How to speed up your WordPress site
There are literally thousands of articles on the web with solutions for speeding up your WordPress site. I’ve spent a great deal of time testing and evaluating the options to come up with an action plan for speeding up the several hundred WordPress sites that ran on my agency’s servers. My findings are shared here.
Finding #1 – all the normal recommended stuff works great, but is hugely time consuming to install
I’ve made a list below of all the normal stuff that every ‘speed up WordPress’ post worth it’s salt recommends… This stuff works great if you take the time to research and understand each item and implement solutions to every point. The down side is that covering every point on the list takes a great deal of time and effort, especially across hundreds of sites. And you really do need to address every point in order to have a useful impact on the page speed.
- Use caching
- Cull your plugins
- Compress images and consider lazy loading
- Minify CSS, HTML and JS
- Optimize Database
- Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks
- Ensure theme code is awesome and don’t use bloated themes
- Put stylesheets at the top and scripts at the bottom
- Use GZIP compression
- Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Optimize Front Page to load quickly
- Add an expires header
- Minimize HTTP requests
Like I said, this stuff does work. I’ve linked each item above to useful resources to help you understand and take action for each point above. If you like doing things manually then hopefully this will be a helpful place to start in optimizing your WordPress site on your own. If you’re looking for a less labor intensive option… read on!
Finding #2 – Cloudflare Pro + W3 Total Cache is a killer combo
My tests found that with careful configuration using Cloudflare Pro in combination with W3 Total Cache achieves a page speed boost equal or better than addressing all the above points manually. The way I have mine set up, it’s basically doing the exact same job, packaged up neatly into 1 solution with a price tag of $20 per month ($5 for subsequent sites). Given that I have hundreds of sites to optimize, (I consider my time somewhat more valuable than $5 per month) this is the clear winner for me.
Using this set up I’m seeing a consistent 3x – 6x speed boost. For most sites on Enigma’s servers we’re seeing an improvement in Page Speed Grade and YSlow from a D grade in the low 60s, up to an A grade in the 90s. It’s not perfect, and hey it is costing $5 per site per month (although in our case the client is billed for it as part of their hosting fees) , but it’s a huge improvement with very little effort compared with the manual configuration options listed in most articles. Give it a try! Personally I think the convenience and reliability is well worth the cost.
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Got your own solutions for optimizing WordPress? Feel free to let me know by leaving a comment.
Hey Maeve, where are your social media buttons?! 😉 I can’t see a rss button to follow this with bloglovin or anything like that… 🙁 or a subscribe by email… (It’s ok, you can come by my blog and laugh at my standard 1970s look wordpress header – we never have time to work on our own sites, do we?!) Nice chatting to you today. 🙂
haha fair point Laura. I’ve added a few share & follow buttons appended to the end of each post. I’ve traditionally not been a fan of social plugins because they can be very intensive of resources, but I guess with my new Cloudflare optimized site I will give it a chance!