11. Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks are ways for other WordPress websites to link to your content and display that link in your comment section.
Go to Settings > Discussion and uncheck the second item to disable pingbacks and trackbacks. Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts.
To disable trackbacks for existing posts, open the post editor and find the Discussion tab on the right-hand side. Uncheck Allow pingbacks & trackbacks.
12. Disable WordPress Auto-updates
You may have enabled WordPress auto-updates to make your life easier. However, keeping them enabled can affect your site’s speed, as you will frequently be downloading new updates (and not all at once, if you do updates manually.)
To disable auto-updates, go to Plugins > Installed Plugins on your WordPress sidebar. Next to each plugin, click Disable automatic updates.
13. Mobile-Friendly Approach + AMP
With mobile usage skyrocketing, it’s always a good idea to have your site be mobile-friendly. However, designing your site to be mobile-optimized from the beginning is an even better strategy.
By optimizing your website for mobile consumption, you’ll naturally use smaller graphics, less text, and fewer files, which can all help speed up your site.
14. Fix HTTPS/SSL Errors – Mixed Content Error
A “mixed content error” occurs when you are loading both HTTP and HTTPS-originated content on the same page of your website. This means that some of your page assets are secure while others aren’t.
To fix this, find all of the assets on your site linking to HTTP and not HTTPS. Change them into HTTPS.
Go to Settings > General and scroll down. Next to WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL), ensure that HTTPS is in front of the domain, not HTTP.
Finally, you’ll want to add a redirect so that any links pointing to HTTP automatically send to HTTPS instead. You can do this manually in the .htaccess file, but it’s quicker to just install a simple plugin like WP Force SSL & HTTPS Redirect.
15. Use HTTP/2
HTTP/2 is a new protocol that can improve the performance of your site. The technical details are too complex for us to delve into here, but your host can likely enable this for you.
Some hosts automatically have it set up already.
16. Limit Post Revisions
By default, WordPress saves many revisions that you make to every post and page. If you limit the number of saved revisions, your site will perform better.
To do this, simply add some code to the wp-config.php file.
17. Limit the Number of Posts on the Blog Page
If you have a lot of posts, your home page or blog page can be quite large. Reduce this by limiting the number of posts loaded on a single page.
To do this, go to Settings > Reading, and next to Blog pages show at most, type in your desired number of posts. In general, ten posts are good to show on one page.
18. Use Excerpts on Homepage and Archives
Excerpts are a great way to limit the size of the content on your home page. Instead of showing the entire post content, simply show a small portion of it.
To enable excerpts on your blog’s home and archive pages, go to Settings > Reading on your WordPress sidebar and select Excerpt next to For each post in a feed, include.
19. Split Long Posts Into Pages
If you write very long posts, it can be helpful to break them into separate pages.
While you can do this manually by actually making posts into separate WordPress posts (e.g., site.com/post-part-1 and site.com/post-part-2), you can also just add a page break block at regular intervals in your content.
20. Split Comments Into Pages
As with long posts, if you have a lot of comments, you should enable pagination for them.
To do this, go to Settings > Discussions and then scroll down to Break Comments into Pages. You can select how many comments will be displayed per page.
21. Disable Gravatar Images
Gravatar images are displayed next to usernames, most prominently in the “about the author” section and user comments. Since they are stored on WordPress’s network and not your own site, they must be loaded separately.
By disabling Gravatars, you can save yourself a lot of bandwidth.
Go to Settings > Discussion and click the checkbox next to Avatars to disable them.
22. Use Gutenberg Instead of Other Page Builders
Some other page builders can add too much bloat to your site, causing it to run more slowly. As such, we generally recommend using Gutenberg, as it is the leanest page builder available. Since it is the “default” version of WordPress and is installed regardless of whether you use it or not, it is better to stick with it.
Speed Up WordPress Today
And with that, we’ve come to the end of our WordPress speed optimization 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.
But if you feel overwhelmed by the waterfall analysis, you can still probably get your site under that 3-second mark if you…
Did you implement these tips and achieve a big reduction in your site’s page load times?
