How To Speed Up Your WordPress Website’s Load Time

This blog loads faster than 97% of all websites tested by Pingdom’s Website Speed Test as you can see in the report above. It wasn’t just naturally this fast, it took some effort. To save you time and help you speed up your WordPress site, I’ve outlined 19 specific ways you can do this on any WordPress driven web site. Some of these items will not be options if your web host doesn’t accommodate them, but most of them will be relevant regardless of your web host.

    Best Practices for Load Time Optimization

  1. Use the fastest WordPress hosting

    Everything on this list is essentially pointless if you’re on a bad WordPress web host, so make damn sure you’re not! For cheap and fast go with SiteGround. For the fastest go with WP Engine.

  2. Remove Unused Stylesheets & Scripts

    If you’re not using it, remove it.

  3. Remove Unused Images Referenced via Stylesheets

    Don’t reference what you don’t use.

  4. Disable Unused Plugins

    Make sure you’re only running plugins you actually use or they’ll clog up your site for no good reason.

  5. Ensure Elements Load Only When In Use

    For example, don’t load a script in your header file throughout your site if it only needs to be called on one page.

  6. Use JPG’s Instead of PNG’s when Appropriate

    JPG’s have smaller file sizes, if you don’t need the image to be transparent, then you don’t need it to be a PNG.

  7. Don’t Rely on Slow Third Parties

    Twitter is notorious for downtime and slow connections, cache their data, don’t depend on it being available all the time or it will destroy your site’s load time.

  8. Localize External Files Whenever Possible

    Don’t make external requests when you don’t have to; the more you make, the more servers you have to trust to not slow your web site down.

  9. Load All Stylesheets in the Head Before scripts where possible

    JavaScript generally takes longer to load than stylesheets, you don’t want your JavaScript to delay the loading of your styles.

    10. WordPress Plugins for Load Time Optimization

  10. Use WP Super Cache

    While this may be less popular than W3 Total Cache, I have found it to reduce load time more effectively. You’ll just have to deal with a less user-friendly interface to take advantage of it.

  11. Use Better WP Minify

    Sometimes it’s better not to minify your files, so test the load time with Pingdom’s Website speed test before and after enabling it, to determine whether or not it makes sense for your site. This is particularly true if you have a lot of CSS files being loaded, as one big group they can take a lot longer to load than they would separately.

  12. Use WP Smush.it

    Ideally you’ll be able to just bulk “smush” all your images. Yahoo’s Smush.it service tends to be a bit unreliable however. If it’s not working at the time, you can always run a GTmetrix report on your site and manually download the compressed version of the images it reports as not being optimized.

    13. Third-Party Services for Load Time Optimization

  13. Use a Content Delivery Network

    I recommend either Cloudflare – Click here for my setup guide or MaxCDN – Click here for my setup guide

    Why use a CDN on your Blog?
    A CDN (content distribution network) is useful for speeding up your website’s load time for your visitors, particularly users located far from your website’s server’s physical site. What it does is store your images, JavaScript & CSS files on locations throughout the world so they load faster via the closest POP (point of presence) site. This also helps reduce the amount of bandwidth your server uses. CDN service is relatively inexpensive with MaxCDN and free with Cloudflare and adds a lot of value, plus it’s easy to do, so why not do it? Anyone that takes their website seriously should use a CDN.

  14. Use CSS Sprites (create them with SpriteMe)

    This gem makes it super easy to create & implement CSS sprites for your site.

    15. .htaccess Tweaks for Load Time Optimization

  15. Enable mod_deflate

    After enabling mod_deflate on your server, add the following directives to your .htaccess file:

    16. # MOD_DEFLATE #
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
#The following line is enough for .js and .css
AddOutputFilter DEFLATE js css
#The following line also enables compression by file content type, for the following list of Content-Type:s
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml
#The following lines are to avoid bugs with some browsers
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

# MOD_DEFLATE #

  16. Enable mod_headers

    After enabling mod_headers on your server, specify a vary: accept-encoding header by adding the following directives to your .htaccess file:

    17. # MOD_HEADERS #
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
<filesmatch ".(js|css|xml|gz)$">
Header append Vary: Accept-Encoding


# MOD_HEADERS #

  17. Set Cache Expiration

    Add the following directives to your .htaccess file (with whatever expiration you feel is most appropriate for your site of course):

    18. # CACHE EXPIRATION #
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/ico "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 week"
# CACHE EXPIRATION #

    WordPress Functions for Load Time Optimization

  18. Load JavaScript from Your Template’s Footer

    You can install the Scripts To Footer WordPress Plugin…or just add it’s PHP code to your functions.php file:

    19. /*
 Plugin Name: JavaScript to Footer
 Plugin URI: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/footer-javascript
 Description: This plugin automatically moves JavaScript code to page footer, speeding up page loading time.
 Version: 0.4.1
 Author: Vladimir Prelovac
 Author URI: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir
 */

// super easy way to move javascript to footer
 remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_print_scripts');
 remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_print_head_scripts', 9);
 remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 1);
 add_action('wp_footer', 'wp_print_scripts', 5);
 add_action('wp_footer', 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 5);
 add_action('wp_footer', 'wp_print_head_scripts', 5);

    The problem is, some of your JavaScript files may not work properly if they’re moved to the footer. In this case you’ll have to move the JavaScript files to the footer on a case-by-case basis. You can do this utilizing the wp_register_script() & wp_enqueue_script() functions. These are normally found in the functions.php file of your WordPress theme. The fifth parameter in each function is $in_footer. As long as you set this parameter to true for both functions for a given script, the given script will then be loaded in the footer where the wp_footer() function is called in your theme’s template.

    For example if you had the script prettyphoto being included as follows:

    wp_register_script( 'prettyphoto', $uri.'/js/prettyPhoto/js/jquery.prettyPhoto.js', array('jquery') );
wp_enqueue_script( 'prettyphoto' );

    You would adjust it as follows to get it to load in the footer:

    wp_register_script( 'prettyphoto', $uri.'/js/prettyPhoto/js/jquery.prettyPhoto.js', array('jquery'), '', true );
wp_enqueue_script( 'prettyphoto', '', '', '', true );

  19. Remove Query Strings from Static Stylesheets & Scripts

    Add the following to your functions.php file to remove them from all your scripts & styles:

    20. /* Remove unnecessary query tags from scripts & stylesheets in header */
 function _remove_script_version( $src ){
 $parts = explode( '?', $src );
 return $parts[0];
 }
 add_filter( 'script_loader_src', '_remove_script_version', 15, 1 );
 add_filter( 'style_loader_src', '_remove_script_version', 15, 1 );

    Use the following instead if you need to keep the version query string on a style or script for some reason (i.e. the Google Maps API reference breaks if it’s removed):

    /* Remove unnecessary query tags from scripts & stylesheets in header */
 function _remove_script_version( $src ){
 $parts = explode( '?', $src );
 //return str_replace("http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js","http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false&ver=3.5.1", $parts[0]);
 return str_replace("http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js","", $parts[0]);
 }
 add_filter( 'script_loader_src', '_remove_script_version', 15, 1 );
 add_filter( 'style_loader_src', '_remove_script_version', 15, 1 );

Share Your Results

Test your load time before following this guide. Once you have fully implemented these techniques, please share your results in the comments! Also, if you have any further recommendations I’d love to hear those too!

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

31 COMMENTS

  3. A note about jpg vs. png. Each type of image is different, so sometimes even gif is better if it is images like line drawings using only 256 colors. png is also sometimes better depending on the actual image. jpg filetypes are always best with photos. png is great for icons, and both png and gif support transparency but jpg images don’t.

    Andy, do you provide site and page load optimization as a service? If so, please contact me at http://www.21stsoft.com. Much appreciated.

    • Thanks for the detailed explanation on the differences between jpg, png and gif, great info!

      My team and I at MentorMate provide these types of services once in a while, I’ll reach out to you.

  9. Validation errors are not important at all in the whole scheme of things. So long as your site renders properly on the important browsers and for the various mobile resolutions they’re essentially irrelevant and fruitless to bother fixing. If I spent my time worrying about them above more important things (i.e. content, seo, load time, mobile rendering, etc.) then my site probably wouldn’t be one of the top 45,000 most visited websites in the world.

  10. hi. Thanks for the speeding tips.

    i get tht following error, if i insert the “Remove Query Strings from Static” Code:

    The Google Maps API Server rejected your request. The ‘sensor’ Parameter specified in the request must be set either ‘true’ or ‘false’.

    How can i resolve it?

    thx

  12. Hey there. Great post, thanks for sharing the tips. I’ve used the pingdom tool and I can already see that I have a lot of room for improvement with my site speed. My window tinting company website is here: http://www.alphatinting.com. I’m not exceptional with the technical side of speeding up my site. I’ve used caching plugins and minifying plugins before, but sometimes I notice it breaks certain parts of my site. Is this something that you offer as a service? If not, is there a place where I can hire someone for a one-time optimization for site speed?

    Thanks in advance!

    – Jeff

  13. Thanks for this helpful post. I have spent a good bit of time on trying to speed up my page load, although with a photo-intensive food blog, it will never be perfect. Here’s my problem: Ads. I can’t move that javascript to the footer because I just stick the tags in wherever they need to appear. They are all asynchronous, so in a tool like gtmetrix, my page load looks somewhat decent, but pagespeed insights seems to look at the total load time including ads. Is there any way to set some sort of delay for all js to load, even ads? Thank you!

  15. Hi Andy,

    Thanks for this detailed article, very helpful for people speeding up their website (me). I was wondering if, besides pingdom.com and gtmetrix.com if you know of any other good other speed testers. So far I’ve come across http://www.webpagetest.org and http://www.giftofspeed.com but there don’t seem to be many other alternatives available? You know of some good ones? Thanks! Magnus

  17. My G MAPS embed code always make my site slow. i had optimized my web pages by your post. but i can’t optimize my G MAPS widget. can i use static map instead of dynamic map.

    Kind regards

    • That’s not fair, I’ve updated the site a plethora of times since I originally wrote this blog post. I just tweaked some things and now it’s at 94% are you satisfied? Of course the strategy has changed and there are new options and tactics to consider now, but a lot of these are still useful tactics to implement today. Sounds like I should create an updated version of this for 2017.

  20. Never before discussed, but I didn’t write about it on Hackernoon until about a month ago, is Hyperdrive plugin. Which uses Fetch Injection to leverage modern browser technology to load pages magnitudes faster than otherwise possible using WordPress or traditional script loading techniques.

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