Professional WordPress site owners all want the same thing, a fast-loading WordPress site. In this guide you’re going to learn 7 hacks to get a fast-loading site in 2021. Having a website or blog that loads in less than 1 second is a big deal because it directly affects your website traffic, revenue and SEO.

A fast-loading WordPress site would have more overall traffic than a slow WordPress site because people have short attention span and would usually click away when a webpage takes too long to load. 

This leads to loss of website visitors, views, potential revenue from those visitors that clicked away. You’ll be left with a very high bounce rate, which tells Google and other search engines that people don’t like what they see on your site, or it’s not high-quality, or related content or the webpage has a low user experience score, and so on.

Frankly, no one wants to lose money, and traffic is money in the world of blogging. You have a lot of organic traffic coming from search engines like Google, Bing, Ask, etc. Monetization becomes easy because now you can choose to make money by running adverts on your site or publishing affiliate articles. Either way, you’re sure when people click on your website link, your pages open up super-fast, in record time.

7 Hacks for a Fast-Loading WordPress Site in 2021

Let’s quickly go over the 7 hacks you need to use to get your WordPress site loading super-fast! 

1. Use Google Page Insights

A bad WordPress speed checker can give you wrong speed estimates and bad recommendations that might break your site. That’s why I always recommend using Google Page Insights because Google is the largest search engine in the world, and everyone is essentially writing for Google search.

Using Google Page Insights guarantees you get accurate page loading speeds and actionable steps you can take to improve your loading speed to get a fast-loading WordPress site.

Another reason to use Google Page Insights is they provide speed tests for both mobile and desktop. After all, Google is now mobile-first because many people are on their phones compared to computers. 

Google Page insights give you very detailed data of how your WordPress site loads to the very second!

They also give you recommendations on what to do to make your site load faster. These tasks can be easily completed with a Google Search to find out how to optimize your site. For example, the first option here is to “Eliminate render-blocking resources” – Start by doing a Google search and reading an article.

I usually run another speed test using GTMetrix to compare results and create a priority list for the optimization that needs to be done to get me a fast-loading WordPress site. 

2. Optimize your Images

A lot of people forget to optimize their images, and they also use bad image usage practices. This means they load their initially fast-loading WordPress site with big, unoptimized images as sliders, featured images, menu page images, etc. 

Unoptimized images with large file sizes greatly impact your website loading speed because visitors have to go through the large file size before the page completely loads, which depends on how fast your website hosting is and the internet being used by the website visitor.

There are many WordPress image optimization plugins like Smush or Imagify, and so on. Still, the easiest way is to resize your image before uploading it to your WordPress site, change formats from PNG to JPG so you can save images in small file sizes without losing image quality.

3. Use a Lightweight Responsive WordPress Theme

Lightweight WordPress themes are very good for SEO and giving you a fast-loading WordPress site because the theme files are so small in size (10KB), it would take less than a second to load your website completely, unlike heavy WordPress themes with file sizes of 10MB.

Using a Lightweight, responsive WordPress theme means you won’t lose traffic, would have a low bounce rate, make more money with your website, and you’ll get more traffic from search engines like Google.

Example of Lightweight WordPress themes is GeneratePress, WPAstra or Genesis Framework.

4. Use a Fast-Loading Hosting Company

Did you know that 90% of most slow websites have bad hosting? It’s one of the textbook reasons why websites load slowly because the servers their website files are hosted on are overcrowded, not optimized for speed, or just plain old outdated servers.

One of the fastest ways to instantly improve your WordPress site loading speed is to use a fast-loading hosting company. I would recommend reading this article on WordPress hosting before making any hosting decisions.

5. Use Google Fonts

This is usually theme-specific, but sometimes website owners use a custom font for their website’s body text. Maybe they love a particular font or want their blog design to stand out, which is good, but most of them fail to realize that there are processes to optimize the font, so it doesn’t slow down your WordPress site.

6. Optimize your WordPress Database

If you’ve been blogging for years and you’ve never optimized your WordPress database, you need to stop everything you’re doing right now and optimize your database the right way! 

Optimizing your WordPress dashboard would ensure WordPress operates in tip-top condition and isn’t a bottleneck for you getting a fast-loading WordPress site. You can install plugins like WP-Optimize to optimize your WordPress database.

7. Delete Old WordPress Articles

Old “DEAD” articles, especially when you have thousands of spurned or copied content you know, haven’t gotten any traffic or generated any affiliate revenue in years. Still, they are just sitting pretty on your WordPress site; please delete them.

If they are small, you can always try content upgrade options like doing research and adding more original words to the article, but if they are in the hundreds and thousands, please delete them. They will stop your dream of having a fast-loading WordPress Site in 2021.

Conclusion

With these 7 simple hacks, you can make your site a fast-loading WordPress site in 2021, and remember that it all starts with checking what your current page speed is by using Google Page Insights. There are other more in-depth ways to speed up your WordPress site, but this is the beginner-friendly version.

Guest Author Byline

Paul Aroloye is a humble blog owner and part-time YouTuber. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, and writes about how to make money blogging at nairatips.com

You can connect with him on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.