Page loading speed is not only crucial for ranking on Google search engine ranking page but also any visitor loves a faster loading website. Especially, when you are using a responsive design to serve your site to mobile users, you need to perform a lot of optimization. In this article, we will highlight the points which will help you to make your WordPress website load faster.
Which Tests I Can Use to Test Page Loading Speed of My WordPress Site?
www.webpagetest.org is a standard for testing the page loading speed. Google Page Speed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom are the other three standard test suites. Unfortunately, you can not expect a website with a responsive design to score very high by Google Page Speed Insights because we can not properly optimize a site both for desktop and mobile.
What are the General Rules to Have a Good Page Loading Speed of a WordPress Site?
If you can afford a good dedicated server, the TTFB expected to be better and also, MySQL on optimized dedicated server will perform better. Cloud server from good vendors such as MediaTemplate, Rackspace, and IBM Cloud does not cost lesser. We have guides on this website to install Apache2, and Nginx on the server and optimize it. You should use some cache on the server-side (OpCache, Varnish cache) to optimize the backend. Apache2 can be well optimized, and SSL configuration can also be optimized.
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You can never beat a great server with a low-end server. This is a fact that you have to accept. Second, you must use a cache plugin. It can be W3TC or WP super cache. We have guides on optimization tricks for both. As our servers are cheaper, cache plugins take time to build the cache.
Third, you should use a good CDN. Forth, we suggest you use some plugins like Async JS and CSS to pass the tests of Google. Forth, use a good WordPress theme framework, like StudioPress Genesis and a well-coded child theme. Firth, avoid using a lot of plugins.
Sixth, avoid adding too many snippets on the child theme’s functions.php file. We have a discussion and a plugin to avoid it. Seventh, it is better to remove the comment form. Because it sucks some resources and opens up SQL injection vulnerability.
Eighth, you can use some server side software like Google PageSpeed.
