress settings, including databases, plugins, themes, uploads, and more.
Scaling images (Optional).
In WordPress, you can insert smaller images based on the available sizes.
Try inserting a smaller image if you trigger thumbnail alert.
Optimize WordPress images with Smush.
Install and enable WP Smush to optimize and compress images for WordPress websites. Make sure the function “Auto-Smush Images on upload” is enabled. From now on, the images uploaded to your WordPress will be optimized by WP Smush.
“Auto-Smush Images on upload” is turned on and checks that the image size has been optimized.
Next, click on “BULK SMUSH NOW” to optimize the images available in the library. With the free version, you can only optimize 50 image files / click.
Click on “BULK SMUSH NOW” to optimize images available in the library.
Install and enable WP Fastest Cache.
Once installed, you will see “WP Fastest Cache” located in the sidebar of WordPress Dashboard.
Proceed to enable the following settings:
- Cache System: Allows caching to distribute pages faster.
- Preload: You will get a popup showing which buffer to archive.
WP Fastest Cache caching option.
- Logged-in Users: Shows the actual unsaved page when logged in.
- Minify HTML: Compression reduces the size of the HTML file.
- Minify CSS: Compress CSS file size.
- Combine CSS: Combine CSS files into a single file, to minimize the number of requests.
- Combine JS: Combine JS files into a single file, to minimize the number of requests.
- Gzip: Compress downloaded files.
- Browser Caching: Browser cache.
WP Fastest Cache – Enable all the features to be optimized.
Attention is important when optimizing a WordPress website
Minimizing and combining HTML / CSS / JavaScript can break functionality in a website.
Shrinking through scripts will essentially remove extraneous data like comments, formatting, whitespace, and other things that the computer doesn’t need to read. Merging will take the contents of each individual script and aggregate them all into a single script.
Because these processes modify data, they sometimes break functionality due to spelling errors, syntax errors, duplicate function names, etc.
Make sure to test your website’s functionality after enabling the miniaturization / merging features. If you find everything broken, turn off all minimize / merge features and re-enable them one by one to find out which one is causing the problem.
If your hosting environment supports HTTP / 2, then there is no need to combine scripts, as the HTTP / 2 protocol supports multiplexing – essentially allowing multiple downloads with a single TCP connection (only 6 Parallel connections in HTTP / 1.x.)
Page caching.
Whenever you make major changes to your website, like adding plugins or modifying CSS / theme, you should clear the cache and reload it again to make sure the website will show the latest version. You can find the option to clear cache in WP Fastest Cache under the tab “Delete Cache”.
You can find the option to clear cache in WP Fastest Cache under the tab “Delete Cache”.
WP Fastest Cache will automatically reload the cache again after you delete it.
Analyze your website.
Reanalyse the website (via GTmetrix.com) and see the difference in performance!
You should see an improvement in the following metrics:
- Fully loaded time / Onload time.
- Total Page Size.
- Requests.
- Google Page Speed / YSlow scores (PageSpeed / YSlow scores):
– Serve scaled images (Serve scaled images).
– Optimize images (Optimize images).
– Leverage browser caching.
– Minify CSS / HTML (Minify CSS / HTML).
– Enable gzip compression.
– Make fewer HTTP requests.
Your scores are subject to change! Due to the different nature of WordPress installation, plugins, themes, and hosting environment, there may not be a significant effect on all of the above metrics. But, things like third-party resources (Facebook widgets, YouTube embedding, etc.) and ads can still have a big impact on this score.
In brief
After testing with many similar plugins (free version). We have evaluated that the combination of WP Fastest Cache, Image scaling, and WP Smush provides the most efficient and simplest way to improve the performance of your WordPress website.
Before and after following our WordPress Optimization Guide.
If you are using a WordPress website, try this guide and improve user experience!
