The Ultimate Guide To WordPress Speed

Optimization

Why Is Site Speed So Important?• 83 percent of users expect sites to load in less than 3 seconds.• The average load time of the top 500 e-commerce websites’ home pages is 10 seconds.• 79 percent of shoppers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy

from the same site again.• A slow site was found to negatively affect user experience, bounce rate, SEO, and

conversions.• A 1 second improvement in load time equals, on average, 7 percent increase in conversions.

For example, if your site makes $1,000 per day, you will be losing roughly $25,550 per year because of that 1 second slower load time.

• A 1 second delay in page load time decreases customer satisfaction by about 16 percent.• Amazon and Walmart both reported 1 percent loss in revenue for each 100 ms of site speed

delay.• Obama’s fundraising campaign increased donation conversions by 14 percent when they

brought down page load times from 5 seconds to 2 seconds. This resulted in an additional $34 million in contributions.

• Mozilla boosted their conversion rates by 15.4 percent when they removed 2.2 seconds from their page load times. This resulted in more than 60 million additional downloads per year.

• More than 40 percent of people will abandon the page before it even loads, if they have been waiting for more than 3 seconds.

Why Is Site Speed So Important?• 73 percent of mobile Internet users said that they have encountered a website that was too

slow to load.• Most mobile web users will wait no more than 10 seconds for a page to load before they

abandon it.• 44 percent of online shoppers will tell their friends about a website that they’ve had bad

experience with.• Online shoppers remember online wait times to be 35 percent longer than they actually are.• 51 percent of online shoppers in the U.S. say that a slow website is the top reason why they

abandon a purchase.• 18 percent of online shoppers will abandon their cart if page load times are too slow.• 64 percent of mobile web users expect a page to load in less than 4 seconds.• If a page takes more than 8 seconds to load, visitors who actually wait that long will

spend only 1 percent of their time looking at primary banner content.• At peak traffic times, more than 75 percent of online surfers will abandon a site for a

competitor’s rather than wait for it to load.• According to this study, tolerable page load time is about 2 seconds. However, adding a

progress bar, a loading icon, etc, can increase tolerable waiting time significantly, all the way up to 38 seconds.

WordPress Speed Optimization - Step By Step Guide

Now, when you first install the WordPress CMS on your server, it is far from what I’d call “speed optimized”. So, it is your job to make it lightning fast. Along with this guide, I will basically include the exact steps that I took in order to improve the site speed performance of this website – and boy was there a lot of room for improvement. Okay, let’s optimize.

Step #1: Choosing WordPress Hosting

The WordPress hosting you choose will be the foundation of the page load times of your website. That is, if your WP hosting is not optimized for speed , you won’t get optimal results from the rest of the steps from this guide.

Step #2: Selecting a WordPress Theme

When selecting a theme for your website, you should not only focus on speed, but functionality as well. You want the theme you install to meet your requirements for the vision you have of your website.Take a look at this case study and this WP themes performance rankings post if you are having difficulty in finding an efficient, yet speedy theme.

Step #3: Implementing a Caching Plugin & CDN

Aside from the hosting provider you choose for your WordPress site, a caching plugin and a CDN will most significantly lower page load times.• For your caching plugin you can choose between

W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and other great WP caching plugin.

• For your CDN, in most cases, you will choose between MaxCDN, CloudFlare, and using both the latter being the best combination.

You can find out exactly how you can set up and configure your caching plugin and then connect it to your CDN from this in-depth tutorial on WordPress speed optimization.

Step #4: Implementing a Minification Plugin

Minifying the JS, CSS, and HTML code of your WordPress site is also a great way to further reduce page load times.Better WordPress Minify is the best plugin for that job, because it will not only minify all the static code on your website, but it can also be easily connected to your CDN.

Step #5: Optimizing ImagesImages will be one of the resources that increase your page load times the most. So, it is absolutely vital that you optimize them.There’s basically 3 things you need to do in or to achieve that:• Optimize the images beforehand – that means using the JPEG

format whenever you can and resizing the images to the dimensions of the container they will be in.

• Further compressing the images – you can use a WP plugin such as WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer to perform lossless compression of your images.

• Implement an images lazy load plugin – a3 Lazy Load is perfect for the job and won’t load your images until the reader reaches their position in the content.

Step #6: Optimizing The DatabaseWordPress is an extremely popular platform and in being so, it is the target for many spamming software. This will build up a lot of entries in your database right along side the post and pages drafts you might have.This can clutter your database quite a lot if not taken care of, which will result in a decrease in website speed.To cope with this issue, you can simply download the WP-Optimize plugin and clean your database with the click of a button.

Step #7: Blocking Spam RequestsThe spam that we talked about in the previous slide can be filtered by certain plugins such as Akismet, but the thousands requests will still influence page load times.To solve this problem, you need to restrict access to certain target pages that spam software request. Those are:• /login.php• /join.php• /not_foundAnd the way you can block spam requests from accessing those pages and putting a strain on your server is by inserting the following code into your .htaccess file (this example will restrict access to the login.php page):<Files login.php>Deny From All</Files>But before you can do that, you will have to install a security plugin such as iThemes Security, which can change the location of your login page, so that you will be able to login after you restrict access to it.

Step #8: Optimizing WP Plugins & Themes

Leaving unused and inactive plugins and themes in your WordPress website will not only cause it to load slower, but might also leave a potential security threat.So, if you have plugins and themes that you don’t need, deactivate them and delete them completely from your website.And if you are concerned about the performance of a certain plugin, you can use the P3 Plugin Performance Profiler plugin to examine how much each of your plugins take to load – and of course, remove the extremely slow ones.

Step #9: Removing Query StringsLeaving query strings on your static resources i.e. the “style.css?v=3.6” will both put an unneeded strain on your CDN and will also slightly slow down website speed.WP has a great solutions for this problem in the face of a simple plugin called Remove Query String From Static Resources, and all you have to do is install it and it will remove all the query strings on all the static resources on your website.

Step #10: Disabled The “Force Rewrite Titles” Option In Yoast

If you have installed the Yoast plugin on your website, you need to disabled the “Force Rewrite Titles” option since Yoast themselves recommended that.Leaving the setting enabled might result in severe decrease in website speed.

Step #11: Optimize Discussion Settings

By default, WP allows pingbacks and trackbacks on new articles, however, you want to have this option disabled since it can impact your website speed performance.

Step #12: Keep Your WordPress Up-To-Date

You want to keep both your plugins and themes up-to-date as they occasionally roll out updates that improve their performance.Be careful though, always check the update details before you actually execute the update.

Step #13: Prevent Image HotlinkingHotlinking of your website’s images will both torment your hosting and will increase website bandwidth and page load times.In order to prevent this from happening, you need to insert the following lines of code into your .htaccess file:RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?website.com [NC]RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ http://i.imgur.com/XjQA9Q7.jpg [NC,R,L]Of course, you need to replace “website.com” with your own domain name and also change the Imgur URL with an URL to the image you want to display instead of your website’s images.

SummaryIf you apply all these steps to your WordPress site, trust me, you will see an incredible increase in speed.This will not only result in better visitors retention, but will also skyrocket the overall efficiency of your website including conversions and engagement.And we know very well that those two combined result in revenue for your business. For the full tutorial and a real life example of these steps at work, you can check out the ultimate guide to WordPress speed optimization by Inet Solutions.