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This is the second part of our Optimising your WordPress Website for Speed Post. This post covers some specific strategies for improving the load time of your web pages.;.

Use a good web hosting provider

Whilst cheap shared hosting might seem like a “great deal”. It probably also has slow site speed and frequent down time during high traffic periods.

You may need to pay a bit for it, but you should choose a host provider that is optimised for WordPress and physically located in the country of your main target market.

For Australian Web Hosting – we recommend Web Hosting Australia.

Use a reliable framework/theme

The “default” theme for a WordPress Installation (currently Twenty Seventeen) is generally lightweight and pretty fast, because they keep it simple.  Many more “sophisticated” themes are certainly flexible and offer lots of features and functions, but they are also complex, are often bloated with features that you will never use, and may low down the speed of your site.

When choosing a theme, pay attention to what they say about speed optimisation.

Use a caching plugin

WordPress caching plugins can drastically improve page load times.

Two of the most popular free Caching plugins are W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache – they are simple to install and activate, but do require some setting up.

WP Rocket is becoming recognised as one of “the best” caching plugins… It is a premium (paid) plugin but offers all of the features (and more) of the free plugins and is very simple to setup.

Optimise your images

Ideally you should resize and optimise every image you use on your website BEFORE you upload it, but if you use a lot of images (or are technically challenged with graphics tools) this can take a lot of effort.

Fortunately, there is a great, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them.

Consider using a content delivery network (CDN)

A CDN, or content delivery network, takes static static files that your site uses (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.

CDNs are usually a paid service and are most effective if your site visitors are scattered around the world… If your target market is localised (e.g. Australia) and most or all of your visitors are from that area, then local hosting is probably a better option.

Optimise your homepage

Your websites home page is the most likely entry point to your site… so it is worth spending some extra time and effort to ensure that this page is optimised to load FAST.

Things that you can do include:

  • Keep in simple –  a clean and focused homepage design will help your page not only look good, but load quicker as well.
  • Minimise use of images – and make sure the ones you do use are optimised
  • Reduce the number of posts on the page (i.e. show the 3 latest posts – not 10)
  • Show excerpts instead of full posts
  • Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (it can take a long time to download latest Facebook/Instagram/ etc content)


Optimise your Database

Use a Database optimisation plugin such as WP Optimize to optimise your database by automatically cleaning your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency.


Use an expires header for static resources

An Expires header is a way to specify a time far enough in the future so that the clients (browsers) don’t have to re-fetch any static content (such as css file, javascript, images etc). This can cut your load time significantly for your regular users.

Here is an example of how you might do it for images – you would need to copy and paste the following code in your root .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

The above numbers are set for a month (in seconds), you can change them as you wish.

Limit Post revisions

Post revisions (the WP feature which automatically saves older versions of Pages and posts) is a great comfort factor for many site owners, but these revisions take up space in your WordPress database. Some database queries run by plugins may perform slower if you have lots of revisions and they might slow down your site by searching through them unnecessarily.

You can easily limit the number of revisions WordPress keeps for each article by adding this line of code to your wp-config.php file.

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 6 );

This code will limit WordPress to only save your last 6 revisions of each post or page, and discard older revisions automatically.