How to Make Your Wordpress Site Faster

A fast website is important because it improves the user experience and makes it more likely that visitors will stay on your site, leading to higher engagement and potentially more sales or conversions. Additionally, search engines like Google tend to rank faster sites higher in search results, which can lead to more organic traffic. Below I will outline several key ways to help you increase the speed of your Wordpress install.

Choose a theme that is optimized for performance and does not have a lot of unnecessary features or code.

Here are three WordPress themes that are known for their speed and performance:

1. Astra: Astra is a lightweight theme that is optimized for speed and performance. It is fully customizable and has a variety of pre-designed templates to choose from.
2. OceanWP: OceanWP is a fast and flexible theme that is easy to customize. It has a range of features, including built-in support for popular page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder.
3. GeneratePress: GeneratePress is a lightweight and customizable theme that is optimized for speed. It is also responsive, so it looks great on all devices.

These are just a few examples, but there are many other fast and performance-optimized WordPress themes available. It's a good idea to do some research and compare different options to find the one that best meets your needs.

Caching plugins store a static version of your website and serve that to users instead of dynamically generating the page each time it is accessed. This can significantly reduce the load time of your site.

Here are three popular caching plugins for WordPress:

1. W3 Total Cache: W3 Total Cache is a powerful caching plugin that can improve the performance of your WordPress site by reducing the load time of pages and posts. It has a variety of features, including support for content delivery networks (CDN) and the ability to minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files.
2. WP Fastest Cache: WP Fastest Cache is a user-friendly caching plugin that is easy to set up and configure. It has a variety of features, including support for Gzip compression and the ability to minify CSS and JavaScript files.
3. WP Super Cache: WP Super Cache is a popular caching plugin that is easy to set up and use. It generates static HTML files for your site and serves those to users instead of dynamically generating pages, which can significantly reduce the load time of your site.

These are just a few examples, but there are many other caching plugins available for WordPress. It's a good idea to do some research and compare different options to find the one that best meets your needs.

Large images can slow down your site, so make sure to optimize your images before uploading them to your site. You can use an image optimization plugin or tool to compress your images.

There are many WordPress plugins that can help you optimize images on your site. Some popular options include:

1. WP Smush: WP Smush is a plugin that automatically optimizes images as you upload them to your site. It compresses images without losing quality, which can significantly reduce the size of your image files and improve the performance of your site.
2. Imagify: Imagify is a plugin that allows you to optimize images on your site with just a few clicks. It has three levels of compression to choose from, so you can find the right balance between image quality and file size.
3. Kraken.io: Kraken.io is a plugin that allows you to optimize images on your site using the Kraken.io API. It has a range of features, including the ability to automatically optimize images as you upload them and bulk optimize existing images.

A CDN stores copies of your site's static assets (such as images and JavaScript files) on servers around the world, so they can be served to users from the location nearest to them. This can reduce the load time of your site for users who are physically far from your server.

Here at Brilliance, we almost exclusively use Cloudflare. Cloudflare is often considered one of the most optimized content delivery networks (CDN) because it has a global network of data centers that are strategically positioned to deliver content quickly and efficiently. In addition, Cloudflare has a range of features that can help improve the performance of your site, such as automatic minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files, and the ability to cache static assets on its network. These features, combined with Cloudflare's fast and reliable network, make it a premiere choice for all websites.

Each plugin you use on your site adds extra code that needs to be loaded, so it's a good idea to minimize the number of plugins you use. Only use necessary plugins and delete any that you are not using.

Your database stores all of the information on your site, including posts, pages, and comments. Over time, it can become cluttered with unnecessary data, which can slow down your site. You can use a plugin to optimize your database and remove this excess data.

One popular WordPress plugin that can help you optimize your database is WP-Optimize. This plugin allows you to clean up unnecessary data from your database, such as trashed posts, spam comments, and orphaned metadata, which can help improve the performance of your site. It also has a feature that allows you to schedule regular database optimizations, so you can keep your database clean and optimized automatically.

While we hope that we were able to assist you in speeding up your wordpress site, sometimes the architecture of your system is something a plugin can't solve and you'll need the help of a skilled developer. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us here at Brilliance, we're experts at creating some of the fastest user experiences on the web.