Speed Up WordPress Website Complete Guide Step by Step 2020

WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System ) In the web internet world. Recently, a 34% website has built by WordPress but a few days ago I have researched on the internet about the WordPress website and I find out that the most common and very important problem is WordPress Website loading Slow. A visitor will not want to visit a slow website any day and visitors do not come back to your Slow website so, You will be lost the visitors and profits.

Amazon calculated that for every second load of more, it would lose 1.6 billion dollars (English) in sales in a year. So, I honestly believe, You should pay attention to your WordPress or WooCommerce website speed. In this tutorial, I would like to share with you the Speed Up WordPress Website Complete Guide Step by Step. Instead, all you need is a few quick tools and your WordPress website will rapidly improve its speed, much to the delight of your visitors. The good news is speeding up your site does not take much technical ingenuity.

Here Are The Best Ways To Speed Up WordPress:

• Choose a better web hosting
• Use a lightweight WordPress theme
• Resize and Reduce image sizes
• Delete unnecessary images
• Optimize JS and CSS files
• Use a caching plugin
• Use a CDN
• Enable GZIP Compression
• Reduce the third-party scripts
• Cleanup Website database
• Deactivate and delete unnecessary plugins and themes
• Disable pingbacks and trackbacks

Choose a better web hosting

The major factor that influences the speed of a website is the hosting of your WordPress or WooCommerce website. Without Hosting you couldn’t run a website. So, You must need to choose to host for your website if you want to run a website. The best web hosting can bring a lot of profit for you. There is a lot of web hosting provided available on the market. You can choose one hosting for your business website. If, you want my suggestion then, I would like to recommend the following hosting for your WordPress Website or WooCommerce Website.

• SiteGround
• Bluehost
• WPEngine
• DreamHost
• HostGator

However, You can check here the above hosting details

Use a lightweight WordPress theme

I strongly recommend, use the best quality WordPress theme for your website and do not use any nulled theme. You can use a free theme for your website.

I would like to recommend with you the following WordPress theme for your website.

• Avada
• The7
• Flatsome for eCommerce website
• BeTheme
• Newspaper
• Enfold
• Divi

Resize and Reduce image sizes

You may use there is a lot of images for your website or you need to use a lot of images for your website.

Example: if you run an eCommerce or Dropshipping website then you will use a lot of images for your business website.

The first thing you need to know is which image type works best for a specific file type. Without getting deep into the weeds, JPGs and PNGs work differently and each file type lends itself to more efficient loading when visitors access your page.

Image optimization for your site is very important as well. These optimizers will trim the fat from your images. In fact, optimizing your images will reduce the clutter the image contributes to your WordPress site by up to 95% per image. Here’s what that means in real numbers. Let’s say an image is 523 kB. An image optimizer clears out the clutter and resizes the image, essentially. Reducing an image of this size by 25% means your site now only has to manage an image the size of 392 kB instead. This may not seem like a lot, but when you add it up over all the images on your site, you’ll be astounded at how much speed-reducing clutter has been removed from your WordPress site.

However, I would like to recommend with you the following images optimization plugin for your website. This plugin free and the best image optimize plugin.

• Compress JPEG & PNG images

Delete unnecessary images

When you completely install and active “Compress JPEG & PNG images” plugin and this plugin will show how many images you have used on your website and how many images you have uploaded in your webserver.

To Check Go to admin panel to Media

So, You should remove unused images from the webserver. Learn more here how to remove the unused images from the Web Hosting. How do I delete all UNUSED images from my uploads directory

Optimize JS and CSS files

Minification is a great word, but is simply nothing more than removing worthless characters, waste in a text document, such as white space, new lines, comments and block delimiters in HTML, JavaScript and CSS files.

To be clear, these features significantly improve these files for human readability, but are completely useless for computers and web browsers to deal with. Removing unnecessary characters and redundant code can greatly speed up WordPress by reducing the size of the page by a huge number of kilobytes.

So, You should use the best caching plugin for your website. I would like to recommend the following caching plugins for your website.

• W3 Total Cache
• WP Rocket
• WP Fastest Cache
• Autoptimize

W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket and WP Fastest Cache is the best caching plugin for WordPress Website but Autoptimize is the best for optimizing JS and CSS files. If you need to remove Leverage Browser Caching or Defer parsing of JavaScript warning then you should use Autoptimize.

Use a caching plugin

If you are looking for simple caching, try WP-Rocket Plugin. This is an easy tool from CDN considerations and will help you make your site appreciably faster in minutes.

Understanding How to Cache
There are a couple of considerations when page caching, but unless you have an e-commerce site, it is pretty easy to gain much in the way of speed from your WordPress website. Caching is pretty simple – instead of doing the process of generating a page each time someone accesses your website the caching process takes a copy of the page and then gives a copy to all subsequent parties heading to that page. This process makes your site run 2 – 6 times faster.

Use a CDN

If you have a high traffic website or high-level website, then all those user requests will slow down your website. So, You can use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for your website. But, you should use any premium CDN and I don’t want to recommend any free CDN package.

• MaxCDN
• Cloudflare
• StackPath
• KeyCDN

StackPath CDN recommended by W3 Total Cache and if you use WP Rocket caching plugin for your website, then I would like to recommend KeyCDN. So, You can find here how to use KeyCDN with WP Rocket. SetUp key CDN for WP Rocket.

Enable GZIP Compression

When a user accesses your website, a call is made to your server to provide the requested files. The larger the file, the more it will take for the full page to load. Gzip compress works for your web pages, and it creates the style sheets before they are sent to the end-user.

A Caching plugin includes the GZIP compression function. After activating a caching plugin you can active GZIP compression from the plugin setting. or add the following codes in your .htaccess file.

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

Reduce the third-party scripts

Remove third-party scripts from your website

• You Tube Video
• Google AdSense Ads
• Facebook Like box
• Instagram Widget
• Disqus comments
• Facebook conversion tracking pixel
• Google Analytics

Read Third-Party Performance on Your WordPress Site

Cleanup Website database

If anything, your WordPress database will become disorderly over time. To make it squeaky clean, you want to clean plugins, leftover tables uninstalled, and delete overhead. The process of cleaning your website database can be performed manually by PHP My Admin, but it is difficult and harmful if you do not know how to use it. If you are not an expert in technology, installing a plugin to do this task is the safer way to go. WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache of the advanced database create safety for your database and get rid of things like the older versions, the comments of spam, MySQL queries, and more.

Deactivate and delete unnecessary plugins and themes

Unless you follow a minimalist lifestyle, over time, we all tend to accumulate clutter. These unnecessary things should be cleaned now and then. You should do this thing for your blog also.

Remove unused plugins and themes. Not only unused plugins and themes have security vulnerabilities, but they can also affect the performance of the WordPress site. Here, web hosting also plays a very important role.

Disable pingbacks and trackbacks

Pingbacks and trackbacks are two core WordPress elements that alert you whenever your blog or page receives a link. It might sound useful, but you can check the page links from the Google Webmaster Tools. So, you should remove it. Because it can barrier your website speed.

Also, keeping pingbacks and trackbacks can also put an undesirable amount of strain on your server resources.

You can turn off the WP-Admin → Settings → Discussion.

Extra Tips (Function Reference)

• Increase WordPress Memory
• Disable The Cron File
• Detect High RAM Consumption
• Use WordPress HeartBeat
• Use WordPress Thumbnails
• Expiration Of Images Or Specify A Cache Validator
• Remove Query Strings From Static Resources
• Remove Browser Caching – Add Expire Headers to WordPress
• Google fonts asynchronously by using Google
• How to Remove Defer Parsing of JavaScript Warning (Manually)

Increase WordPress Memory

To increase it you must edit the wp-config.php file that will be in the public_html folder and insert the following into:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M');

Disable The Cron File

To Disable it you must edit the wp-config.php file that will be in the public_html folder and insert the following into:

define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

Detect High RAM Consumption

Sometimes the problem does not come from the consumption of CPU, but from the high consumption of RAM. WordPress just like any other program runs in RAM. If there is any plugin that is consuming more resources from the account, then the web will load slower.

So we have to see which plugin is consuming too much RAM. You have to know that there is no plugin that tells you how much RAM a plugin consumes. There are some, but they are complicated to understand and do not give you simple data.

But I have discovered a way to know more or less the RAM consumption of the plugins. It is enough that with having activated the Server IP & Memory Usage Display plugin and we are deactivating plugins and seeing how the memory is going down to know what they consume.

Use WordPress HeartBeat

You can use WordPress HeartBeat function for your website. If you use the WP Rocket caching plugin, then this plugin includes WordPress HeartBeat function. You just need to active.

Use WordPress Thumbnails

You can have several sizes configured and when you upload an image in for example 1200 × 800, one of 600 × 300, another of 150 × 150, etc. is created. This obviously depends on the sizes you have configured. But it also depends on the template, because these also usually bring some predefined sizes incorporated.

Expiration Of Images Or Specify A Cache Validator

Add the following Code in your .htaccess file

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
</IfModule>

if it didn't work try adding this as well:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
    <FilesMatch "\.(bmp|css|flv|gif|ico|jpg|jpeg|js|pdf|png|svg|swf|tif|tiff)$">
        Header set Last-Modified "Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT"
    </FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

Read Details here

Remove Query Strings From Static Resources

Add this PHP code in your active theme function.php file below.

<?php
function remove_query_strings() {
   if(!is_admin()) {
       add_filter('script_loader_src', 'remove_query_strings_split', 15);
       add_filter('style_loader_src', 'remove_query_strings_split', 15);
   }
}

function remove_query_strings_split($src){
   $output = preg_split("/(&ver|\?ver)/", $src);
   return $output[0];
}
add_action('init', 'remove_query_strings');

Remove Browser Caching – Add Expire Headers to WordPress

Every WordPress caching plugins include Browser Caching – Add Expire Headers to WordPress function. Or if plugin not working, then add the following .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    # Enable expirations
    ExpiresActive On
    # Default directive
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
    # My favicon
    ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
    # Images
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
    ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
    # CSS
    ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
    # JavaScript
    ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"
</IfModule>

Google fonts asynchronously by using Google

You could load your Google fonts asynchronously by using Google’s Web Font Loader. place the following code below in your footer.php file.

<script type="text/javascript">
    WebFontConfig = {
        google: { families: [ 'Open+Sans:400,700:latin' ] }
    };
    (function() {
        var wf = document.createElement('script');
        wf.src = 'https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1/webfont.js';
        wf.type = 'text/javascript';
        wf.async = 'true';
        var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
        s.parentNode.insertBefore(wf, s);
    })();
</script>

How to Remove Defer Parsing of JavaScript Warning (Manually)

You need to add the following code to remove Defer Parsing JavaScript Warning. Add this code in HTML file just before the body close tag.

<script type="text/javascript">
function parseJSAtOnload() {
   var element = document.createElement("script");
   element.src = "script_to_be_deferred.js";
   document.body.appendChild(element);
 }
  if (window.addEventListener)
  window.addEventListener("load", parseJSAtOnload, false);
  else if (window.attachEvent)
  window.attachEvent("onload", parseJSAtOnload);
  else window.onload = parseJSAtOnload;
</script >

Instructions:

• Copy and paste the code in HTML file just before the close body tag
• Replace script_to_be_deferred.js with the link of the Script which is to be deferred
• Save changes and test your website again

How To Remove Defer Parsing Of JavaScript Warning Multiple Script

If you want to remove multiple Defer Parsing Of JavaScript Warning. You should use the same script and small modification. In the following code replace defer1.js, defer3.js, and defer3.js, etc.

<script type="text/javascript">
  function parseJSAtOnload() {
  var links = ["defer1.js", "defer2.js", "defer3.js"],
  headElement = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0],
  linkElement, i;
  for (i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
  linkElement = document.createElement("script");
  linkElement.src = links[i];
  headElement.appendChild(linkElement);
  }
}
  if (window.addEventListener)
  window.addEventListener("load", parseJSAtOnload, false);
  else if (window.attachEvent)
  window.attachEvent("onload", parseJSAtOnload);
  else window.onload = parseJSAtOnload;
</script >  

Defer Parsing of JavaScript using WordPress Plugin

There are a ton of WordPress plugins available to remove defer parsing of JavaScript in WordPress Website but I am listing only a few plugins.

• Autoptimize
• Speed Booster Pack
• W3 Total Cache
• WP Rocket

Defer JavaScript Parsing in WordPress via PHP

Add the following code snippet in functions.php file.

<?php //Defer Parsing of JavaScript in WordPress

function defer_parsing_js($url) {
//Add the files to exclude from defer. Add jquery.js by default
    $exclude_files = array('jquery.js');
//Bypass JS defer for logged in users
    if (!is_user_logged_in()) {
        if (false === strpos($url, '.js')) {
            return $url;
        }

        foreach ($exclude_files as $file) {
            if (strpos($url, $file)) {
                return $url;
            }
        }
    } else {
        return $url;
    }
    return "$url' defer='defer";

}
add_filter('clean_url', 'defer_parsing_js', 11, 1);

Conclusion

The biggest advantage of lowering your website’s loading time is that it will help increase user experience and improving SEO. It can be mobile devices or PC. Furthermore, it will also improve your Website SEO rankings on Google search and reduced hosting bandwidth usage.