How to Speed up WordPress for a Higher Converting Website

Table of Contents

• How to Speed up WordPress in 7 Steps
  • The Quick Answer
  • 1. Fast, Reliable Web Hosting & CDN
  • 2. Choosing The Right WordPress Theme
  • 3. Image File Types & Compression
  • 4. WOFF2 Font Files
  • 5. Caching
  • 6. Keep an Eye on Your Plugins
  • 7. Evaluate Your Page Content
  • Bonus – Do I Need a Performance Plugin to Speed up WordPress?
  • How to Speed up WordPress – Conclusion

Knowing how to speed up WordPress is a crucial skill when it comes to keeping folks on your website. Additionally, loading times have been proven to directly affect your conversion rates.

Website performance has a large, measurable effect on conversion rates. Studies have consistently shown that fast page speed will result in a better conversion rate. In other words, the quicker a webpage loads, the more likely a user is to perform the targeted action on that webpage.

Cloudflare

In this article, I’ve covered seven initial steps to start fine-tuning your WordPress site. As a result, you’ll reduce your page sizes as well as improve your loading times. This, of course, keeps your visitors happy, which, in turn, keeps Google happy. A double win for your SEO strategy!

Disclaimer – No single blog post, tutorial or video will hold a miracle cure for a faster-loading website. Each site will usually have a unique set of requirements. However, address as many steps as you feel comfortable with and adopt an ongoing process to continually improve your scores.

Talking of scores, you can test your website performance over at Google PageSpeed Insights. Furthermore, just so you know that you can trust me, here are the results for one of my websites, leafletlion.uk. I’m somewhat obsessed.

How to Speed up WordPress in 7 Steps

When paired with the right theme and built correctly, WordPress is nippy right out of the box. With that said, as soon as you start adding plugins, page builders, huge images and a plethora of elements that you probably don’t even need, it’s going to struggle.

Over the last eleven years, I’ve tweaked my process, formula and tech stack for optimum performance and results.

Here are seven tried, tested and actionable steps that you can apply to any WordPress website. Let’s do this!

1. Fast, Reliable Web Hosting & CDN

Firstly, it’s important to realise that where your website lives (your web host’s servers) needs to be fast, secure and reliable.

For the best of the best, check out:

• Kinsta ($35 per month for a single site, $70 for two sites or $340 for twenty. Pay less with an annual plan).
• Rocket ($30 per month for a single site, $60 for three sites or $100 for ten. Pay less with an annual plan).

Both of the above options are also integrated with Cloudflare. This makes your site a whole lot more secure, as well as optimising how your content is served via a CDN (content delivery network). Pretty impressive stuff, I have to say!

At Rocket.net we only believe in providing the best in class, which is exactly why we partnered with Cloudflare to deliver all traffic on our platform through their Enterprise CDN.

rocket.net

Alternatively, if you’re a smaller website or on a smaller budget:

• 20i (from £9.99 per month)
• SiteGround (from £13.99 per month)

Generally speaking, a smaller site can easily get away with one of the lower-priced options if needed. Otherwise, if there’s room in the budget and you’re bringing in tonnes of traffic, you’ll get the quickest speeds with either Kinsta or Rocket.

I’ve used both Rocket and 20i and can highly recommend both options, with the latter being my current provider.

2. Choosing The Right WordPress Theme

Secondly, the theme you choose to build your website with will directly affect your loading times.

Having used block themes such as Twenty Twenty-Five & Ollie, I can highly recommend any of these options. They’re fast, lightweight and about as close to building purely with WordPress as it gets.

Not ready to commit to a block theme just yet? Check out something like Kadence, which will also help you achieve some incredibly pleasing loading times.

Do plenty of research and testing to find a solution that fits your needs. Ultimately, if you can work with a theme that lets you build with Gutenberg/the block editor, this is where the magic lies.

3. Image File Types & Compression

Images are usually the main culprit that causes your page size to be way bigger than it needs to be. This needn’t be the case.

A simple, three-step process will reform your images, helping them load instantly (no additional plugin required).

1. Use the correct size
2. Use a format like WebP
3. Compress before uploading

First of all, if you know your image will take up half of the width of your page, and your page is 1280px wide, then we know your image needs to be 640px wide.

Image formats such as WebP and AVIF are leading the way in reducing file sizes across the web. WebP is the most popular of the two and is usually my chosen format.

Most design or photography software (including Affinity) will let you export as a WebP file. Go ahead and choose that option, then pop your image into tinypng.com.

This will, or at least should, result in a drastically reduced file size. You may need to experiment with different file types. Specifically, simple vector graphics can sometimes work out smaller as a PNG.

4. WOFF2 Font Files

WOFF2, despite its ridiculous name, is a font file format that’s way smaller than anything you’ll download directly from Google Fonts.

For example, if you were using Space Grotesk (SemiBold and Regular). Here’s how the files compare after being converted to WOFF2.

• Space Grotesk – SemiBold.ttf – 90 KB
• Space Grotesk – Regular.ttf – 90 KB

• Space Grotesk – SemiBold.woff2 – 33 KB
• Space Grotesk – Regular.woff2 – 33 KB

Once you’ve downloaded your font files, if they haven’t already supplied a WOFF2 version, you can convert them at CloudConvert for free.

5. Caching

Next up, caching. Nobody (probably just me, actually) really knows how it works, other than it’s powered by magic. As a result of said magic, it significantly speeds up your website’s loading times.

Various popular plugins are available for WordPress. These include W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache, and WP Super Cache.

Caching is the process of saving and storing static copies of your site’s files in a temporary storage location. Doing this allows a web page to be delivered to the visitor’s browser more quickly.

Hubspot

However, before you install yet another plugin, check to see if your hosting provider already has you covered. As far as I’m aware, most do these days.

For example, with my provider, 20i, their caching plugin is automatically included when you install WordPress. Happy days!

Note – Some caching plugins can break your site, so stick with what’s been provided by your web host wherever possible.

6. Keep an Eye on Your Plugins

Talking of installing plugins, the next step to address when considering how to speed up WordPress is the number (and quality) you have installed.

Less is certainly more in this step. With the slow but steady developments with core WordPress tools, there’s a lot we can do without the need for as many plugins now.

With that said, it’s doubtful that you won’t need any. Choose wisely, and only install a plugin if you fully trust the developer. Sounds a bit dodgy, right? This is because out-of-date or badly managed plugins are often how a WordPress site gets hacked.

Kadence Blocks (and all of their other plugins), Yoast, Koko Analytics, Widget Review for Google and Two Factor are all plugins I use and recommend. I’d rarely need much on top of this.

7. Evaluate Your Page Content

Lastly, a fast-loading page borrows many of the same principles as sustainable web design. This means questioning every aspect of every element on your page.

Why is it there? What purpose does it serve? Will it affect conversion rates if it’s not on the page? Of course, there are plenty of elements that will need to remain present, but maybe there are a few we can remove.

Consider animations, videos, large images and embedded content or contact forms. These will all contribute to slower load times.

A contact form, for example, can be moved to a separate contact page, freeing up your homepage to fire on all cylinders. ?

Bonus – Do I Need a Performance Plugin to Speed up WordPress?

Most lists or articles on how to speed up WordPress will include installing a performance plugin. These are available with free and paid options, and the most popular is WP Rocket.

This will set you back $59 per year for a single site or $199 for up to ten sites. These sorts of tools handle your caching plus a whole bundle of additional features.

While it’s an extremely powerful plugin that will indeed speed up most WordPress websites, it’s not always necessary.

For example, if the site is designed and built with all of the above steps in place, as well as using the right tech stack, you won’t need WP Rocket.

I personally no longer use a performance plugin, but I’d happily recommend one if a specific website would benefit.

How to Speed up WordPress – Conclusion

With an ongoing process of tweaking and tuning your WordPress website, you can definitely achieve the green circles of joy from PageSpeed Insights.

Being aware of your current scores and working to better them will positively affect your website’s conversion rates. A faster loading time equals more clients or customers. I think we can all agree that more enquiries are only ever a good thing.

Seven initial areas to focus your attention on are:

1. Fast, Reliable Web Hosting & CDN
2. Choosing The Right WordPress Theme
3. Image File Types & Compression
4. WOFF2 Font Files
5. Caching
6. Keep an Eye on Your Plugins
7. Evaluate Your Page Content