The WordPress performance optimization will ensure that your visitors enjoy your website with fast page turns. Moreover, search engines such as Google require short loading times to appear at the top of search engine results.
Despite WordPress’s reputation as being SEO-friendly, easy to use, and having a massive library of free & paid plugins, web performance optimization may only sometimes be a default option. However, various tools and techniques are available for website owners to choose from.
This guide contains all the information and topics you need to know to optimize your WordPress website’s performance.
Here's why WordPress Performance Optimization is important
Performing an audit of your WordPress site’s performance, speed, and efficiency will set your site up for the best possible success. Quite simply, how quickly your site loads determines how successful it can be. Visitors will flee from an inefficient, slow website.
Sites that take more than five seconds to load tend to have extremely high bounce rates. It doesn’t matter how well you market or promote your website if it’s slow.
Auditing your WordPress site’s performance, speed, and efficiency will set it up for success, so it’s worth the effort.
Checklist for WordPress Performance Optimization
- You can improve the speed of international visitors and users by adding a content delivery network.
- Compress and minify HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files to reduce the amount of data transferred.
- Reduce file size and improve resolution by optimizing image sizes according to the use case.
- Increase the speed of search queries and other use cases by implementing server-side caching.
- Identify and refactor problematic SQL queries, including ORM-generated N+1 queries, to make them more efficient.
- Using prefetching techniques, you can predict users' actions and initiate the loading process before they begin.
- Monitor your website's performance and user experience for 404 and other errors that could adversely affect the performance.
Five most useful plugins for speeding up your website.
To boost website performance and improve page loading speeds – WordPress performance optimization plugins make technical changes to your website’s backend. For example, It might block your website files and code minified or reduce image sizes.
Our objective in this roundup is to review and compare the best WordPress performance plugins to optimize WordPress’ performance. Here are their key features, how they can help you optimize your WordPress site, and everything you need to know.
A WordPress caching plugin like W3 Total Cache can give you much control, but it takes time to learn.
Developers are more likely to use W3 Total Cache than casual users. It is because there are many advanced configuration options on the interface, which can be overwhelming if you are not very experienced.
Features:
- CDN Support
- Browser caching
- Database caching
- Object caching
- Minifying
- And lots more
A popular WordPress performance plugin is WP Rocket. You can implement page caching and many other performance optimization techniques with it.
With WP Rocket activated, many performance optimization techniques are automatically applied, including:
- Page caching
- Browser caching
- Gzip compression
Features:
- Minification
- Combine files
- Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript
- Heartbeat API control
- Lazy loading
- CDN integrations
- Option to host tracking scripts locally (such as Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel)
- Database optimization
- Cloudflare integration
The WP Fastest Cache free caching plugin is one of the most popular and best-rated caching plugins at WordPress.org, with an average rating of 4.9 stars on over 3,000 reviews.
You can enable page caching by checking a box, which is pretty straightforward.
Features:
- Image optimization
- Database optimization
- More advanced minification, including support for JavaScript minification
- A tool to eliminate render-blocking JavaScript resources
- Option to load Google Fonts async
- Lazy loading
WP Rocket’s Lazy Load plugin is a free plugin that optimizes performance in one specific area: lazy loading.
By using lazy loading, you can delay loading below-the-fold assets (such as images and videos) until the user scrolls down. It improves the perceived performance of your site by speeding up the initial page load.
Features:
- Let you lazy load Images & Videos.
- Youtube videos (including the option to display a thumbnail instead of video embeds until you click to play the video, which is a great optimization tactic for embedding lots of videos on your site).
Performance Matters helps you optimize your WordPress site in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, the plugin doesn’t cache pages, but it’s a great option paired with one.
In the first place, Perfmatters can help you disable many unnecessary WordPress settings. Emojis, WordPress versions, Dashicons, and others are examples.
These are all minor tweaks by themselves, but collectively, they can reduce HTTP requests considerably.
Features:
- DNS prefetching
- Disable Heartbeat API
- Lazy load images
- Host analytics locally
- Preconnect
Conclusion:
WordPress performance optimization involves a series of relatively minor adjustments. As your site design or operating environment changes, each stage may need to repeat several times. Regardless, all of these tips will enhance the performance of your website.
You will significantly improve your visitors’ experience by reducing your website’s loading time. Whether they use a mobile device or a PC does not matter. Additionally, it will improve your SERP ranking. It is ultimately beneficial to you both short- and long-term to reduce your hosting bandwidth usage and to improve your site’s loading speed on your client’s end.
Want to improve SERP Rankings? Check out this blog about the 7 Best SEO Plugins For WordPress.
