To speed up your WordPress website and get a better search engine ranking, you need to make your blog as fast as possible.
You should optimize the loading time and make it in seconds. To do that, you don’t have to edit your theme or add new functions.
Instead, you have to apply the next easy steps, and you will increase your blog loading time in a few minutes, without technical knowledge. You’re going to add the following trusted and free plugins.
- W3 Total Cache
- WP-Optimize
- WP Smush
And finally, optimize your images before uploading them to your posts or pages.
Plugins for faster WordPress website
Speed up your Blog with W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is the most popular plugin that increases WordPress blog speed by caching all its files. So, when people want to visit your blog, they get cached pages delivered rapidly to their browsers.
First, let’s test your blog before doing all the next steps to compare the result, later. You can visit Gtmetrix.com and test your blog loading time and performance.
You get a score relevant to your blog loading time, and other parameters. Don’t kill yourself to understand all those lines and scores; just remember your score only.
- Now install the W3 Total Cache plugin.
Then, Activate the plugin, you’ll get many parameters to set. Just enable what you want. You will find many services to be enabled with activation keys, just skip them and check the others.
Please avoid using Cloudflare, it was working fast, but after years, their services have become useless for sites. Instead, look for a professional CDN like MaxCDN.
Optimize your blog database
Now, you need to optimize your blog database. That will increase your page loading time and speed up the site in general.
Your database contains spam comments and saved drafts that you don’t need. This plugin will clean your database and accelerate your WordPress blog.
- Install WP Optimize
WP Optimize is a simple plugin that doesn’t need a complicated setup, you just have to check some boxes like the following screenshot example.
You can optimize your database once a week, manually. Or, you can do it automatically as you want. That will save disk space and optimize the loading time for your web pages.
Use the WP Smush plugin
Large images will make your blog load slowly, you can solve that problem by optimizing your images before uploading them. You can use Photoshop and optimize all photos using the option”optimize for the web”. This is an optional optimization before uploading images.
- Install the WP Smush and optimize images.
Smush is the best plugin to compress a photo directly in WordPress. It will save the same quality for your images, but, with half of the size or less. This plugin will automatically compress images when uploading them.
Now come back to Gtmetrix.com and re-test your blog again. You can see the difference. Your blog will load faster than before, but, don’t expect to get a 100% score. Even the Google home page, which has a small file size, will get a score of 97% and 96%, so if you get 90% for both, your blog is fast.
Just make sure to delete unnecessary plugins. For example, if you have three separate plugins for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, you can replace them with one single plugin that does the same work.
Thus, you get the maximum performance, and you will make things easier with a fast site. The loading time is a real factor that affects the ranking on Google. Companies and websites are doing their best, to get a faster website.
That helps search engine crawlers to access your content faster and even index it better. Make sure that you’re not using plugins that are not activated, and delete them instead. The same things apply to themes, you need one single theme that your site uses.
