WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for building and hosting a small buisiness website and a
high percentage of websites hosting on our platform would be developed in WordPress. We want you to
have the best hosting experience possible so if you need our team to work with you to analyse your website and help speed up it’s load time just open a support ticket and we will be more than happy to assist.
Speeding up a WordPress website is essential for better user experience and search engine rankings. Here
are some ways to speed up a WordPress website:
Consider your Hosting Package:
The Starter Shared Plan whilst an excellent package is ‘shared web hosting’ meaning there will be many
websites hosted on the same physical server and this will have a small impact on performance especially if
another website on the same server gets busy. We can still assist you in speeding up a website hosted on
a Starter Package but there are more server side changes we can make if you were to consider moving
your website to a Single Site Server such as changes to how Apache operates to give better performance.
Use a lightweight WordPress theme:
A theme that uses too many features, widgets, and plugins can slow down your website. Choose a
lightweight and fast theme that is optimised for speed. Always review your use of plugins – do you need all the plugins that you have installed on your website or can you remove some that are not in use.
Use a caching plugin:
A caching plugin creates a static version of your website and serves it to users which in turn stops a lot of
database queries that will generally slow down performance. Choosing the right caching plugin can
significantly speed up your website. Popular caching plugins for WordPress include W3 Total Cache, WP
Rocket, and WP Super Cache. Our team have had a lot of success with the free version of WP Optimize.
Optimise images:
We’ve seen many clients upload huge images and then resize them in the browser meaning the page loads a lot more data than is actually needed. Large images can slow down your website significantly and give lower scores on Google Pagespeed. Compress images before uploading them to your website, and use an image optimisation plugin like Smush to automatically optimise images.
Load as many resources locally as possible:
We had a client recently whose main page was slow to load. Looking at the waterfall load chart it showed
that the fonts were loading from an external website and that external website was extremely slow resulting in an overall slowdown of performance. The client had their developer change the code to load the fonts locally from the web server itself and performance significantly improved.
Minimize HTTP requests:
Each file on your website, such as images, scripts, and stylesheets, requires an HTTP request to load.
Minimize the number of HTTP requests by combining files and reducing the number of plugins you use.
The less http requests the faster the website will load.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN):
A CDN is a network of servers that store copies of your website’s files and serve them to users from the server closest to their location. This can speed up your website by reducing the distance that data has to travel. We get asked all the time if it’s beneficial to spend some money on a CDN to load images for example. Our general advice is if you have for example an ecommerce website accessed worldwide then a CDN may help as if you are accessing in Australia the images will load from the closest CDN point of presence in Australia as opposed to your web server in the UK for instance. However if you are a website serving clients from mainly one region then a CDN is unlikely to give a significant boost in performance.
Use lazy loading:
Lazy loading delays the loading of images and videos until the user scrolls down to where they are located on the page. This can significantly reduce page load times, especially for pages with a lot of images or videos.
Optimise MySQL:
On Private Hosting our team can assist with running a special MySQL database tuner whereby we look at
your database performance and see what changes can be made to faster database performance. Even on
a Shared server you can reduce the database size by archiving old entries and ensuring your database is
not bloated. We’ve also had good success with a WordPress plugin called Index WP which adds keys (also
known as indexes) to make it easier and faster for WordPress to find the information it needs.
By implementing these strategies, you can significantly improve the speed of your WordPress website and
provide a better user experience for your visitors. Please know that with Big Wet Fish Hosting you are not
on your own when it comes to speeding up your WordPress Website. Our expert team will advise on what
you can do and we can make any tweaks server side to help. We can also advise if there is anything
website side that your developer can assist with optimizing for better performance.
