Our hosting plans are optimized for speed and most of the time, run your site quite fast. However, if you want an even faster website, you can do the following optimizations to further improve the speed.
Caching #
Note: High Performance Plans already cache your site. Using a caching plugin is unnecessary.
Caching can make one of the biggest differences when it comes to speed. Page Caching is when a dynamically generated page like WordPress is stored as an HTML file on the first load and served to all future visitors directly, so PHP is not processed at all.
There are many great caching plugins, but we recommend WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache for speed based on our own testing.
To use a caching plugin, navigate to the “Plugin” tab in your WP-Admin interface, and click “Add New.” Search for the caching plugin you want to use, and click install and activate.
Once the plugin is activated, go to its settings screen and ensure full page caching is enabled. If the plugin supports it, don’t forget to enable “htaccess” mode or “Expert” mode for maximum speed.
Visit your website from an incognito tab to make sure everything is working. The second time you visit your site, it should be noticeably faster!
Compression #
Another thing that can increase your website’s speed is the use of compression, namely GZIP or Brotli. Our high performance plans have GZIP enabled by default.
You can enable GZIP on shared hosting by adding the following lines to your .htaccess file in your public_html directory (Don’t forget to enable “show hidden files”).
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
This will enable GZIP compression for all your sites. Don’t forget to save!
Images #
Images can make a large impact on your loading speed since they tend to be quite large. to alleviate this, you can do the following:
- Use a CDN like Cloudflare to deliver images closer to a user. Guide
- Compress your images before upload, or use a plugin like resmush.it to compress images once they are uploaded
- Lazy-load your images via a lazy load WP plugin to reduces the amount of assets loaded.
Clear your cache (if enabled) after making any of these changes.
Combine, Compress, and Reduce Script and Styles #
JS and CSS styles can also greatly impact your load and render time.
You can optimize them in the following manners:
- Use a CDN (again!) to deliver your assets closer to the use
- Minify and Combine your assets to make them smaller (use a plugin like Autopimize, but be careful because this can break your website)
- Unload unecessary scripts via a plugin liks Asset Manager
Reduce Plugins Installed! #
Adding lots of plugins can make your website very cool, but al plugins require extra code to load and this can slow down your site greatly. Using many plugins also opens up many attack vectors and potential vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit.
Always deactivate and remove plugins that you aren’t using, and try to find lighter plugins, like SEO Framework instead of Yoast SEO.
