How to speed up your Wordpress using just plugins

Last updated: January 21st 2022

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Introduction

Speeding up Wordpress has the effect of making it less stressful for viewers and improve your SEO. A rule of thumb is that if your homepage is not displayed within 3 seconds, 40% of viewers will abandon your site. Therefore, site loading speed is very important.

Wordpress can also become very slow if you have certain themes or plugins installed as Wordpress code is rarely optimized for speed.

In this article, I will show you how to make your site load faster using just some plugins and general common sense. The plugins listed in this article are plugins we tested and found that work well, but there are a great deal of caching and performance plugins out there for Wordpress and we encourage you to explore these and read their featureset, reviews etc. in order to find the best fit for you and your website in particular.

Remove plug-ins you are not using.

Simply removing all the plugins you know you are not using on your site is a great first step to speed up your Wordpress. This method is the easiest way to improve the loading speed of your site.

Enable page caching on your site.

This may be the single most efficient way of speeding up your site as a page cache basically removes all overhead of PHP processing and results in a very quick response from your webserver. You should be aware that full page caching can have unintended side-effects on dynamic pages such as forms and shopping carts so your mileage may vary. There are typically caching plugins available for most, if not all, scenarios - so search around the plugin marketplace if the plugin we suggest below is causing you problems.

1,Install "WP Super Cache Settings".

Click "Setting" > "WP Super Cache Settings"→"Caching On (Recommended)"to enable the cache.

cash.PNG

Compressing images using plug-ins

You can optimize load times by compressing all images used on your site.

  1. Click on "Plugins" and select "EWWW Image Optimizer" in "Search
    index.PNG
  2. Install the "EWWW Image Optimizer" at the top of the page.
  3. Click "Settings" -> "EWWW Image Optimizer". Check the box as shown in the image below, and click "Next". Then, follow the instructions on the screen.
    settings.PNG
  4. 3,Click "Media" -> "Bulk Optimize" -> "Scan" to scan for uncompressed images. Then click "Optimize" to compress all the images. When the message "finished" appears, you are done. Note: Compression will slightly degrade the image. If you need to show a clean image to your viewers, you cannot use this method. Please note that there is no backup for compressed photos.
    finished.PNG

Introduce "Native Lazyload".

This plugin was developed by Google and it does lazy loading of images. Lazy loading means that your site code loads in first and the browser does not wait for images before rendering the page. Images are then loaded afterwards, giving the impression of a faster loading web page.

This plugin will automatically do all the optimization for you just by installing it, so please follow the previous steps to install the plugin!

Compress html and css code.

If you have a well-designed site with a large amount of css and html source code, you may be able to speed up your site by compressing the source code. Note: This method may break the design of some themes, so it is recommended to make a backup. You can take a snapshot in the Webdock backend very easily before proceeding with this operation.

  1. Install "Autoptimize".
  2. Click on "Settings" and then "Autoptimize". Next, check the "Optimize JavaScript Code?", "Optimize css Code?", and "Optimize html Code? It is not recommended to change the other settings. Changing the settings may change the design of your site and break things. Finally, click "save" to complete the process.

Change the theme entirely

If the speed of your site is too slow even with these plugins and recommendations, you may have to consider changing your theme entirely. 

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