How to Speed Up WordPress Blog

Do you want to speed up your WordPress blog easily without hassle? If you are using Google page speed insight or GTmetrix to analysis your website and see slow blog speed score then this guide will help you to speed up your WordPress blog.

Blog speed is one of the crucial part to optimize for any successful startup or business website. Fast loading website engage visitors and generate leads. It is also one of the important factors to rank your website in search engine such as Google.

Why My Website is Loading Slow?

Website runs from the web server where all your blog data are stored. Depending on the size of the blog data your web server resources may need to upgrade. Limited server resources slow down the blog performance.

Another main reasons of slow blog performance is unoptimized images, html scripts or the faulty plugins. If the blog is hosted with best hosting provider then optimizing the images and other scripts is easy process.

Analysis your Blog Speed

There are many tools to analysis the blog speed, one of those best tools that you can use to analysis the blog speed are Google page speed insights and GTmetrix.

Google Page Speed Insight Analysis

Google page speed insights is one of the best tools to analysis your website speed which is provided by Google.

Go to Google page speed insights website and enter your website name then click on analyze button. It will show the scores, how your blog performing in mobile and desktop devices.

As you can see the example image below, the blog speed in mobile devices is 28 which needs to increase certainly for the better performance.

Whereas in desktop devices, the blog speed is average and can be increased by optimizing some of the resources that are taking time to load.

GTmetrix Speed Analysis

GTmetrix is another free page speed performance analyzing tool that provide the performance scores using Google page speed and YSlow.

Lets, see what GTmetrix reports says, Open Gtmetrix in your web browser and enter your blog address then click on test your site button. It will generate page speed and YSlow report in few minutes.

As in the image below, the blog performance report is 55% and loading time is 3.2 s which also can be increase in no time.

How to Speed up WordPress Blog ?

Speeding up WordPress blog has made easily using the plugins. The core areas that need to optimize for the blog performance depends on the best website hosting provider despite that unoptimize images and unwanted scripts are also the reason of slow website.

It is recommended you to keep your website backup before starting the optimizing process of your blog for speed.

1. Choose WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosting is one of main thing that your blog speed depend upon. If you have not hosted your blog with WordPress recommended hosting provide then you can see these best Website hosting companies officially recommended by WordPress.org which accelerate your blog performance.

If your blog is already hosted with WordPress hosting providers then you need to optimize few more things in your blog using plugins. Follow the steps below.

2. Optimize Images

Every website have images, unoptimize images will take time to load which makes your website slow. It is important to optimize all the images that are stored in your website using popular image optimizer plugin called EWWW image optimize.

From the WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins then Add New, search for EWWW image optimizer plugin then install and activate it. You can see this guide on how to install WordPress plugins.

Once activated, click on Tools then EWWW image optimizer. From the EWWW image optimizer dashboard click on Bulk optimize link.

It will take you to the bulk optimize page where you have to click on scan for unoptimized images button without selecting force re-optimize option.

It will show you the number of images that needs to optimize. Click on Optimize images button to continue.

Depending on the number of images it will take few minutes to completes. Once image optimization completes you need to follow the below steps below to remove unwanted scripts from your blog.

3. Minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript using Plugin

Some unwanted HTML, CSS and JavaScipt takes long time to load. You need to optimize those unnecessary scripts in your blog by using Autoptimize plugin.

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins then click on Add New. Install Autoptimize plugin and activate it.

Once activated, click on Settings then Autoptimize. In the Autoptimize settings page Under JavaScript Options select Optimize Javascript Code and leave rest of the default.

From CSS options select Optimize CSS code and from HTML options select Optimize HTML Code and leave rest default. Click on Save Changes and Empty Cache button.

Note: If your website crashed or display white screen of death then you need to disable the plugins to revert your website back online. Sometime the plugins conflict with one another which may cause issue.

That’s all, you have successfully optimize the images and remove unwanted script from your website. Go back to Google page speed analysis website and check the page speed score. You will see the increased speed scores of your website.

Even in GTmetrix page speed analysis tools you will see your blog performance score higher than before.

We hope this guide is on how to speed up WordPress blog is helpful. You may also like to see 27 common WordPress errors and how to fix them. If you find this guide helpful, please share and follow us on facebook and twitter.