How to increase speed of WordPress website without plugins
There are many reasons why you should want to speed up your WordPress website. Google is becoming more and more strict on page load speed and will penalize websites that do not meet the requirements. If your site takes too long to load, visitors will leave it or never reach it in the first place.
Another reason is because there’s money in being fast. As researched by Kissmetrics, a 1 second increase in page speed can result in an increase of conversions by up to 20%. That’s pretty significant considering how many people visit sites every day!
If you have a WordPress website but aren’t sure how speed up it without installing heavy plugins. Read this complete blog we will teach you to speed up your site without installing single plugin in your WordPress site.
Optimize Your Homepage to Load Quickly
The homepage of your WordPress website is the first thing to load when someone visits your site. A lot of visitors will leave if it takes too much time to load, so you need to make sure that your home page loads fast.
Optimize Images
Optimizing your images can have a big impact on the speed of your site. Images are often one of the biggest file types, so making sure they’re optimized will help decrease load times.
The most common way to optimize images is with Photoshop or GIMP, but there are also several option to do this, here are some tips:
Use Right Format
Reduce image size by choosing the right file format and adjusting its quality level. File formats include JPEG (best for photos), GIF (for graphics), PNG-8/24/32 (for web graphics), SVG (vector-based graphics) and WebP (lossless compression).
Use Short File Name
Use short filenames a long filename means more bytes have to be downloaded before loading begins.
Minify CSS, JS, HTML
Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters from source code without changing its functionality. It reduces the file size of the source code, which can improve website performance by reducing HTTP request size and transfer time, as well as download time after a cache hit.
Implement Lazy Loading Media.
Lazy Loading is a technique that helps you to reduce the overall page load time by loading only what is needed. So, when you are loading your images, videos or other media into the browser, they will be loaded only when they enter the user’s viewport. This will make your site loads faster because it doesn’t load unnecessary content until it’s needed.
Remove Query Strings from Static Resources
As with any other website, WordPress websites also suffer from slow load times due to content that is not cached. One of the best ways to improve performance is by removing query strings from static resources.
Here’s how:
Go to Settings > Permalinks and click “Save Changes.” Navigate to wp-content/cache/supercache/.htaccess and open it in your favorite text editor.
Add the following lines somewhere near the top of this file (for example, right after Rewrite Cond %{QUERY_STRING}.
Avoid Bad Requests
Bad requests are requests that the server has to process before sending a response back to the user. These can include redirects, page refreshes, and AJAX calls. Avoiding bad requests will speed up your website.
Enable GZIP Compression
Gzip compression is a method of encoding data that reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network.
GZIP compression is used in many web servers and web browsers to compress HTTP responses. It works by replacing common strings with pointers to existing strings stored in a dictionary (called a “zlib stream”), which are typically Huffman coded or LZ77 compressed.
Reduce External HTTP Requests
The second way to speed up your WordPress website without plugins is by reducing the number of external HTTP requests. There are two ways you can do this:
Minimize the Number of Requests
The fewer requests a page makes, the faster it will load. Ideally, pages should have only one or two requests and not more than three. This is because each request incurs some overhead for both your visitors and their browsers as they wait for the site to download assets from different servers (or domains). The more domains a browser has to visit when loading a web page, the longer it takes for that page to load.
Minimize Size of Each Request
Make sure all files requested are optimized so that there’s no extra code being loaded unnecessarily. For example, if you were using an image slider on your website but didn’t need all those images in each slide then don’t include them! Your users would appreciate getting faster load times instead of waiting longer due to unnecessary elements slowing down their experience while browsing through your site.
Switch to Better Hosting
That said, if you’re not sure how much bandwidth your site requires or what type of hosting provider would be best for your needs, there are plenty of resources online where you can find out more information about this topic. In general, though: if speed is important to you then consider switching providers!
Use Light Weight WordPress Themes
Now you have a fast and reliable hosting company, but how do you choose a speedy WordPress theme? First, let’s check out the most important factors to consider when selecting a theme for your website.
A WordPress theme with a lot of fancy elements and icons can takes time to load on browser. Even if you are using powerful hosting services a theme with dynamic elements will slow down your website. So be selective while choosing the WordPress themes, and go for Best WordPress theme bundle with light weighted, fast, and responsive WordPress theme.
Remove Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS
You can improve the speed of your website by removing render-blocking JavaScript and stylesheets.
- Use the async attribute to load scripts asynchronously
- Remove render-blocking CSS from above the fold content (before your page finishes rendering)
To do this, you’ll need to add a defer attribute to external scripts or a nonce attribute to external stylesheets:
Use a CDN
Another way to speed up your WordPress website is by using a CDN or Content Delivery Network. A CDN is a network of servers that deliver web content to users, so that they can access it more quickly. CDNs are also useful because they help you avoid many common problems such as bandwidth limitations and server overloads both common causes of slow loading times.
Clean up Database
You can clean up your database manually, but this is a task that should be left to plugins. They’ll help you delete all unnecessary data from the database, which will greatly improve performance.
There are two plugins that we recommend: WP-Sweep and WP-Optimize. Both have an easy-to-configure interface that allows you to see exactly what they’re doing and when it was done.
Limit Post Revisions in WordPress
When you use WordPress, you will have to deal with the revisions of posts. These are saved versions of your content that are created each time you edit a post or page. You can configure how many revisions to keep by using the Post Revision Limit feature in WordPress Settings.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways to speed up your WordPress website without using plugins. The key is to use the right tools for the job. If you want to do it yourself, then you can follow our guide and use these tips to improve your site’s performance.
