How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website in 3 Simple Steps

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world. With over 100 million downloads and growing, it’s no surprise why. Developed by the team at Automattic, the company behind the immensely popular blog platform, WordPress itself is a popular choice for blogging platforms. So, it follows that if you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering how you can speed up your WordPress website. Well, you can thank us later. For now, let’s get to the good stuff. Here are three simple steps to getting your WordPress website flying.

1. Minimize Your Workload

The first and most important step to speeding up a WordPress website is to minimize your workload. Now, you might be wondering what kind of workload we’re referring to here. Well, let’s take a look. When you publish a new blog post, it’s loaded onto the website. Then, it’s ready to go live. But, if you’re also performing tasks like editing, formatting, or designing the blog post, you’re using up computing resources. Now, when you’re running a digital marketing campaign, you might want to look into investing in a WordPress managed hosting plan. These plans take the complexity out of having to set up your hosting and WordPress on your own, so you can just focus on running the campaign. While it’s great to get all of the convenience of a pre-designed hosting plan, you should always strive to go with the least complex option. As much as possible, you don’t want to overload yourself with too much work. Otherwise, you’ll crash and burn.

2. Cache Your Pages

As we mentioned above, whenever you make a new blog post, it gets loaded onto your WordPress site. Now, just so you know, a single blog post can consume a decent amount of online storage. So, if you’ve got a site that’s slowly running out of space, you might want to consider caching the blog posts. Caching is a feature that keeps a copy of the most recent blog post in the server so when a visitor comes back, they don’t have to wait for the blog post to load. Once it has, they can continue browsing your site. There are numerous plugins to do this for you. You can also look into hosting with page caching or using a WordPress.com VIP account to take advantage of the built-in cache for free.

3. Use the Right Tools

A great way to speed up your WordPress website is to use the right tools. Now, this might sound like an obvious step, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t do this. You see, when you’re looking for ways to speed up a WordPress website, you’ll often encounter tools that promise to do all the heavy lifting for you. Take a look at the tools below and you’ll see what we mean.

• The WP Curve – If you want to get fancy and use a curve to edit your blog’s design, this tool makes it super easy.
• Jetpack – This is the tool from Google that allows you to launch and maintain a WordPress site. It’s free and you can use it to increase your site’s performance by taking advantage of caching, minimizing your workload, and using multiple devices.
• iThemes – Whether you want to create a free blog or a premium one, this tool offers a variety of templates to choose from.
• Divi – Similar to iThemes, Divi is also a popular choice for bloggers because of its elegant templates and powerful features.
• Neutrino – This is one of the more complex caching tools out there, but it’s also one of the most powerful. Not only does it cache your pages, but it also provides a ton of tools to speed up your site’s performance. It’s a must-have for anyone running a WordPress site.
• WP-Optimize – Did you know that the default WordPress theme comes with a lot of annoying optimizations in place? This tool makes it easy to change the default theme, removing all the extra junk so you can focus on what’s important to you.
• Xtra Markers – This is a must-have for anyone running a business blog or an eCommerce store. It’s a free service that saves all your website’s visits in a huge database so you can track your site’s performance in great detail.
• Pingdom – This is the ultimate tool for getting your WordPress site speeded up. Not only does it provide you with all the information you need to know about your site’s performance, but it also lets you compare it to others.’

Final Takeaway

So, there you have it. Three simple steps to speeding up your WordPress website. Now, you might be wondering what kind of payoff you’ll see. Well, you can thank us later. For now, let’s get to the good stuff. Below, you’ll find some additional tips and resources to help you succeed.

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