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Chariot

The Performance Tutorial for WordPress

  • If you want your WordPress powered website to load faster so that you get better search rankings, more conversions and happier users, then use the following tool and walk through the steps needed to improve your WordPress site speed.

    Every 100ms delay costs 1% of sales

    Greg Linden of Amazon
    To get started, we need some basic information from you.
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    Someone that actively keeps your WordPress and its plugins and themes up to date as well as secure?
  • Godaddy, WPEngine, SiteGround, WordPress.com, etc...?
  • WordPress, unless you mean WordPress.com isn't a hosting company. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS). WordPress is like Microsoft Word, and your hosting company is more like the builder of your home or the owner of your apartment building.
  • We can't help you speed up your WordPress.com website. WordPress.com is a hosted WordPress instance that allows zero control from external vendors. You will want to contact WordPress.com support for any speed concerns or contact us to have the site moved from WordPress.com to our platform.
  • We are big fans of WPEngine and think they are a great choice for smaller businesses. If you are experiencing site speed issues using their hosting, we recommend you contact their support as they can help with many of the solutions we are going to go through in this tool.
  • If you are using our services, then your website is likely already faster than most. If you feel it can be improved, feel free to contact us and we will see what we can do.
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  • Please open a new tab or browser window and run a GTMetrix test on your website.
    You can find this information near the top under Page Details
  • That's amazing. It sounds like your WordPress website is very optimized. You should be very happy. If your site isn't growing quickly then maybe you need to look at SEO or content development for continued growth. You can contact us at PressTitan for assistance with either of those things.
  • You have a fast website. You likely don't need to do anything to improve your site speed. Good job! If you feel there are still things you can improve, feel free to continue through this guide. This guide also provides plugin recommendations that may be useful to you.
  • Sounds like your WordPress site could use a bit of a speed improvement. Ideally, you want your pages to load in under three seconds as people are impatient. This guide will help you improve your site speed.
  • I can see why you wanted to work through this tool, your WordPress website probably loads too slow for the majority of your visitors. Improving your site speed should reduce your bounce rate and if you are an eCommerce website, it should improve conversions.
    This information can be found next to Fully Loaded Time

  • Scores

    You should also record your PageSpeed and YSlow scores, but we won't be using them directly. Scores don't matter as much as resolving issues and making sure your site loads as fast as possible.
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  • To find out, go to your WordPress administration panel and then under Plugins -> Installed Plugins, you can see how many you have installed, inactive and active.
  • That's great! Having so few plugins means you are already on the way to having an optimized WordPress installation. Plugins can add JavaScript, external API calls, and page weight that can slow things down and make the user experience worse.
  • You have an okay number of plugins active. If you can remove any of the plugins you are using, your site may load even faster. We recommend creating a staging environment and testing which plugins you can remove and what effect they would have on your site loading speed.
  • You have too many plugins active on your site. You need to investigate if you can remove any. Plugins that add JavaScript, call third-party services or add additional page weight can slow down your website. We recommend twelve (12) or fewer plugins and believe that for all but the most extreme edge cases, this should be enough to provide a good owner and user experience.
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  • WordPress, by default, doesn't focus on raw speed. There are things enabled that can make your site slower, so let's go through and change those settings.

  • Disable Emoji

    If you don't use Emoji on your website, then disabling it can be a small speed boost and savings as it loads a 10 KB file on every single load. Depending on your version of WordPress, there may or may not be a setting to disable Emoji.
    • Log into your WordPress admin
    • Go to Settings -> Writing
    • Look for a Formatting Option called "Convert emoticons like 🙂 and 😛 to graphics on display" and uncheck it
    • Click Save Settings
    If you don't have this option, install the Disable Emojis plugin, perfmatters, or WP Rocket (our favourite) which can help with this and many more things on our list today.

  • Disable XML-RPC

    Used as an early API system, XML-RPC is not used by most websites out there for anything at all and with the WP API already replicating most of the functionality, it is wise to remove XML-RPC. XML-RPC is good to disable/remove for security reasons alone! To disable XML-RPC, we recommend perfmatters or the Disable XML-RPC plugin. Note: As of creating this guide, If you have JetPack installed, you cannot disable XML-RPC as it still uses it to connect to your site.

  • Disable Gravatars

    If you are using Gravatars, or any images next to the comments your visitors are making, you are potentially slowing down pages on your site. I recommend going into Settings -> Discussion and unchecking the Show Avatars option.
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  • Image Optimization

    One of the biggest issues I see in modern websites is that they don't really think about the images they are using. Optimizing your images can be one of the biggest site speed changes you can make!
  • Maybe you need to change your approach. A different way of optimizing your images might be what you need. We recommend the following plugins:
    • Smush Pro
    • reSmush.it
    • EWWW Image Optimizer
  • Maybe you need to change your approach. A different way of optimizing your images might be what you need. We recommend the following plugins:
    • Smush Pro
    • reSmush.it
    • EWWW Image Optimizer
  • You really should be optimizing your images as much as possible. Images are some of the biggest performance killers on a site as they are typically the largest files you have to transfer to your visitors. We recommend the following plugins:
    • Smush Pro
    • reSmush.it
    • EWWW Image Optimizer
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  • Many of the issues that tend to come up with regards to WordPress site speed have to do with how the web host is configured. You might have noticed things like Add Expires Headers, Compress Components with GZIP or Leverage Browser Caching as issues brought up by the GTMetrix report. These issues require technical knowledge to resolve. If you aren't comfortable solving these issues yourself, put in a support ticket with your web hosting company explaining that you need their help to solve these issues.
  • You will want to look into adding Expires Headers information to your .htaccess file. Make sure you include images, CSS, JavaScript, and PDFs.
  • There are multiple ways to enable GZIP compression. Ideally, your website host will enable this for you, but if you want to do it yourself, some WordPress plugins will assist with this. We recommend using WP Rocket as it has an option to automatically add GZIP compression rules to your .htaccess file.
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  • Minify HTML

    Have you ever looked at the source code of your website? If you right click on a blank area of your web page, you should get an option to View Source. If you don't, search for how to "view source" using your web browser of choice. All of the line breaks, blank lines, extra spaces or characters that aren't needed actually add up and cause it to take longer to load your web page. This might be a small factor, but it is also one of the easier and less disruptive things you can do.
  • We recommend WP Rocket to minify your HTML.

  • Minify and Combine CSS/JS

    Your CSS can be minified quite easily, and usually, it can be combined as well without problem. JavaScript can be a little more difficult and require some adjustments to work correctly. But if you can complete this step, you'll likely see a large speed improvement.
  • We recommend WP Rocket to optimize your site and minify your CSS and JavaScript. Some other options include Perfmatters, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache.
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  • Caching

    We are bringing up caching late in the process because if you set up caching too early, it can sometimes be difficult to confirm the other steps have worked well. Caching is like taking a picture of a web page so that it doesn't have to be re-built from scratch for each and every visitor with calls to the database, running scripts and more.
  • We recommend WP Rocket as the best caching plugin for WordPress. Some other options include W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.

  • Content Delivery Network

    Think of a content delivery network like a bunch of servers out in the world with copies of some of your website. Because of them having those copies, they can provide files from your website to nearby people faster. So if your hosting is in California, but there is a CDN server in New York, and a visitor from New York loads your site, they'll have a faster experience than if you didn't have a CDN.
  • Cloudflare is a great free option available, but we also recommend KeyCDN, CDN77 and BunnyCDN as other options worth exploring.
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  • Refresh your website homepage so that your cache will be generated on your server and then please re-run the test with GTMetrix and wait for the results.
  • Please enter a number from 0 to 600.
    please enter the number of seconds only
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
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