Speed up WordPress site instantly

In WordPress, lots of plugins are available and you can easily build a full-featured website with these plugins. These plugins and site’s theme include many JavaScript and CSS codes and it does affect your site speed. If your website takes the long time to load, most of the visitors can leave. According to the Google ranking algorithm, search ranking depends on site speed. So, the speed of your site influences the visitors and SEO.

This WordPress optimization tutorial helps to speed up WordPress site and make WordPress faster instantly. Using two WordPress plugin, you can reduce site load time and improve speed. Follow our step by step guide mentioned below and load your site much faster.

Before starting the optimization you can test website page speed. Some popular website speed testing sites are given below.

• Google Pagespeed Insights
• GTmetrix
• Pingdom

Step 1: Install and configure W3 Total Cache Plugin

W3 Total Cache is a popular WordPress plugin for easy Web Performance Optimization (WPO) using caching: browser, page, object, database and minify.

Installation:

 You can install W3 Total Cache plugin in your WordPress site by two ways.

•  Go to the wp admin panel and navigate to Plugins » Add New. Search for W3 Total Cache plugin and install this plugin.
• OR
•  Go to the plugin page and download this plugin. Extract plugin ZIP file and insert the plugin directory (w3-total-cache/) into /wp-content/plugins/ directory.

 Go to the Plugins » Installed Plugins from wp admin panel and activate W3 Total Cache plugin.

Configuration:

Once installation is completed Performance tab would be appear into the left sidebar.
 Click on the Performance » General Settings from the sidebar.
 Under General check “Toggle all caching types on or off (at once)” option.

 Under CDN uncheck “Enable” option of “CDN”.

 Under Monitoring uncheck “Enable” option of “New Relic”.

 Click on any Save all settings button.

 Click on the Performance » Minify from the sidebar.
 Go to the HTML & XML section.
 From HTML minify settings check “Enable”, “Inline CSS minification”, “Inline JS minification” and “Line break removal”. Click on Save all settings.

 Click on the Performance » Browser Cache from the sidebar.
 Under the General section check “Set Last-Modified header”, “Set expires header”, “Set cache control header”, “Set entity tag (eTag)” and “Enable HTTP (gzip) compression”. Click on Save all settings.

Step 2: Install and configure WP Smush Plugin

WP Smush Plugin helps to reduce image file sizes, improve performance and boost images SEO of your site.

Installation:
 You can install WP Smush plugin in your WordPress site by two ways.

•  Go to the wp admin panel and navigate to Plugins » Add New. Search for WP Smush plugin and install this plugin.
• OR
•  Go to the plugin page and download this plugin. Extract plugin ZIP file and insert the plugin directory (wp-smushit/) into /wp-content/plugins/ directory.

 Go to the Plugins » Installed Plugins from wp admin panel and activate WP Smush plugin.

Configuration:

 Click on the Media » WP Smush from the sidebar.
 Go to the Smush in Bulk section and click on Bulk Smush Now.

•  WP Smush free version allow you to bulk smushing 50 attachments per request. So, once 50 attachments is completed, you need to click to start next 50 attachments new bulk smushing.

Step 3: Analyze Your Site

After completing Step 1 and Step 2, it’s time to test your site speed. You can test your site speed by some popular speed testing sites. Your testing report would look like the below.

This WordPress optimization guide is very quick and effective solution for increase site speed. After trying around many plugins and testing, we’ve found that the combination of W3 Total Cache and WP Smush plugins are the easiest way to improve your site performance.