You should take the hosting for your website very seriously. In fact, this is the most important decision you will ever make for your website. A reputable hosting solution for your website will definitely lower the page load time for your website.

There are way too many hosting providers to choose from. Some are very cheap and you may think that they are providing a very lucrative offer with their unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, unlimited domains etc for just under USD 30

My recommendation is to stay far away from such hosts, and instead, search for hosts that provide optimized WordPress Hosting. These hosting providers are not cheap, usually cost more and have several usage related restrictions. However, their customer support is exceptional when it comes to solving WordPress speed related issues and their servers are optimized to handle spikes in traffic on WordPress websites.

To further complicate matters, WordPress hosting providers can be categorized into following categories.

• Shared WordPress Hosting Providers
• Dedicated WordPress Hosting Providers
• VPS WordPress Hosting Providers
• Cloud WordPress Hosting Providers
• Managed WordPress Hosting Providers

Shared hosting providers often offer cheap deals that look very good. However, remember that in return for the low prices, you will be sharing your server (IP address) with other websites and the quality of services is not that great. Bluehost, NameCheap and Godaddy are three well known shared hosting providers.

Dedicated hosting plans are expensive and require you to have an expert system administrator on your staff to optimize the servers for WordPress. These hosting solutions are hard to maintain but can usually deliver exceptional performance (if optimized perfectly). Siteground, Godaddy, Nexcess are a few popular dedicated hosting providers.

These days, VPS hosting has become very popular, with DigitalOcean being the most popular. These hosting solutions have high performance, reliability, and scalability. But, you will need an expert to optimize your VPS hosting solution for WordPress.

Cloud hosting offers very high performance and is usually expensive. In fact, many experts consider this to be the most reliable hosting solution of all types of websites. Amazon EC2, Linode, Google Compute Engine are some popular cloud hosting solution providers.

Managed WordPress Hosting – Due to the large number of users using WordPress, several web hosting providers have chosen to offer managed WordPress hosting. An account with one of these providers only allows you to host WordPress based sites and nothing else. The benefit of managed WordPress hosting is that you do not have to worry about ANYTHING. They optimize your site for performance, make sure that your site is secure, and keep regular backups. On top of that they advise you if a specific plugin is having a negative impact.

A theme plays a vital role in WordPress optimization!

A WordPress theme which is well-coded and has the right balance of images and content, will not put excessive load and will thereby, fasten the loading time of your website.

The sole idea is to keep the theme as simple, yet as effective as possible. Since this directly affects the speed of your website, more and more WordPress website themes are designed craftily to provide the best user experience to the website owners as well as the visitors.

Best part, you could visit MyThemeShop or Thrive Themes or StudioPress Themes and choose from a huge number of superlative WordPress themes for your website!

Optimizing your database should be the next thing on your to-do list to speed up your WordPress website. However, this is also one of the most dreaded and time-consuming tasks of all, especially when doing it manually. Although MySQL is one of the best databases in the market, it suffers a major setback when it comes to regularly cleaning itself efficiently.

So what can you do about it?

Install fantastic WordPress optimization plugins like WP-Optimize or WP-DB Manager.

These clever little plugins will help you in effortlessly optimizing and managing your entire database including post revisions, spam, drafts, tables, etc. Moreover, the WP-DB Manager will regularly set dates for optimization, so that your website performs exceptionally, always.

With so many plugins available, WordPress website administrators sometimes get carried away and load the website with all sorts of plugins. However, you should know that the higher the number of plugins, the more will be the page load time of the website.

I strongly recommend that you use as few plugins as possible and always opt for plugins from reputable developers. These plugins are especially optimized for and plugins that have a good reputation. Reputable plugins are known to perform well and have optimized code that really speed up the website..

So you did carried away and installed all the plugins you could find. Now if you think that you could deactivate the plugins and speed up your website, you are very wrong! The only solution in this case is to delete all unused plugins and themes from the WordPress website. Deleting unused plugins and themes will reduce the size of the wp-content folder, further improving access time to this folder.

Many users think that they could make their websites visually appealing by uploading high resolution images (100kb to 1MB in size). However, these images eat up a lot of time and bandwidth of your visitors.

In many instances, high resolution images make WordPress websites sluggish. To deal with these images, I suggest that you convert the images to a lower resolution and smaller format (JPEG, BMP, GIF).

If you prefer a plugin to do the job for you, then WP Smust.it and ShortPixel Image Optmizer wins my recommendation as the best WordPress image optimization plugin.

Some themes and plugins are loaded with external scripts that call various resources including JavaScript, CSS, fonts, and images.

If you check the source code of your WordPress website, you will see some scripts that you could not identify. The best practice in this scenario is to eliminate as many external HTTP requests as possible and host them on the server alongside your website.

External HTTP requests are sometimes slow to respond and in the worst cases, even timeout. That is because external requests are loaded from external servers that you do not control.

Using the latest version of PHP (at the moment PHP 7.x) will greatly improve the speed of your website. PHP 7 works wonderfully well with WordPress websites and delivers exceptional performance. Ask your hosting provider whether they have support for PHP 7. This is a must-have upgrade that performs well even on low-end servers.

Some WordPress themes, by default, load entire blog posts on the homepage of the WordPress website.

To make your blog more readable and to reduce the loading time, I recommend reducing the number of blog posts that are displayed on the home page. To limit the number of blog posts, head over to Settings >> Reading in the WordPress Admin and define the number of blog posts you wish to display. I recommend using a number less than 10..

If your blog becomes popular, chances are that people will start commenting on your blog posts. Sometimes, the conversations span over hundreds of comments. Keeping all the comments on one page will seriously impact the loading time of your website.

The best practice to deal with thousands of comments is to paginate them and load groups of comments on demand. You can easily control this by navigation to Settings >> Discussion and select the Break Comments option

By default, WordPress enables pingbacks and trackbacks. Through pingbacks, WordPress websites communicate among each other by sending notifications whenever one WordPress website links to other one.

Enabling pingbacks and trackbacks has drawbacks as each notification is a separate request. Thus, If your website receives a lot of trackbacks and pingbacks, it adds to the load time of the website.

To turn off these requests, navigate to Settings >> Reading in the WordPress Admin and uncheck the Allow link notifications from other blogs option

The size of the data that gets transferred between your server and the users is quite huge and this is often the reason for the slow performance of your website. In order to rectify this, all you have to do is use gZIP to compress your data files including the CSS and JavaScript files. As a result, the server will compress the content up to 70% its original size, before transferring it to the browsers.

This greatly reduces the loading time of the website as the size of the content being transferred is drastically reduced. Moreover, it’s amazingly simple to activate/enable gZIP compression.

Just add this codes to the .htaccess file in the WordPress root folder to speed up your WordPress website’s performance!

## ENABLE GZIP COMPRESSION ##mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*## ENABLE GZIP COMPRESSION ##

WordPress gives you the option of customizing your website’s layout through widgets. However, having a lot of 3rd party elements on your site can hamper your site’s speed. Also, since most of these widgets are unlikely to get updated often, it is essential that you optimize your widgets to keep your site’s load time optimal.

You can use a plugin like Lazy Widget Loader that provides the option to load content only when needed, thereby helping you optimize your site’s speed and improving your bandwidth usage and page load time.

It is an absolute bliss to use WordPress. But it has some pretty annoying features, which if left un-rectified can bring the speed of your website down.

For example, WordPress often saves all your drafts after revision, for eternity, thus taking up a good amount of storage space that gradually brings the speed of the website down. Once a draft is posted, you will probably never need it again. So why save them indefinitely?

This is where the WP Revision Control Plugin comes into the picture. It gives you more control by allowing you to set the limit to the number of revisions that can be stored for every page or post. This way you can easily save your back-end from being overburdened with unwanted post revisions and reduce your website’s loading time.

To permanently disable revisions you can add the following code to your wp-config.php file in the root of your WordPress setup.

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

Updates for the WordPress core are vital for the security of your website. In addition to the security, these updates are also essential for speeding up your website. The performance boost may be too small to be noticeable, but still , I highly recommend that you update the WordPress core as soon as an update is released.

Similar to the core. It is necessary to keep all the plugins updated at all times. The same logic that applies to the updates for the WordPress core, applies to plugins as well.

Expires header in your content defines for how long should the visitor’s’ browser retain your content in its cache. This is very helpful for returning visitors to your website because the browser do not have to reload resources on every visit.

You can add expire time in the .htaccess file by defining the following code

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000

ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

The above code tells the visitor’s browser to cache images for a month. You can edit this duration by editing A2592000 (this means 1 month in the future (60*60*24*30=2592000)).

Similar to plugins, people do get carried away all sorts of eye candy, widgets and buttons on WordPress websites. Adding too many widgets and social buttons will add a lot of requests on the frontend and each request means an additional call to the database. The end result of this many requests is a slow loading page. Therefore, It is best to keep the frontend of your theme lightweight and simple.

Visitors come to your website from all over the world. The problem with this globally distributed traffic is that everybody will have different page load speed.

To ensure near-uniform loading time for all geographical locations, a CDN is the best choice. CDN makes a copy of your website onto servers that are distributed across the world. A website behind a CDN will be served from the nearest server to the visitor’s IP address.

I strongly recommend MaxCDN for your WordPress websites.

Social sharing is a crucial marketing strategy for all websites. However, sometimes in our zest, we end up giving so many sharing options to our audience that it frustrates them as well as slows down our website. Thus, ensure that you don’t go overboard with the social media sharing, it is essential that you use a simple yet effective plugin.

One such plugin is Sharify. A responsive plugin, it lets you add a plethora of social share buttons to your WordPress website and is easy to set-up. Plus, it comes with caching that reduces server load, thereby proving faster access to content. You could also try out other lightweight plugins such as Social Media Feather and Floating Social Media Icon. Our team has a also created a dedicated guide on How to Optimize Images for Social Sharing.

MySQL is probably the most used database by WordPress users and hosting providers. However, several databases such as MariaDB, PostgreSQL are known to perform better than MySQL.

Ask your hosting provider whether they have MariaDB or PostgreSQL, and if they do have the support, I suggest you to move your WordPress database to either of these DBMS.

A WordPress caching plugin is a must-have on all your WordPress websites. These plugins help in configuring the following caches on the website:

• Browser Cache
• Database Cache (more on this later)
• Opcode Cache
• Object Cache
• Server side Cache (Varnish)
• Page caching

Best WordPress Caching Plugins For A Fast Loading Website

1. WP Rocket

2. W3 Total Cache

3. WP Super Cache

Whenever content is deleted, be it a comment, post, page, media etc; it is sent to trash. From here, the content can either be restored or deleted permanently. It is effectively a fail-safe system that helps you recover anything that was deleted accidentally (in much the same way the recycling bin works in your computer).

Trash can take up a lot of unnecessary room in your website’s database. The bigger the database, the longer it is to retrieve information from it.

By default, WordPress will automatically delete trash after thirty days. This can be reduced by modifying the wp-config.php file. For example, you could reduce this to seven days by adding the following:

define (‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 7);

You can completely disable the trash system by adding this to your wp-config.php file.

define (‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 0);

The URLs of your website pages and posts are called Permalinks. In layman’s language, they are what users use in their address bars to reach to your website and view relevant page. They are also used by other websites and search engines to link to your website.

WordPress comes with a default permalink settings to allow you to change them as per your convenience and needs. These settings can be found in settings -> permalinks.

It is always a best practice to change the default setting to post name i.e. /%postname%/ since it is easy to remember by the users and simple to index by search engines.

Here are a few examples:

Bad Permalink: www.yoursite.com/?p=3423 (Default Option in WP)

Pretty Permalink: www.yoursite.com/this-is-easy-to-read (Post Name Option in WP)

or This: www.yoursite.com/2015/02/this-is-easy-to-read-too(Month and Name Option in WP)

Just like paginating blog comments, it is a good practice to paginate long blog posts that contain more than a thousand words. Many websites use this technique to keep the loading time to a minimum. A side benefit is that content consumption becomes easy because of small servings.

In most themes, you can use <!––nextpage––> in the post editor to paginate the text after the tag to the next page.

If this tag does not work, simply open single.php file in your prefered editor and add in the WP Loop. I recommend checking out the WordPress Codex.

Loading all the images at once can put a lot of stress on the server and the browsers of the visitors.

The best method of reducing the load time of your WordPress website is to lazy load images. This concept loads up the images as the visitor is scrolling and viewing a part of the image.

You can easily implement this technique through a Lazy Load plugin.

Spam is a common issue on most popular sites. However, apart from being a nuisance, spam comments take a lot of your database space which slows down your website. Thus, it is essential that you delete spam comments on a daily or at least a weekly basis from your database. However, while you can delete spam comments manually, to save time, it is advised that you make use of the Askimet plugin.

A powerful spam filtering tool, Askimet plugin automatically checks all comments and filters out spam, thereby helping moderators save hours each day. Plus it helps clear disk space which further improves your website’s speed optimization process.

One of the most used design elements, Sliders are a popular addition to WordPress websites. However, if a particular slider is not well-coded, it can significantly increase your site’s page load time. Thus, to avoid this, you need to make sure that you use a faster slider plugin, one that is optimized for speed and will improve your site’s performance. One such plugin is the Soliloquy.

The best and fastest loading responsive WordPress slider, Soliloquy is lite, easy to use, well-coded, SEO optimized and comes with an intuitive user interface that helps you to create a wide-range of Sliders with just a few click.

Minification of resources means removing unnecessary characters from your HTML, Javascript, and CSS that are not required to load, such as:

• White space characters
• New line characters
• Comments
• Block delimiters

This speeds up your load times as it reduces the amount of code that has to be requested from the server.

If you are using WordPress you can also minify your CSS and Javascript with WordPress Cache Enabler.

Redirects are performance killers. Avoid them whenever possible. A redirect will generate additional round trip times (RTT) and therefore quickly doubles the time that is required to load the initial HTML document before the browser even starts to load other assets.

Redirect http to https:

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect an old page URL to a new page URL:

Redirect 301 /old-page/ http://www.yourdomain.com/new-page/

Redirect root domain to new domain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

WordPress redirect old domain to new domain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

WordPress redirect old domain, including posts and pages to new domain:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} olddomain\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

While broken links inside your content won’t affect your website speed, although they can make for a bad user experience, broken links in your JavaScript, CSS and Image URLs can make your website irritatingly slower; be sure to scan these aspects of your website for broken links and fix them before they send your users away.

To ensure a fully functional website, you have to rely on files and resources from other websites; as a result, you have to embed videos, presentations and other multimedia files. While this isn’t necessarily bad, if it’s too much or if you’re requesting external files from slow websites, it can have an impact on your site load time.

Try to limit the number of external requests your website will make; if possible, host as many files as you can on your server. For other files, only let your website request them from very reliable websites.

Only run the plugins you really need to get your site running. Remove any unused, testing, or debugging plugin rather than leaving them installed and disabled. Remember, when WordPress loads it’ll go through the list of plugins and themes. The less things to load, the faster your site will be. This is not only for performance, but for security as well. Less code means less potential vulnerabilities.

Any missing file generates a 404 HTTP error. Depending upon the platform you are running 404 errors can be quite taxing on your server. For example, Drupal has very expensive 404 errors. On an ‘average’ site with an ‘average’ module load, you can be looking at 60-100MB of memory being consumed on your server to deliver a 404.

We don’t recommend installing plugins or modules to check for 404s, instead we advise you occasionally run your website through an external service such as the “Online Broken Link Checker” or a tool like Screaming Frog. This ensures that you aren’t wasting any of your server’s resources on this task. You can also see these in Google Search Console.

Videos, when uploaded, take up a lot of bandwidth and take a lot of time to load. If you have various videos that you want to showcase on your website, instead use video hosting platforms such as DailyMotion, Vimeo, or YouTube. On WordPress, you have a built-in video embed feature which allows for easy copy and pasting of the video URL. When this URL is pasted across you will have the video embedded onto your WordPress site. You can also download video player as well to help transition the videos better. It’s that easy, and it doesn’t slow your site down dramatically.

When choosing a hosting company, you would have signed up with an account with set limitations to bandwidth and other options. It’s a good idea to revise your account from time to time and upgrade your membership as your site grows. You may have only required a lower bandwidth, to begin with; however, if you’ve expanded considerably and you’re still on your old plan it may be time to upgrade to help your plan cater for the capacity your site needs.

Flash files take a great deal of processing power in comparison to HTML 5 and Javascript. The technical issues that happen because of flash are one of the biggest reasons why many developers are moving away from that platform.

Installing security measures protects your data while preventing hackers from using your site as a base for spamming others. From brute force protection to hijacking webpages to steal information, attacks are plentiful on the Internet. Never assume that your site is too small to be a target.

You can also use the stopwatch on your computer (or an online one) to test how long it takes to load a webpage.

The number of database queries a webpage makes to load the page have an effect on the page load time. You can use the following piece of code in the footer of your theme to find out how many database queries a page is making:

queries in seconds.

Make sure the webpage is not making any unnecessary database queries.

If you create great content (as I’m sure you do), sooner or later someone will want a piece of it for themselves. Anything great published on the Internet will sooner or later be stolen, scraped and copied.

That’s just how it is. Don’t feel too bad about it. It happens to everyone and Google and other search engines are usually smart enough to figure out which article is the original.

The bad news, however, is that it can impact your site’s performance through a practice known as hotlinking. That is when someone imports images from your server via a link instead of copying them to their own site. That way, they will use part of your bandwidth without giving you any more traffic.

The good news: you can stop this from happening. Just add the following piece of code to your site’s .htaccess file:

#disable image hotlinking
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

What’s valid for the software on your server, also holds true for WordPress. Each version of the CMS comes with new features, bugfixes and more. They make your website run more efficiently and prevent it from slowing down too much.

Keeping your website up to date is not only a speed but also a security issue. With the latest version of WordPress, your themes and plugins, you also make sure all known vulnerabilities are fixed. Nothing will slow you down more than a compromised website.

HTTP Keep Alive refers to the message that’s sent between the client machine and the web server asking for permission to download a file. Enabling Keep Alive allows the client machine to download multiple files without repeatedly asking permission, which helps to save bandwidth.

To enable Keep Alive, simply copy and paste the code below into your .htaccess file.

Header set Connection keep-alive

Avoid scaling images to ensure fast load times. This way you can guarantee the best experience for your visitors. Using the correct images sizes for your site helps avoid massive images being uploaded here and there. Be sure to set the height and the width correctly.

img src=”” ”” width=””250″” height=””250″”

Permalinks and link structure are important from the point of view of search engines. While opinions differ on the most optimal structure of permalinks, Google states it clearly that permalinks should be as simple as possible and as intelligent as a human-being, so that the search engines and searches can come across the desired piece of content with ease.

• The optimal length of the permalink should be 100 characters maximum.
• Use keywords to the point. Do not over-stuff permalinks with them.
• Separate words with hyphens and omit stop words like ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’, ‘at’, etc.
• Do not use dynamic properties (if possible).

Not only do texts but also images get ranked in Google. So, if you want to grow the users engagement, think about adding good name for image files as well. You could have noticed that Google reveals both texts and images on its search result pages, revealing relevant images that are added to blog body. As a person clicks on the image in Google, he is taken to the page where the image was published.

Remember, sometimes less is more. Try to aim to keep each page of your website under 200 kb. To accomplish this, this means that the images/videos that you use on your page need to be optimized for the web. Large video and picture files will negatively affect your website’s loading time, so compress these files appropriately. You also want to keep the design light and simple by not using too many unnecessary videos and pictures in your design. Not only can this overwhelm your audience, but it will also add unnecessary “dead weight” to your web page.

Image sliders/image carousels – Don’t use them! You cannot count on users to click through the slides or be patient enough to wait for the carousel to run through all the slides. In addition, these elements can slow page load times, which not only make for a poor user experience but also negatively impact conversions, lowers the average time on page, and tends to increase bounce rates.

All of these metrics factor into search engine algorithms, so pages with sliders tend to rank lower in search engine results, making it harder for your audience to find your business. If you absolutely cannot avoid using sliders/carousels, try to limit them to three slides, as studies show user interaction severely drops off after this number.

CSS holds the style requirements for your page. Generally, your website accesses this information in one of two ways: In an external file, which loads before your page renders, or inline, meaning it is in the HTML document itself.

The external CSS is loaded in the head of your HTML with code that looks something like this:

<!—Your styles –>

As a general rule, avoid including CSS in HTML code (like in divs or your headings) like in the inline CSS pictured above. You’ll get cleaner code if you put all of your CSS in your external stylesheet.

This reduces the size of your code and creates fewer code duplications.

When setting up your styles, it’s also best to only use one external CSS stylesheet, since additional stylesheets increase HTTP requests.

If you’re not sure how your CSS is currently set up, you can use this CSS delivery tool to find out. Enter your URL, and you’ll see a report with all of external your CSS files.

Large files, especially images, can really slow down your website. Therefore, it’s well worth optimizing your existing content as well as all content you add to your site in the future. When it comes to quick wins that will improve website performance, going back and optimizing your old content might not seem like one of them.

Thankfully, there are free plugins that will take care of this for you. In just a few clicks, these plugins can optimize all the images you’ve already used on your site, as well as any you add in the future – definitely a quick win!