Reduce the Server Response Time of a WordPress Website (Secrets You Didn’t Know)
There are a ton of tools that are available online for checking the speed of a website. I will use the Pingdom tool and GTmetrix. They are free tools for monitoring the loading time of a WordPress website or a static website.
Anyway, if your website is taking so much time to load, this is not good. This is because there are so many factors there, which affect the website’s speed.
And in this post, we will show you how you can reduce the server response time of a WordPress website and make it faster.
How to Reduce Server Response Time in WordPress?
We have seven actionable tips for you. By adequately applying them, you could score better than now.
Choose the Right WordPress Hosting
You can find thousands of WordPress hosting companies online. Choosing the right one might be a bit hard for you. Some people look for the pricing of the hosting. Some will check the support and uptime. Anyway, while choosing a WordPress hosting, you might want to check
- Security
- Uptime
- User Reviews
- Speed and Performance
- Tech Side
- Pricing
In our experience, we recommend you host your blog/ website on Cloudways. We are proudly hosting our website at Cloudways without any issues.
These days, we have seen that so many folks start their own local hosting company by purchasing reseller hosting packages. Well, don’t start a blog there.
The pricing might be too low, like $5 a year or $10 a year. But you will not get proper support, uptime, and security in those packages!
So, stay away from them.
In our case, our blog and all our sister projects are hosted on Cloudways. It is a far better WordPress hosting company available in the market. See our guide on hosting a blog on AWS and Google Cloud.
Use a CDN
Most beginners are not using a CDN provider for their blog.
Many free and premium CDN providers are in the market, like Cloudflare, MaxCDN, KeyCDN, etc. CDN stands for Content Delivery Network.
If you want to improve your website speed and performance, you might want to start using it.
Let me make it simple.
While choosing a web hosting plan, the hosting company will also allow you to pick a data center for your website. They might offer DCs in multiple locations like the USA, UK, Canada, India, etc.
If you target visitors from India through your website, you might want to pick the Indian DC. So when someone from India browses your site, the website’s speed will be high enough.
In our case, our blog targets international visitors, not from any specific country or region. So, we need to ensure that our DC will take care of every visitor’s speed and performance.
That’s where CDN helps us.
The Content Delivery Network will take care of the site’s speed and deliver it to visitors faster. No matter whether they are from India or the USA, or even Pakistan. The CDN provider will have the contents from the user’s nearest DC.
No need to fetch content from our original data center every time.
This way, you could improve the speed of your website.
Related Read: How To Generate Site Speed Reports Using MonsterInsights
Use a WordPress Caching Plugin
A caching plugin is essential for every WordPress blog.
No matter you are running an online shop with WooCommerce or a personal blog for sharing your thoughts. You might want to start using a caching plugin.
So many free and premium WordPress caching plugins are available in the market. Some of the popular ones are
If you need a premium solution, check out WP Rocket. It is one of the best WordPress caching plugins we tried. The pricing is affordable.
A caching plugin will generate a static version of your website. So, when a visitor browses your content, the static version will be served—no need to call the database every time. Hence, we have reduced the server response time!
NOTE: Some managed WordPress hosting companies like WP Engine, Kinsta, and Flywheel got their inbuilt caching system. So if you are running your blog there, you don’t need to use an additional caching plugin.
Recommended Read: How to Delete W3 Total Cache Plugin From the Website?
Optimize Databases
Optimizing the database for speed is a good option. For example, if your database is full of unused tables, you might want to consider removing them. However, they will probably make your website slow.
At BlogHeist, we have already limited the post revisions to 3. So, only three revisions will get saved to our database, not the entire one. This way, we can optimize the DB.
There’s a plugin available called WP-Optimize. It will help you clean your WordPress database from unnecessary tables, revisions, spam, and trashed comments.
WP Rocket offers a similar option in their settings as an alternative.
Also, consider using the latest, secure, and stable version of PHP. It will help you to serve your files faster than usual!
NOTE: Optimizing the database is a good option for reducing the load. But always keep in mind that this process is irreversible. Therefore, we recommend using a WordPress backup plugin like BackupBuddy and generating a complete website backup before the optimization.
So, if you lose any essential content, you can quickly restore the previous version of your website from the backup!
Recommended Read: How To Generate The Best Post Titles (8 Tools)
Compress Images
We couldn’t run a WordPress blog without adding images.
Especially if you are running a content blog, you might want to add many images. But adding these many images will make your website heavier.
For example, if you add ten images to your blog post, each with a 500KB size, the blog post will take additional time to load.
But, if you have used optimized images in your blog post, that would be much better.
Many online tools and WordPress plugins are available for compressing images, reducing the file size without losing quality.
I am a massive fan of the ShortPixel WordPress plugin. It is a freemium service. Once registered on their website, you will get an API key. With the API key, you can optimize the images on your blog.
The original images you added to the blog post will be converted to the new optimized ones! So no manual work is needed.
Compressing images will also save your disk space usage and bandwidth.
Enable Lazy Loading
Another simple optimization trick I have for you.
As I mentioned above, you think that you have added 20 images to a long blog post. So, when a visitor from any search engine or social media visits that blog post, it would take more than 5 seconds to load.
The page will only get fully loaded after serving the images in the front end. If the page takes too much time to load, this is not a good sign.
But by enabling lazy loading for images, we can fix this issue.
There are plugins like BJ. Lazy Load in the scene for fixing it. It is a plug-and-play WordPress plugin that comes with basic settings. Once you got configured that, you are good to go.
When a visitor browses the same blog post, the page will get loaded quicker than before. However, the images won’t get loaded. Instead, they will be served to the user as he scrolls down to the content.
Complete peace of mind.
WordPress caching plugins like WP Rocket also have these settings in their configuration wizard. If your caching plugin has the inbuilt lazy loading feature, you can enable it and leave BJ Lazy Load behind.
Combine HTML, JS, and CSS
You can speed up your WordPress blog by combining CSS, HTML, and CSS files.
There are so many WordPress minification plugins available for this purpose, like Autoptimize. However, you need to choose any of them for dedicated settings and configuration.
On the other hand, you could rely on your caching plugin.
NOTE: Combining some external/ internal static files will break your WordPress site. So, consider combining them and testing your website from the front end. If the WordPress site’s CSS got broken, don’t get afraid. Revert the changes you made, and you are good to go!
Conclusion
Having a website that is optimized is essential. You can expect a better ranking, reduced bounce rate, and increased conversions when you have a performance-optimized WordPress website. In addition, from the above tips, you will be able to improve your server response time.
Please consider sharing this post with your friends and fellow bloggers on social media if you did. Also, we welcome you to our WordPress archives for more exciting topics about WordPress and blogging.
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