How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site
There are a ton of ways to improve your site speed.
But here’s the thing…
There are three things you can do to make 90% of the performance gains.
1. Switch hosts
Your host has a huge impact on how quickly your site can load.
Even with a fully optimized website, your site will struggle to load in less than 3 seconds with a poor host. Using a better host, you can get load times under 1 second. In fact, switching hosts is the easiest and fastest way to immediately speed up your site.
And I know what you’re thinking.
Switching hosts sounds difficult!
The thing is, switching hosts is a two-step process and your site won’t experience any downtime.
We use WP Engine here at Compete Themes and recommend them for lightning fast WordPress sites. The migration process is easy and their customer support is top-notch.
I have a lot more great things to say about WP Engine, but I’ll save it for my in-depth review. Check it out if you think your hosting is holding you back.
Click here to read the WP Engine review
If you want an alternative for a premium WordPress host, check out Kinsta. You can find my detailed review here.
2. Install WP Rocket
There are a lot of ways to optimize your site and WP Rocket can handle many of them all at once.
WP Rocket speeds up your site from the moment you install it with caching then takes things into the stratosphere with file minification, concatenation, and lazy loading.
Don’t worry – I explain all of these technical features and how to use them for your site in the complete WP Rocket optimization guide.
Click here to start optimizing with WP Rocket
3. Optimize your images
Images take longer than any other files on your site to load. If you have uncompressed images, you could be seriously burdening your site.
The good news is that image optimization is extremely simple. In fact, you can do everything directly from your WordPress dashboard by using ShortPixel.
Check out the step-by-step image optimization guide to learn how to optimize media on your site.
Click here to start optimizing with ShortPixel
Customize your site
Use the three methods above and your site will be loading lightning fast all the time.
Once your site is blazing fast, you might want to tackle some theme customizations you put off.
Check out our WordPress customization guide and learn how to change everything on your site from the colors to the layouts.
