Fine-Tuning Methods WordPress for Speed Optimzation
Have you already performed the steps above? Looking for some more advanced techniques? Check out the tips below!
1: Use High-Performance DNS (Cloudflare)
This step is optional and highly advanced. You can still get a fast-loading site without performing this step – it’s just another way to make a small improvement to your site’s page load times.
When someone visits your WordPress site, their web browser needs to look up the IP address of your server before it can start loading your content. To do this, it uses something called Domain Name System (DNS), which includes your domain’s nameservers.
These nameservers are similar to your hosting — if you use slow nameservers, it will take longer for a visitor’s browser to get that important IP information, which means it takes longer for your website to load.
For example, in DNSPerf’s rankings, there’s a 0.1-second difference between the fastest-loading DNS and the slowest-loading DNS, which is actually a pretty big difference when it comes to your site’s page load times.
To speed up your WordPress site’s DNS, we recommend using Cloudflare for two reasons:
- It ranks #1 in DNSPerf’s rankings, which means it’s one of the fastest DNS services that you’ll find.
- It’s 100% free.
To use Cloudflare’s DNS, you’ll need to sign up for a free Cloudflare account and then change your domain’s nameservers to point to Cloudflare. You can follow this tutorial to get it working:
- While Cloudflare offers other features like a CDN and security rules, you can also disable those features and use Cloudflare as a standalone DNS tool.
2: Use Optimized Plugins From Reputable Developers
There’s a common myth for WordPress sites that “more plugins means a slower-loading site.”
This is not true. Using more plugins will not automatically slow down your site.
However, using more unoptimized plugins will.
That’s the key difference. You could have hundreds of small, optimized plugins that have little effect on your site’s page speed, while a single unoptimized plugin could tank your load times. Speed Optimzation
We already covered one way to find unoptimized plugins after the fact by using a waterfall analysis.
However, you can stop a lot of performance issues before they happen by carefully considering each plugin that you install:
- Use reputable sources — WordPress.org and CodeCanyon are good options. While a plugin being listed in those directories doesn’t guarantee that it’s optimized, it does ensure that it at least follows some basic standards.
- Read the reviews — Do the reviews mention poor performance?
- Check the developer’s reputation — See how responsive a developer is to support requests. You can even ask your own question to see what kind of help you get.
- You can also install the plugin in a sandbox environment and run a waterfall analysis. If you’re using SiteGround, our recommended host, it lets you create staging sites on the GrowBig plan and above.
3. Optimize the WordPress Database
Over time, the WordPress database can get cluttered with unnecessary files. As such, it’s important to optimize it regularly.
You can do many things, including using certain plugins or accessing the database via cPanel and optimizing it manually.
Please read our full guide to optimizing your WordPress database.
4. Add Expire Headers to Static Resources
Expire headers communicate to the browser if an image, video, or another item should be downloaded from the site directly or if it can be loaded from the cache.
By adding expired headers to static resources, your site might load more quickly for visitors.
5. Reduce External HTTPS Requests
The more external HTTPS requests your site makes, the slower your performance. There are many different ways to reduce the amount, but a few common ones are:
- Remove unnecessary plugins.
- Optimize images and use lazy loading.
- Use one plugin for many functions rather than a large number of smaller ones.
- Only load certain scripts and other code necessary on the particular page. For example, you probably don’t need to load scripts intended for the checkout page on a blog post.
6. Use a DNS Level Firewall
Cloudflare has an excellent DNS-level firewall that both improves your performance and protects your infrastructure from attacks, keeping you online no matter what. Using a similar service is highly recommended.
Some web hosts offer network firewalls or WAF (Web Application Firewalls). These can be equally effective at protecting your website.
7. Keep Your WordPress Websites Up to Date
This one is pretty straightforward, but you should always keep your site updated. New updates usually introduce new efficiencies and can help reduce the overall performance cost of your site.
To update WordPress, look for the red notifications within the dashboard and follow the instructions.
8. Don’t Upload Audio/Video Files Directly to WordPress
It would be best always to use an external solution to upload audio and video files to your website. This means that instead of uploading files to your site, you upload them to YouTube, Vimeo, or another external service.
That way, when the user visits your site and watches the video, it is downloaded from YouTube’s servers and not yours, saving you a ton of bandwidth in the process. Speed Optimzation
We cover the video in more detail in ‘The Best Video Hosting Solutions.’
9. Disable Font Awesome and Google Fonts
Font Awesome and Google Fonts are ways of adding extra fonts to your website. However, since they are not installed on your site and must be loaded externally every time a visitor comes to your page, they can make WordPress slower. Speed Optimzation
To avoid this issue, host fonts locally on your website.
10. Disable Hotlinking
Hotlinking is when someone puts a link on their site to images, videos, or other files that are hosted on your website. As you can imagine, this affects your bandwidth.
There are many different ways to disable hotlinking, but the easiest is to either use a CDN or install a plugin.
Unfortunately, the plugins that specialize only in preventing hotlinking are not very good and haven’t been updated recently.
However, most security plugins do have hotlink prevention built-in, so if you use one like All In One WP Security & Firewall, you can prevent it from happening.
Speed Up WordPress Today
And with that, we’ve come to the end of our WordPress speed optimzation guide.
If you run your WordPress site through GTmetrix or WebPageTest again, you should notice a big improvement in your page load times.
While we’ve gone into a lot of detail, it’s important to remember that you don’t have to implement every tip on this list to get a fast-loading site.
Will your site be faster if you dig through the waterfall analysis and use Asset CleanUp to load scripts conditionally? Yes, most likely. Speed Optimization
But if you feel overwhelmed by the waterfall analysis, you can still probably get your site under that 3-second mark if you…
- Optimize your images with Optimole or ShortPixel AI.
- Choose a high-performance WordPress host like SiteGround.
- Use a lightweight WordPress theme like Astra and pick optimized plugins.
- Implement page caching and other performance tweaks with WP Rocket.
Did you implement these tips and achieve a big reduction in your site’s page load times?
