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WordPress performance is significant for your website. If pages take too long to load, Google may penalize your site, and visitors will flock back to the SERP.
In fact, according to the Akamai Online Retail Performance Report, a one-second delay in loading time can decrease conversion rates by 7%.
If you’re selling courses, running a podcast, or publishing blog posts regularly, you can’t afford to give up features for a minimalist site approach, even if it will increase performance.
With that in mind, here are seven ways to boost your WordPress performance without sacrificing functionality.
1) Optimize Images
Start with compression, which means reducing the size of your images where appropriate. For example, suppose you’re showing a small testimonial icon. In that case, you can compress that image to 20 x 20 pixels instead of having your website load the full resolution to minimize it in the interface.
You can do this manually by accessing your WordPress media folder and resizing each image in part.
The benefit is that you can choose not to compress an image if others know it should be downloaded and used in their content (i.e., an infographic for link building).
If you don’t have time for that, you can use a tool like WPSmush to help you speed up the process.
Next, try serving scaled images. This means that you serve one asset to the network, and markup will scale the image in CSS or HTML based on the device your visitor is using. This is excellent mobile optimization because smartphone users won’t have to load a full-sized image, but desktop users will still see the same quality.
It’s not easy to implement, but this Google Developers tutorial provides a detailed guide.
Lastly, do some intelligent web design. Compressing all images from my home page can save up to 2 MB of data.
But that’s only equivalent to one full-sized picture. If I rearrange my homepage and replace the image below with a CSS element or background, I can save just as much.
2) Leverage Browser Caching
Browser caching is extremely important, especially for serving repeat visitors well. This works by having users save some content from your pages for later use.
When they navigate to a different page or return to your website after a few days, they don’t have to download every byte again. Their page loads faster, and your network uses less bandwidth.
Logos, headers, footers, and backgrounds are elements you can cache, and the process is easy. Just set expiry dates for certain types of files in your HTTPS.
Alternatively, you can use a WordPress plugin to do this. WPSuperCache is made by Automattic, the organization behind WordPress so that you can try it.
3) Check Your Plugins
Since we mentioned plugins, here’s one more fix: make sure the ones you have installed are not wasting resources.
This can happen because updates create incompatibilities. You cannot detect this manually, but you can install P3 (performance profiler plugin) on your site.
My result with P3 went pretty well, and none of the plugins I installed were problematic.
One thing to watch out for is the plugins for which you’ve purchased a Pro version—make sure you either deactivate or uninstall the vanilla version; otherwise, it may affect your loading time.
4) Watch Out For That Theme
If your theme is not optimized well or it’s not communicating correctly with other WP tools, loading time can suffer.
There’s no natural way to analyze this independently—it’s a trial-and-error process of discovering fast themes.
But your job is not done. Using visual editors like Elementor sometimes means deactivating your theme’s interface and using only a blank canvas page.
However, if you forget to deactivate elements from the theme settings, they might load but not display. Headers tend to do that, so deactivate such elements from your theme dashboard.
Lastly, delete unused resources. You don’t want to overload your server with content, but unused themes and theme elements are especially problematic.
5) Minify Code
When your page loads, a lot happens in the background; CSS, HTML, and JavaScript lines run to output your website, and you can also do some work here.
Code minification means decluttering your code and removing clear lines, comments, and unnecessary sections to make everything smoother.
This is extremely important for using a visual editor with custom code lines. For example, if you hover a button with the drag-and-drop editor but use custom CSS to resize it, you’ll have two sections that can be made into one.
Such delicate retouches can only be done manually by accessing the entire page’s code, but for a more straightforward fix, you can use a plugin like Autoptimize or a free tool like the CSS Compressor.
These will clean your code where possible. However, don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty to maximize performance. You don’t need to learn a programming language; understand the syntax and go through your website’s code, clearing useless lines or redundant functions.
6 ) Optimize Your Content
It’s not all images and code. You can also tweak your written content to increase WordPress performance.
Usually, people break a long-form piece into pages or use an FAQ format for really long pieces, where visitors can drop down the sections they’re interested in reading. For example, this works well if you’re publishing a 10x pillar page.
Your performance will increase since visitors only load the sections they want.
Another thing anyone can do is break the comments section into pages. This way, visitors won’t load every comment if they’re not interested in reading them.
7) Use a CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) stores static content from your website on different servers around the globe.
This helps because visitors will receive data from a server as near them as possible, removing lag and increasing performance.
CDNs come in all shapes and sizes. If you’re looking for a decent free version, we recommend Cloudflare, but do your research—you can start here.
And For The Final Fix
Boosting your WordPress performance means rolling up your sleeves. It’s not the most complex process, but you must understand a little about networks, coding, images, and web design. Follow the tips outlined above, and you should have a decent head start.
If you want a trusty tool to help with the process, consider using WPRocket. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth the money because it can help with almost everything you read today without sacrificing functionality.
Read Authority Hacker’s Step-by-Step Guide on Speeding Up Your WordPress Website for more information.