Good evening! Is your WordPress website taking forever to load? I am sure it is or else you probably wouldn’t have stumbled upon this blog post…. Well keep reading to learn how you can speed up your WordPress website just like the pros and enjoy the journey!
Delete Unnecessary Plugins
Deleting unnecessary plugins is probably one of the easiest things you can do to speed up your WordPress website, because all you have to do is login, deactivate and delete the plugins you don’t need, and you’re done!
Just remember not to delete any plugins that you actually use or any that might be required for your theme to function correctly, or else you could temporarily end up with a very wonky looking website and nobody wants that, right?
Resize and Compress Your Images
If you read our previous article 10 SEO Tips Every Business Owner Should Know, then you probably noticed that we mentioned that optimizing your images will help you decrease your website’s loading time, right? Well, let’s dive into that topic for a bit.
When you are uploading images to your website try to always make sure that each individual image is under 100 kilobytes. If you don’t have an image compression plugin installed on your website to help reduce the filesize, then you can try using compressjpeg.com and compresspng.com in the meantime.
You probably already know that some pictures just won’t make the cut and my advice to you is to just find different pictures or just keep in mind that they might be a bit larger than you would have hoped.
Remove Inactive Themes
Not many people know this, but having multiple themes installed will actually slow your website down. So, just remember to check what themes you have installed once in a while and remember to remove any themes you currently aren’t using.
Another great thing you can do for yourself before installing and deciding to use a new WordPress theme is to check the theme’s GTMetrix score beforehand that way you know if it performs well or not.
Failing to do so can end up leaving you frustrated and confused, especially if you do everything right, but are still getting low page speed scores.
Disable WordPress Heartbeat
Did you know that disabling WP Heartbeat will also help speed up your WordPress website? For those of you don’t know what WP Heartbeat is, then let me give you a quick run down of what it is before we continue.
WordPress Heartbeat or WP Heartbeat is the autosave feature that is built into WordPress; however, it can definitely cause performance issues with some WordPress websites because it basically runs constantly.
Moving on, I also wanted to say If you’re new to WordPress, then please exercise this next tip with caution because you will have to edit your functions.php file in order for this to work.
That being said, I strongly advise you to install a child theme on your WordPress website before adding the following code.
Okay, so after you have installed your child theme (or if you didn’t) all you have to do is copy and paste this code into your functions.php file and press save.
add_action( ‘init’, ‘stop_heartbeat’, 1 );
function stop_heartbeat() {
wp_deregister_script(‘heartbeat’);
}
Easy enough, right? Before we move on to the next tip, I want to credit Themeskills for this advice on WP Heartbeat.
Install a Caching Plugin
Kind of ironic that you’re being told to install a plugin after we just got done telling you to delete ones you don’t need, huh. Well, in this case, downloading and installing a caching plugin like WP Fastest Cache will usually do your website a lot of good and here’s why….
- It will allow you to minify HTML, Javascript, and CSS.
- The premium version will compress your images for you.
- WP Fastest Cache even allows you to Lazy Load your images.
- This caching plugin also allows you to enable GZip Compression.
Do your website and yourself a favor and go and install a caching plugin to help you get those GTMetrix page speed scores from an F to an A!
I hope you have enjoyed reading tonight’s article about how to speed up your WordPress Website in 2020 and I encourage to come back and visit us often for more awesome WordPress tips and tricks!
