7. Use The Latest PHP Version

One thing that you can not leave from the check list of how to improve website speed is your website’s php version. It is recommended to use the latest version of php to maintain your website speed. However, don’t just start using the latest version of php because your wordpress, theme, and others plugin also needs to be compatible with the version of php you use on your site. So, first, check if themes and plugins are compatible with which latest version of php and then upgrade to that one.

Php is the scripting language that powers all wordpress websites. It’s a server-side language, meaning that its files are stored and executed on the web server that hosts your site. Like themes and plugins, php also releases occasional updates to run more efficiently, which in turn helps your pages load faster. The latest stable version of php is php 7, released in 2015. Php 7 is a major performance improvement over php 6, and there’s really no reason to not run your website on it. See our guide to php 7 in wordpress to learn how to check your site’s php version and update it manually.

Php is the programming language that wordpress is written in. It’s important to always use the latest version of php, as newer versions are more efficient and secure, and this makes your site faster. Most of the time, your host will just handle the php version for you and keep it updated. However, you may want to check what version you have installed. To quickly check your php version, go to tools site health on your wordpress sidebar. Then click the info tab. Scroll down and find the server tab. You’ll see your php version listed. If you are using an older version and want to upgrade, give our step-by-step guide to upgrading your php version a read.

Advice as old as time! but it does work so we can’t go without mentioning it. You can gain a nice speed boost just by updating your wordpress website to a newer version. You get the latest performance improvements and lots of other optimizations. What’s not to like about that! wordpress 6. 1, for instance, got a bunch of performance improvements under the hood, such as better database performance and better handling of media delivery. On the front end, this results in faster load time for both new and returning visitors. Additionally, updating to a new wordpress version allows you to run a newer version of php, which also gives you all the more performance improvements.

Php (hypertext preprocessor) is at the core of wordpress. It runs on the server side and carries out different tasks required to run a site successfully. Over the years, php has seen many updates, including the latest php 8. 1. The last major update, php 7 , took place in 2015. All these updates bring a plethora of features, including significant performance improvements. And that’s why you should update the php version to the latest. It is best to ask your hosting provider to handle the php version update. If you’re self-hosting, you can follow online guides or ask a php developer to do the update for you.

8. Turn on a DNS Level Firewall

A popular wordpress firewall plugin (web application firewall or waf) is dns-level website firewall. Your website traffic is routed through their cloud proxy servers by these firewalls. So, it enables them to send only legitimate traffic to your web server. Due to their exceptional ability to distinguish between legitimate website traffic and malicious requests, we strongly advise using a dns-level firewall. Dns-level website firewalls significantly reduce the load on your wordpress hosting server, ensuring that your website does not go offline. Leading wordpress website security providers like sucuri, maxcdn (stackpath), cloudflare, wordfence security, and jetpack offer dns-level firewalls. You can use any of them depending on your needs.

10. Upgrade Conversion Optimization Tools

Having a fast site is crucial for any project or business. Search engines like google consider page speed a ranking factor as it affects the overall user experience. The wordpress site offers various tools and features that influence your page speed. We will demonstrate how to utilize those features to speed up wordpress. Improving a site’s loading time can help: increase rankings on search engines reduce bounce rate get higher conversions this guide will share 12 actionable steps that can significantly speed up your wordpress site. Backed by expert insights, you will learn valuable tips and understand wordpress speed optimization better. Hostinger has a pagespeed test feature on its hpanel to simplify the process of optimizing your loading time.

Pingdom is one of the most popular website performance monitoring tools. However, unlike our first two, it’s not free. The biggest advantage of the tool is that it’s easy to use. It also allows you to set different criteria for your tests. For example, you can select different geographical locations to run a test, allowing you to see how fast your website loads for a particular geographical demographic. Once you’ve run your test, the results are presented on an easy-to-understand overview dashboard. You can also get a detailed report with all issues and how to fix them. With site speed being a critical seo, ux, and cro (conversion rate optimization) element, you can’t afford to neglect it.

11. Optimize WooCommerce Database

Struggling with how to speed up woocommerce and create a fast-loading store? having a speedy store is essential because your store’s load times will affect your shoppers’ experiences, your seo rankings, and even your store’s conversion rates. But at the same time, woocommerce stores are harder to optimize than regular wordpress sites, which might have you disappointed in your store’s load times. There are several reasons, but two of the biggest are that woocommerce stores are a lot more database-intensive than regular wordpress sites and you can’t cache all of your store’s pages. However, that doesn’t mean you don’t have options to create a faster store.

In this section, we will be covering the top five performance optimization plugins available for wordpress. And they are: wp rocket – wordpress caching bj lazy load – image lazy loading perfmatters – overall performance boosting wp-optimize – database optimization below, we will go through each plugin, and you can decide which one to choose for your wordpress/woocommerce site. So, without any further ado, let’s get into the list.

Slow page loading can cause loss of sales in your store. We hope the speed optimization tips covered in this guide have helped you to fix your woocommerce slow page load times. Using image compression plugins as well as caching plugins greatly improves the loading speed of your woocommerce website. So do well to ensure those are installed on your site. There are other advanced troubleshooting tips you can perform such as database optimization to improve your sites’ loading speed. To further optimize your store and the entire site, read our complete wordpress speed and core web vitals optimization guides.

We've a complete guide on wordpress database optimization , its a really comprehensive guide on cleaning and optimizing your wordpress database, since woocommerce is also based on wordpress the same principles applies. If your store is visited by a user, it requests your site content, which is mostly static and does not change often. In order to place an order, they make a dynamic request. The processing of these requests could be slowed down if your store's database isn't optimized. A slow server can ultimately lead to a slow website. By removing unnecessary junk from the database, you will be able to optimize it.

Nobody sprints with ballast, not even your website. Therefore, free your woocommerce database from data junk that unnecessarily weighs you down. To do this, go through the steps described in the article clean wordpress database explained steps through remove themes clean up and optimize media library delete wordpress sessions.

12. Optimize JavaScript and CSS Files

Caching is the process of saving and storing static copies of your site’s files in a temporary storage location. Doing this allows a web page to be delivered to the visitor’s browser more quickly. To fully understand the benefits of caching, let’s review what happens when a visitor sees your website for the first time. When a user visits a page on your site, their browser sends a request to your website's hosting server asking for the different elements of your site — including html files , css style sheets, javascript, images, and more. Your server then builds these resources and sends them back to the user's browser, resulting in a web page being shown on their screen.

On the surface, the user opens their browser of choice and enters a url. When you enter a url, a dns request is sent from your end. This issue directly pertains to your domain and hosting provider. For example, a hosting provider like godaddy stores all your files and information locally. Now things start to get interesting; dom starts loading all html, css files and also javascript. But it rarely runs all the necessary scripts or loads a web page. Dom request additional resources from the server to run everything correctly. This is where everything starts going downhill culminating in your website loading very slowly.

One of the main advantages of using wordpress is that you don’t have to write a single line of code. However, there are plenty of cases that your website can benefit from doing so. Yet, every time a css , js, or html call occurs, it slows down your website. Thus, to speed up wordpress, you need to minify these files and reduce the number of calls. One of the best and easiest ways to do this is to use the autoptimize plugin. It minifies all of the code and ultimately makes it lightweight. In fact, autoptimize effectively reduces the cumulative layout shift score in pagespeed insights and gtmetrix.

Css and javascript files are sent to the browser every time a user visits the page, which means their size has a direct effect on the loading speed. That is why you should always aim for reducing the size of js, css (and html) files as much as possible without affecting the site’s functionality and look. You can minify the files manually by deleting unnecessary spaces and comments, though it can be achieved much faster with plugins like autoptimize or clearfy cache. These plugins are also capable of compressing the files allowing you to speed up your wordpress site even more.

To put it simply, minification means reducing your html, css, and javascript files’ size. The smaller the file, the easier and quicker it becomes for your website to load pages. Minifying removes unnecessary spaces, lines, and characters from the files, making files almost unreadable for humans. While your website won’t be able to tell the difference, your users will certainly notice an improvement in your website’s speed. Again, you can use a good wordpress plugin for that. Some of the most popular minifying plugins are wp super minify , autoptimize , or w3 total cache that i mentioned earlier.