After installing the cache plugin and optimizing the images, your website loading speed should improve a lot. But if you want to make your site as fast as possible, then you need to use the best way listed below.
These methods are not technical, so you don’t need to know any code. But these methods can effectively prevent some common problems that slow down your website.
Keep the WordPress at the latest version
As a well-maintained open source project, WordPress will be upgraded frequently. Each upgrade will fix security issues and bugs in addition to providing new features. The themes and plugins you are using may also be upgraded regularly.
As a webmaster, it is your responsibility to upgrade your website, theme, and plug-ins to the latest version. Failure to do so may make your website slow, unreliable and vulnerable to security threats.
Use summary on the homepage and archive page
By default, WordPress will display the entire contents of the article on the home page and the archive page, which means that your home page, category pages, tags and other archive pages will load slowly.
Another disadvantage of displaying full text on these pages is that users feel that there is no need to access a separate article page, which reduces the number of page views and the time the user spends on the site.
In order to increase the loading speed of the archive page, you can set the display mode to summary in the background of the website. Go to the Admin Settings background – “Read” and set “Show for each article in the feed” to “Summary”.
Paginate comments
The article has a lot of comments? Congratulations! It is a reflection of users’ good interaction. But the problem is, loading all the comments will affect the speed of your site.
WordPress itself has a built-in solution to this problem. Go to Settings – Discussions and check ” Paginate to display comments.”
Use CDN
Remember what we discussed in first blog? Users in different countries and regions can access your website and the loading time can be quite different. This is because the location of your host server has an impact on the speed of your website. For example, if your hosting provider’s server is located in China, Chinese users will visit your site much faster than US users.
Using CDN can greatly reduce the page load time of all visitors. A CDN is a network of servers scattered around the world, each of which stores “static” files of your website. “Static” files are files that don’t change, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript. Unlike your page, the page is “dynamic” and we’ve explained it in previous blogs.
When you use the CDN, every time the user visits your website, the CDN sends a static file to them from the server closest to the user. Your server will also be faster because CDN handles a lot of things for it.
Don’t upload videos directly to WordPress
You can upload videos directly to your WordPress site. And the videos will be automatically displayed using the HTML5 player…
But! Please do not do this!
Hosted videos consume your bandwidth. You may be charged a high fee by your hosting provider or they may close your site directly, even if you have an unlimited package.
Hosted videos can also make your backup files very large. And it can be very difficult if you need to restore your site from backup.
In fact, you should use video hosting services like Youtube to let them deal with the video problem. As they have enough bandwidth! WordPress has a built-in video embedding feature that allows you to copy video addresses directly into an article and the video is automatically embedded.
Use optimized themes
When you’re choosing a theme for WordPress, pay special attention to the speed optimization of the theme. Some of the very beautifully-looking topics actually have very poor code quality and can seriously affect the speed of the site.
It’s generally best to choose a simple theme and then use a high-quality plugin to get the functionality you need, which is much better than choosing a theme with complex layouts, gorgeous animations and other unnecessary features.
Some advanced WordPress theme stores, such as StudioPress, Themify, and ThemeForest, offer high-quality, speed-optimized themes.
Use a faster slider plugin
Slider is another common web design element that slows down your site. Even if your images are optimized as described above, a badly coded slider plugin will make your previous efforts in vain. We compared several of the best WordPress slider plugins in terms of performance and functionality. From the results, Soliloquy appears to be the fastest.
| Plugin | Loading Time | # of requests | Page Size |
| Soliloquy | 1.34 secs | 26 | 945 KB |
| Nivo Slider | 2.12 secs | 29 | 1 MB |
| Meteor | 2.32 secs | 27 | 1.2 MB |
| Revolution Slider | 2.25 secs | 29 | 1 MB |
| LayerSlider | 2.12 secs | 30 | 975 KB |
Use a faster gallery plugin
If your website is a photography website or a personal gallery, you may want to use a gallery plugin to display your photos.
It’s really important to use a gallery plugin optimized for WordPress speed. We recommend Envira Gallery, the best WordPress gallery plugin available on the market. You can use it to create beautiful and fast-loading atlases.
We used it to compare the speeds of several other plugins and found that Envira Gallery is almost twice as fast as other plugins.
| Plugin | Loading Time | # of requests | Page Size |
| Envira Gallery | 1.08 secs | 24 | 1 MB |
| Foo Gallery | 1.89 secs | 23 | 375.1 KB |
| NextGEN | 1.88 secs | 33 | 518 KB |
Conclusion
That covers some suggestions on plugins and settings that you can alter to accelerate your website. In next blog, we are going to talk about some advance improvements that requires some technical knowledge.