Want serious success with your WordPress site? The most important thing you can probably do is speed up your loading times.

Although you’ll still need a blog that’s packed full of useful information and helpful content, speed really does count in today’s digital world. Not only do fast loading pages improve the experience that your user gets when they come to your website, but they can also help with the SEO of your site too. In this article, we’re going to take a look at eight ways that you can enhance WordPress performance in no time.

1. Start with Optimised Hosting

It’s worth noting that your hosting choices will play a significant role in the performance of your WordPress website. Most sites are hosted on shared servers, along with a bunch of other places that consume the same limited resources. Shared hosting leads to countless problems with both performance and security, regardless of how well you optimise your WP site.

While sharing hosting can seem like a great way to cut costs, it’s rarely a good idea if you want to deliver an unforgettable experience to your target audience.

2. Minify CSS and JavaScript Files

If you’re testing your website with Google PageSpeed, and your site performs less than perfect, you might get a warning that reminds you to minify your CSS and JS files. This just means that you need to reduce the about of CSS and JS requests you make to your server. The fewer requests you make, your faster your pages will load. You can minify your CSS and JavaScript files manually, or you can use a plugin.

3. Change your WP Theme

The WordPress marketplace is packed full of different themes to choose from to help you make a lasting impression on your target audience. These themes are designed to accommodate a range of different requirements. Ideally, if you want to have a fast-loading site that looks great, you’ll need a WP theme that not only looks good but is “lightweight” too. Choosing a lightweight theme is a good idea particularly for a blogging site, as you don’t want your customers to struggle to browse through your pages.

4. Enable GZip Compressions

This is another fantastic way to speed up your WP website if possible. Through GZip compression, you reduce your files by about 30% and automatically decompress those files with the user browser accesses the content. This feature can also be added to WordPress using plugins like W3 total cache. Note that your server should support GZip compression too.

5. Uninstall Unnecessary Plugins

Installing a bunch of plugins onto your WordPress website can seem like a good idea at first, but it also adds more weight to your server, which means that it takes longer for your pages to load. Ideally, you should only be using the bare minimum number of plugins from trusted sources when possible. If there are any unwanted plugins in your system, get rid of them as quickly as possible.

6. Compress your Images

A great way to speed up your WP blog is to compress as much as possible. The images on your website are one of the biggest things that your server has to load. If you reduce image size by using a manual tool like photoshop, you could be at it for months. However, you can always check out some of the plugins available on WordPress that allow you to compress images automatically when you’re uploading them to your site.

7. Use a Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network, as the name suggests, caches your static content and helps to deliver it rapidly to people around the world, by allowing people to load information from the server that’s closest to their location. CDN solutions share your content with servers around the globe so that your users don’t have to make requests from thousands of miles away when they want to access your website.

8. Use a Caching Plugin

Finally, although you don’t want too many plugins on your WordPress blog, there are plenty of plugins out there that can be very useful. For instance, a caching plugin can help you to drastically reduce page loading times, and most of these tools are free.
Caching your pages simply mean that your users can automatically load the information they need on your pages from a cache, rather than making requests straight to the server. This helps with pulling information faster for your end customers.