If you find your WordPress website loads slowly or not at all when you have heavy traffic or just want to make your site load faster, there are a few key changes you can make to help. 

WordPress has many advantages and features, but over time, the components you add to your site can slow down how quickly the page responds in your browser. Let's go over why a WordPress site would load slowly in the first place. When looking at a traditional static HTML website, a static HTML website has no dynamic parts and all the information is there in static files waiting to be viewed. With a WordPress website, your page gets built each time it is viewed. The WordPress application goes to your database to pull out content, builds the HTML, and presents it. While that sounds like a big drawback, the benefits of WordPress are vast: with the ability to use themes and plugins, you can build a beautiful website in hours or days and easily update it every month with new content.

There are a few benefits to optimizing your WordPress site:

• Your site will load fast (did you know 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load?)
• Your site will use fewer resources so you won't need as large a package, or your package can handle higher traffic
• The size of your site files will be lower, which really helps for all your mobile viewers (many people around the world are still on 3G)

So what can you do to speed up your site? Here's our checklist:

1. Clean up your site
2. Install a caching and optimization plugin
3. Smush your images
4. Security and Firewall Plugins

Clean up your site

After building a website, you'll likely have several plugins enabled that you aren't actually using. Many plugins, even if they aren't in use, can lead to slow load times. We recommend that you disable and possibly delete unused plugins.

Install a caching and optimization plugin

Instead of WordPress building your page each time, you can use a Cache plugin to create a pre-built version of your page to show the visitor. This could be the difference between a 0.5-second load time and 5 5-second load time. Another benefit is that most of these plugins also have a number of other optimizations, like compression and lazy loading.

We often use W3 Total Cache, but there are many great optimization plugins like Autoptimize, LiteSpeed Cache and many more.

How to Install W3 Total Cache:

1. In your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins on the left, then Add New.
2. Search for W3 Total Cache and then click Install Now. When the installation finishes, click Activate to activate the plugin.

Here are some settings we suggest setting up right away:

1. Access the W3 Total Cache settings by clicking Performance in the menu, then General Settings below that.
2. Please select the following options
   • Enable Page Cache - Method: Disk Enhanced
   • Enable Minify - Mode: Auto
   • Enable Database cache - Method: Disk
   • Enable Object Cache - Method: Disk
   • Enable Browser Cache
3. Click Save Settings & Purge Caches

Smush your images

When it comes to website speed, images are the biggest contributor. A few big images could be the difference between a 6MB webpage and a 500k webpage. A really large image can take 10 seconds to download, even on a modern phone. Most of the images that get uploaded into WordPress are bigger than they need to be, not compressed, or not in a file type which is optimized for the web. 

We often use Smush, but there are many great image optimization plugins, like EWWW Image Optimizer, Imagify and many more.

How to Install Smush:

1. In your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins on the left, then Add New.
2. Search for Smush and then click Install Now. When the installation finishes, click Activate to activate the plugin.

How to use Smush:

1. Access the Smush settings by clicking Smush from your WordPress dashboard.
2. The Smush setup wizard will pop up if it's your first time using the plugin, we suggest using their defaults. If the wizard does not pop up, we suggest the following settings
   • Enable Automatic Compression
   • Enable Stripping Metadata
   • Under Lazy Load click Activate and use the suggested settings
3. New images will be optimized when you upload them, but to optimize all the images currently on your site, select Bulk Smush on the left menu, then click Bulk Smush Now. If you have a lot of images, this may take a few minutes.

Security and Firewall Plugins

It's always best practice to run a security plugin when using WordPress to keep your site safe from compromises and hacks. A major benefit is blocking unwanted traffic, like bots trying to access vulnerabilities on your site. This extra traffic represents resources that could be feeding faster page loads to your real visitors.

We often use Wordfence, but there are many great security and firewall plugins like: All In One WP Security & Firewall, iThemes Security and many more.

How to install Wordfence:

1. In your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins on the left, then Add New.
2. Search for Wordfence and then click Install Now. When the installation finishes, click Activate to activate the plugin.

How to set up Wordfence:

1. Access Wordfence by clicking Wordfence from your WordPress dashboard.
2. Wordfence will open up a tour pop-up; we suggest clicking through and becoming familiar with the dashboard.
3.  By default, Wordfence will defend your site against brute force and other attacks straight out of the box. However, we suggest optimizing the Firewall:
   • From the WordPress menu click Firewall
   • Click Manage Firewall
   • Click Optimize The Wordfence Firewall
   • Click Download .HTACCESS and click Continue
4. By default, the firewall will be in learning mode for a few days before it becomes fully active, it will flip over automatically.

Extra: CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers around the world which will cache your images and content so they're more quickly available to your visitors. CDNs are typically a paid resource, so we don't have any instructions like above; however, most of the optimization plugins will give the option to use a paid CDN (either theirs or to integrate a 3rd party CDN).