Would you like to reduce page load time in WordPress website?

Loading pages quickly can improve the user experience, increase your page views, and help you use WordPress SEO. In this little post, we will share with you the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips to improve WordPress performance and speed up your website.

Unlike other “X Best WordPress Cache Plugin” lists or the general “X Tip to Accelerate WordPress” tutorial, this article is a comprehensive guide to reduce page load time in WordPress. We tried to cover the reasons why speed is very important, everything that causes WordPress site loading slow, and actionable steps that can immediately increase the speed of WordPress.

Why is page load time important to your WordPress website?

Studies have shown that from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention range decreased from 12 seconds to 7 seconds.

What meaning does it have to a website owner?

You have little time to show your content to users and convince them to stay on your website. Site loading slow means that users may leave your website before loading. According to the Strange Loop case study involving Amazon, Google, and other large websites, a 1 second delay in page load time can result in a conversion loss of 7%, a reduction in page views of 11%, and a 16% reduction in customer satisfaction.

How does speed affect your website?

Most importantly, Google and other search engines have begun to punish slower websites by pushing them lower in search results, which means that sites that load slowly will have lower traffic. All in all, if you want to get more traffic, subscribers, and income from your website, then you must quickly reduce page load time in WordPress website!

How to detect page load time of WordPress site?

Usually, beginners think their website is okay just because its computer doesn’t feel slow. This is a huge mistake. Since you frequently visit your website, modern browsers such as Chrome will store your website in the cache and automatically prefetch it when you start entering addresses. This makes your web-page load almost immediately. However, the average user who visits your website for the first time may not have the same experience. In fact, users in different geographic locations will have completely different experiences. This is why we recommend that you use tools such as IsIt WP’s WordPress speed test to test the speed of your website. It is a free online tool that allows you to test the speed of your website. IsItWP speed test tool

After you run the website speed test, you may be wondering what website page speed should I aim for? Good page load at an average time of 2 seconds. However, the faster you do it, the better it will be. The improvement of a few milliseconds here can reduce your loading time by half or even a whole second.

What causes your wordpress site loading slow?

Your speed test report may have multiple suggestions for improvement. However, most of them are technical terms that are difficult for beginners to understand. Understanding the factors that slow down a website is key to improving performance and making smarter long-term decisions. 

The main reasons why WordPress sites loading slowly are:

Web Hosting: When your web hosting server is not configured properly, it may damage your website speed.

WordPress configuration: If your WordPress site does not provide cached pages, then it will overload your server, causing your site to slow down or crash completely.

Page size: Mainly images that are not optimized for the web.

Bad plugins: If you use poorly coded plugins, it may slow down your website pages significantly.

External scripts: External scripts (such as advertisements, font loaders, etc.) can also have a huge impact on the page load time in WordPress.

Now that you know what slows down your WordPress site, let’s see how to speed up your WordPress site.

The importance of a good WordPress host

Your WordPress host provider performs a very important role in reducing page load time in WordPress. Good shared hosting providers like Bluehost or Siteground will take extra steps to optimize your website to improve performance.

However, on shared hosting, where you manage server resources with many other sites. This means that if your neighbor site gets a lot of traffic, then it may affect the performance of the entire server, thereby WordPress sites may load slow. On the other hand, using a hosted WordPress hosting service can provide you with the most optimized server configuration to run WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting companies also provide backups, WordPress updates, and more advanced configurations to protect your website.

Also read: 21 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Website [Infographic]

Reduce page load time in WordPress in simple steps (no coding)

We know that making changes to your website configuration can be a terrible idea for beginners, especially if you are not a technology enthusiast. But don’t worry, you are not alone. We will show you how to speed up your WordPress website with just a few clicks (no coding required). If you can click, then you can do this!

Install the WordPress cache plugin

WordPress pages are “dynamic”. This means that whenever someone visits a post or page on your website, they are built instantly. To build your page, WordPress must run a process to find the required information, put them together, and then display it to your users. This process involves many steps. When you have multiple people visiting your website at once, it will really slow down your website. This is why we recommend using cache plugins for every WordPress site. Caching can increase the speed of your WordPress site by 2x to 5x.

This is how it works:

Instead of going through the entire page generation process every time, your cache plugin makes a copy of the page after the first load and then provides the cached version to each subsequent user.

Page cache

As displayed above, when a user visits your WordPress site, your server will retrieve information from the MySQL database and your PHP file. Then it integrates all the content into the HTML content provided to users. This is a long process, but when you use the cache, you can skip many processes. There are many good WordPress cache plugins available, but we recommend using WP Rocket (Premium Edition) or WP Super Cache (Free) plugin.

SiteGround SuperCacher

If you are using SiteGround, please log in to the hosting cPanel and enable SuperCacher under “Site Improvement Tools”.

Supercacher

After that, you need to install and activate the SG Optimizer plugin in WordPress to manage SuperCacher settings.

Bluehost cache

If you are using Bluehost, please go to the “My Site” » Performance “section to enable caching. Open cache in Bluehost If you are using a managed WordPress hosting provider, then you don’t need a cache plugin because it is built-in and turned on by default.

Tip: You can use the cache plugin with web application firewalls such as Cloudflare or Sucuri to maximize your WordPress Website Speed and performance.