How to make your Wordpress website work faster?

You probably already noticed that, after you add all plugins, set themes, articles and other stuff, Wordpress website starts slowing down, especially when number of visitors goes high. In this post, I will tell you more about how to speed up your blog/website, CMS platform, widgets etc.

Speed up your wordpress

Do you use cache plugin?

When talking about Wordpress optimization, this is basic. WP pluging with this function are actually caching content meaning that WP won't load database info every time (which slows down loading of site) but present cached and much faster version of website which doesn't need fully loading every time.

By my opinion, for this purpose you should use W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. There are numerous plugins of this kind online and there are no big differences between them. All of them have same task - to cache content, but they could be different by abilities, speed and way they do this.

CDN

CDN (Content Delivery Network) is very important thing from a side of hosting of your website. CDN is a network of servers through which someone could access your website. It works on way that your content is located on few locations, so when user visits a website – data will be loaded and shown from nearest location where content is storaged. If server where data is located is closer to user, data will display faster. jsDelivr is free plugin that allows CDN for your Wordpress website.

Database optimization

Wordpress content is storaged in databas, so it is most important element that could affect speed of your website. Content is oftenly changed or deleted, comments are written, posts are created or edited so database is constantly updating and changing. And that could lead to  accumulating of unnecessary content. You can scan and optimize database with WP-Optimize plugin. Before you start database optimization, create a backup (copy) of it. This option is offered before process starts so if there are any errors in the process you can always use previous version using backup.

Number of plugins

Also, very important factor of speed is a number of installed plugins. More plugins you install, more time to load webpage. Minimize number of plugins and only use ones that you really need, those which you're not using - delete.

Reduce the size of CSS and JS

Big CSS and Javascript databases could affect loading speed additionally. Reduce the size of these databases with Better WordPress Minify plugin . It will automatically shrink of these documents.

Images are also significantly affecting speed of your website, so take care and optimize every image before you set it up on website. Also, you should always update Wordpress because every new version adds numerous improvements, from security and speed point of view.