Quick and simple ways to speed up a new WordPress website

There are many ways to speed-up a website including better hosting, responsive design/ theme, Content delivery network (CDN), JavaScript location etc. However, as a starter, it is important to be careful and take small steps. A lot of these changes can even break-up your new site or might get an error when implemented. As you become more comfortable with changes and ways to restore your site, you can play with more advanced and effective ways to speed-up your website. However, these are five simple things you can do now to help speed-up your website initially. Once you become more advanced or able to handle errors, you can take bigger steps or make bold changes to achieve your goal.

Enable caching

Caching will drastically improve the load time of pages that are not changing often. By enabling caching, your code doesn’t keep generating the same page over and over again.

There are several great plugins that can help you enable caching and also do other optimizations to speed up the site. W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and WP Fastest Cache are just a few of the free WordPress plugins that provide a different kind of caching e.g. page caching, database caching and object caching among others.

Compress images

Images are largest files on a site so if you compress it, it will save a lot of bandwidths. There are some great tools out there to help you compress your files.

There is an amazing, free plugin called WP-Smush, which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. No reason not to install this one. Tiny PNG is also a great tool, which allows strips un-used colors for lossy compressions.

Minify CSS and JavaScript files

Spaces and tabs make the code more readable for humans. However, servers and browsers couldn’t care less as long as it’s valid and executes without error. Removing all white space from the code where ever is possible, will help speed-up the site.

Rather than manually sift through your code with a fine tooth comb, plugin’s like W3 Total Cache can handle this at runtime.

Turn Off Pingback and Trackbacks

By default whenever another blog mentions you, WordPress notifies your site, which in turn updates data on the post. Turning this off will have no effect or not destroy the backlinks and it will save from doing a lot of work for your site.

To do this, simply go to Settings » Discussion page. Under the Default article settings section, uncheck the box next to ‘Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article’ option. Click on the save changes button to store your settings.

Remove unnecessary plugins or the ones that create issues

When we are new with WordPress, we play a lot with different plugins and eventually end up with a ton of them being installed (active or disabled). Removing extra plugin’s will save a lot of unnecessary conflicts behind the scene.

As you become more advanced, you would learn a lot more about site optimization and find many ways to help speed up the site. More importantly, you would find many things to avoid that slows down your site.