The concern about having a website or blog in WordPress faster grows every day, since Google has insisted on favouring fast-loading pages. Above all, more and more users are accessing the web through mobile devices.

To respond to the needs of webmasters, Google and WordPress have been working together to improve the response of the content management platform.

The discussion is not of now, but users are increasingly impatient and bounce rates “Skyrocket” when the loading time of a page is more than 3 seconds.

• 47% of users expect a page to open in less than 2 seconds
• 40% of online store users abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• 1 second of delay loading a page can represent a growth of 16% in consumer instability, a 7% drop in conversions and an 11% drop in the number of page views.

Anyone who works in WordPress, for website or blog, has already come across several times with a slowness – apparently – inexplicable. Here are some actions you can take to make WordPress faster.

Eliminate all unnecessary plugins

Often, when we are building our website or blog, we test a series of plugins that will help the template work or meet some needs, whether analytical, conversion or any other. There are plugins for almost everything, and I also love testing everything.

When we finally decide which are the best tools and which are the best plugins for our site we already have a few dozen plugins installed.

Inactivating plugins is not enough. If you no longer need them, simply uninstall them. The fewer plugins installed, the faster the site can get. This is one of the best tricks to make the WordPress site faster.

Install a caching plugin

Another of the most frequently asked questions is how to make the loading of the WordPress site faster. It’s going to sound weird, but when I say “uninstall plugins” I don’t mean “don’t use plugins”. Like everything in SEO, testing is always the best solution. Caching plugins can be a boon for any website.

These plugins create static copies of the page content and, instead of making queries to the database, use the static versions to immediately display the web content to visitors. Since we don’t normally update pages daily, caching will always be useful for almost every page on your website or blog.

WordPress and/or Web Hosting Configuration

When the web hosting server is not well configured, the page load speed may be affected. The same happens if the WordPress installation is not the correct one.

Servers have maximum responsiveness. Different packages offer the possibility of serving more or fewer visitors.

Using caching services avoids overloading servers – which can help in times of higher traffic.

Reduce the number of HTTP requests

A web page consists of several components – style sheets, Flash components, images, scripts, and many others. The more the number of elements per page, the more the number of HTTP requests made for each of these, resulting in longer durations of page load time, which can hurt the number of conversions.

Use the HTTP request verification tool to find out how many requests your page makes. It is possible to reduce HTTP requests without ruining the web design.

Combine files: Use external scripts and stylesheets (but don’t have more than one script and CSS file)
Image maps: Use contiguous images instead of multiple image blocks to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
CSS Sprites: combine multiple images with one “sprite” and call the “sprite” instead of each image. When the “sprite” also contains images of internal pages, the internal loading times of the page improve, because the content has already been downloaded before the user gets there.
Make small blocks of Javascript inline.
Convert images to base64 encoding using an encoder; once it turns an image into code, the HTTP request is prevented.
These tips will avoid the famous complaint that “my site takes a long time to load in WordPress”.

Image Compression

More than 55% of the problems of slowness when loading a page are related to images. While we are living in times where the need (more than the power) to have images is glaring, it is they – the images – who are often to blame for a slow website. Images are more than half the size of a page. A larger page size will require more bandwidth to load and can cause severe performance degradation.

To make WordPress load faster, it’s good practice to compress the images. But do it without losing the quality of what it offers. This means that the file size – and, in turn, the loading time – will be shorter, but the image quality will not be impacted (or at least, almost undetectable).

We can install a plugin like WP Smush to reduce the file size of images and remove hidden metadata that may be taking up unnecessary space. Or choose to export images from an editor like Photoshop or Lightroom. As a general rule for web upload, the image resolution should be set to 72 dpi and saved in JPEG format (or PNG for crisp graphics such as logos).

Reduce WordPress server response time

Server response time is the time taken by the server to complete the request made by the user. It is counted in milliseconds.

The higher the page load speed, the fewer milliseconds it takes to load the page.

Most shared hosting servers have slow server response time compared to dedicated servers.

You can improve these indexes by using some CDN like Cloudflare. The CDN acts as a replica of the server and helps shorten the physical distance from devices to servers, improving response time.

As we have already mentioned, optimizing images without losing image quality helps to improve the response time of the server. As well as browser caching. It’s easy to do with the W3 Total Cache plugin.

In the end, do an audit of your site and ensure that any changes you may have made didn’t cause a secondary problem.