5. File compression

When a page in a website loads, it will load many files that are embedded in its code. The size of these files will adversely impact the loading speed of the site.

Compressing the file sizes to reduce the page size and reducing the total number of files displayed in the website are therefore two crucial aspects to speedup WordPress site.

This can be accomplished by simplifying the design of your site and combining files such as scripts and CSS. Combine multiple CSS files into a single, optimized file (One 50kb file will load faster than five 10kb files) to load the site faster.

WordPress plugins for file compression

Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML files so that it will reduce the file size and download time, along with bandwidth. WP Minify plugin integrates the Minify engine into the WordPress site to combine and minify files.

Another useful plugin is the JS & CSS Optimizer plugin that combines several JavaScripts and CSS scripts into a single file and hence minimize http requests. Scripts Gzip plugin merge and compress the CSS and JavaScript links on the page.

Plugins like WP CSS helps to automatically remove the white space and compress the CSS files. This will reduce the size of the CSS files and loads them faster in website pages.

Widgets such as social media plugins load so much javascript and code, which will slow down the site. So, whenever you add any widgets, make sure they are optimized and light enough to load easily.

6. Optimize Databases

WordPress has an awesome auto-save feature that helps to save the changes made in the site and posts, which helps to retrieve them even in case of sudden crashes.

But storing all the revisions and updates in the database can cause it to be bulky and end up slowing the website. WP Optimize is an excellent plugin to optimize the databases in an automated scheduled manner.

Optimization of database should be done in a periodic manner depending on the frequency of the updates happening in your site. Setting limits on the number of revisions to be saved in the database, further helps to keep the database size minimal.

7. Caching plugins

Caching helps to make a copy of a website page once it is loaded and then serves the page from the cache later. Caching will thus reduce the page loading time and improve the speed of the website.

We can use plugins for caching web pages. There are many caching plugins, but the most popular ones are:

i. W3 Total Cache - a plugin which improves server performance and loading time. It will cache every aspect of the site, thus reducing the download times.

ii. WP Super Cache - generates static html files for heavy php scripts that are used in the website and reduces the loading time. 

iii. DB Cache - this plugin caches database queries with a given lifetime and uses only a small disk space for caching.

8. PHP upgrade

WordPress software is built with PHP as its scripting language. PHP runs on a webserver such as Apache or NginX and the speed of the webserver and PHP impacts the speed of WordPress site tremendously.

If you’ve done every tweaking on the WordPress site but still its slow, then you’d need to look into ways to speed up your PHP and Apache webserver.

For instance, PHP 7.0 has proved to be two times faster than PHP 5.6. As a result, WordPress sites running on older versions of PHP would definitely improve in speed and performance, if switched to PHP 7.

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A few points to note..

Splitting long posts into pages using pagination is another technique to improve page loading speed. Disabling hotlinking and notifications from other blogs (Pingbacks and Trackbacks) can also aid in rendering faster websites.

After trying the above methods, our website performance got improved by 30%-40%. But choosing the ideal plugins for your WordPress site and optimizing the databases and code, requires expertise and experience in handling the WordPress plugins and code.

While we discussed website optimization tips in this post, there are also certain server optimization aspects that need to be taken care of, for delivering fast websites.

At Bobcares, we tweak code and servers for our WordPress customers and also provide custom plugins to speed up the sites. If you’d like to know how to boost your WordPress websites, we’d be happy to talk to you.