FREE GUIDE

Speed Matters:
25 Expert Tips for
an Ultrafast WordPress
Website
 Table of Contents
Why does site speed matter? 4
Identify and Prioritize Site Speed Issues 6
Benchmark your site speed 7
Common website speed issues 9
Prioritizing issues 9

Website Hosting Essentials 10

1. Choosing high-performance WordPress hosting 11
2. Pick a server that is geographically close to your visitors 13

Page Size & Content Optimizations 16

3. Reduce the volume and size of your index page content 17
4. Split long posts on your index page 17
5. Replace sliders with multiple images with one static image 18
6. Use appropriate image sizes 18
7. Optimize images and next-gen image formats 19
8. Reduce the usage of external fonts 20
9. Manage the number of comments on your site 21
10. Enable Gzip or Brotli compression for your pages 22
11. Minify and combine JS and CSS files 23
12. Defer render-blocking JavaScript 24
13. Enable caching 24

Theme & Plugins Optimizations 26

14. Select a reputable theme from a solid provider 27
15. Choose a lightweight theme 28
16. Avoid bloated themes 28
17. Always use a child theme when creating your site 29
18. Optimize for mobile devices 29
19. Don’t clog up functionality with plugins 30
20. Always keep your plugins up-to-date 30

2
 21. Clean up plugin options from your database 31

Server & Hosting Optimizations 33

22. Take advantage of server level caching 34
23. Use the latest PHP version and OPcache 36
24. Use a CDN 36
25. Use SSL and utilize HTTP/2 36

Conclusion 38
About the author 39

3
 Why does site speed matter?
One of the most influential factors on your website’s success, customer
attention, conversion rates, and search engine rankings is website
performance, particularly website speed.

Slow-loading websites can lead to high bounce rates, poor customer

experience, a drop in SEO ranking, and ultimately loss of sales and
revenue. The average web page load time is 2.5 seconds on desktop
and 8.6 seconds on mobile, while most consumers expect a web page
to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% abandon a website that takes more
than 3 seconds to load. Technology is evolving more rapidly every year,
and attention spans are getting shorter. Therefore, most customers
demand instant service.

However, website performance is not only how your users perceive

your business online but also how search engines evaluate your site
and determine its position on the search engine. The release of Core
Web Vitals in May 2021 added three new metrics that measure the
user experience provided by a website, in addition to the existing Page
Experience signals - mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS, and
Intrusive Interstitial Guidelines. Chrome’s Core Web Vitals are a set of
metrics that measure key aspects of the user experience such as loading
performance, interactivity, and visual stability, putting website speed
in the SEO spotlight. In other words, these signals will assess how fast
consumers perceive your site to be.

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Consequently, as a webmaster, you have only a few seconds to grab
and retain the attention of your visitors—time that you should not spend
waiting for your content to load. It doesn’t matter if you sell goods, offer
services, or just maintain a blog. In the fast-paced world of the internet,
every second counts. So, get down to business and apply website opti-
mization techniques in order to meet user expectations and increase
your conversions.

At SiteGround, we have spent years developing a platform that optimizes

speed and applies performance-enhancing technologies specifically
for our WordPress customers. But we know that website optimization
is a two-way process and you, as a website owner, should take the
necessary steps for optimizing your site speed.

To help you better understand website performance optimization tech-

niques and how to apply them we created this eBook with 25 expert tips.

Let’s start!

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 Identify and
I Prioritize Site
Speed Issues
6
Benchmark your site speed
First and foremost, you should find out if you actually have a problem. The easiest way
to do so is to conduct benchmark tests. You can do this using some free tools, such as:

SiteGround Optimizer plugin

The SiteGround Optimizer is a free all-in-one WordPress plugin, developed
to dramatically improve website performance on any hosting environ-
ment. It has more than 1 Million active installations and is ranked among
the top 3 WordPress performance optimization plugins. You can download
it for free and install it on any WordPress site, regardless of your hosting provider.

Using the Speed Test feature of the plugin (based on Google PageSpeed), you can
easily check the optimization level of your site in over 20 different areas. Furthermore,
suggestions are linked to the exact options in the plugin interface that can improve
the metrics that aren’t perfect.

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To use the plugin’s Speed Test option, navigate to your WordPress Dashboard > SG
Optimizer section from the left sidebar and select Speed Test.

Next, you can select a device type (Desktop or Mobile) and type the slug of the URL
you want to test or leave the designated field empty to test the entire site’s speed.

GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a useful performance tool that combines its own tests
with Google core vital checks. It provides useful information about
the way your site loads, gives you useful tips for hands-on actions
you can take and the waterflow view shows you potential problematic
resources that slow down your site.

Pingdom full page test

The Pingdom Full Page Test allows you to perform speed tests quickly
from different locations. Like GTmetrix it gives you optimization tips
too and performs speed checks but what I find it most useful is that
you can easily see how fast your site loads from different parts of
the planet.

There are many other performance tools available, and if you notice poor results, it is
always a good idea to test your website with them. The more tests you perform, the
better. Thus, you’ll be able to put all the performance reports together, compare them,
and get a clear picture of how your website is actually performing.

Pro Tip: Even though most of the benchmarking tools will give you a “grade”, don’t go
too far chasing it. If your website loads in under two seconds, you’ve done the biggest
part of the job. Chase milliseconds and not artificial grades!

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Common website speed issues
Running performance tests is a great way to assess the performance
of your website. However, if your benchmark tests reveal that you have
a problem with your site speed, your next step may be to discover the
actual blockers and troubleshoot them.

Although each website is unique and has its own set of speed issues, the following
are quite common and should be addressed first:

● Large and unoptimized images

● Outdated PHP version
● Bloated theme
● Too many or unoptimized plugins
● Datacenter far from your visitors

Each of these will be discussed in further detail below.

Prioritizing issues
Your research and analysis of the causes of slowness may result in a
very long list of things you could do. However, you need to prioritize
that list. Some of these issues may take time to fix and may not result
in significant improvements in speed. There are two things that you
should consider when prioritizing your fixes:

● How difficult will it be to fix the issue?

● What effect will resolving the issue have on your site?

Use the answers to these questions in order to create a list of optimizations starting
from those that will have the most significant impact on the time spent.

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 Website
II Hosting
Essentials
10
1. Choosing high-performance
WordPress hosting
The web host is the foundation of a fast-performing website. Before
choosing a web host for your website, do considerable research and
understand what technologies and software resources it offers in
terms of speed. We understand that all of this information can be
confusing, so we’ll discuss the top-tier technologies that a Managed
WordPress hosting plan must have in order to be your top choice:

● Advanced caching options - caching is an important aspect of the performance

of a website, so being able to effectively manage this particular part is essential.

At SiteGround you can take advantage of a powerful caching solution in three

levels - NGINX Direct Delivery for static resources, Dynamic caching for dynamic
resources and Memcached for database queries optimization.

● HTTPS option - securing your website with an SSL certificate is a must nowadays,
as it helps you establish brand trust. Moreover, when a site loads over HTTPS,
it uses HTTP/2 which is much faster than HTTP. SiteGround customers can
configure their site to work with https:// using two separate options. They can
enable the Enforce HTTPS feature for a website from their Site Tools.

Or use the SiteGround Optimizer to force the HTTPS on a site.

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 Additionally, the plugin allows you to Fix Insecure Content by rewriting the insecure
requests coming from your website by simply sliding the respective button on.

● Content Delivery Network (CDN) - visitors around the world should be able to
access your site at all times without location-driven delays. This is extra impor-
tant for websites with an international audience. A CDN caches your website and
distributes it on servers that are closer to your visitors.

Our in-house CDN solution is easy-to-use and does not require any complex
configurations to enable it for your site. You can activate it with as much as a click
and it starts serving your site from the closest available point to your visitors.
SiteGround CDN network is powered by 14 locations all over the world.
To activate SiteGround CDN for your website, navigate to the respective Site
Tools > Speed > CDN.

When the service is active, you can manage various CDN settings. Make your site
blazingly-fast with SiteGround CDN.

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 ● PHP optimized for Speed - most websites are PHP-based thus it’s imperative for
PHP to be set with speed in mind on server level.

At SiteGround we have our own Ultrafast PHP which ensures faster page response,
increased server capacity, lower server memory usage and overall performance
improvement.

● Optimized MySQL Processing - heavy MySQL queries slow down your website
and have a negative impact on user experience. At SiteGround to overcome this
challenge, we deployed a new server-wide solution to optimize MySQL queries.
This innovation significantly reduces the amount of slow MySQL queries which
are taxing on server resources and site performance.

2. Pick a server that is

geographically close to your
visitors
Regardless of your location or from where you manage your website,
it must load fast for your visitors. Thus, when selecting the server
that will host your website, consider where your clients are located
or where the majority of your visitors come from.

Some key factors to consider when choosing a home for your website are:

● Fast connectivity and low latency - а suitable server offers high availability,
low latency and reliability. Customers expect to interact with the web in real
time, without delays. Thus, ensure that the server you choose can meet these
requirements.

At SiteGround, we’ve ensured these points with our main datacenter partner
Google, which is known for maintaining a fast and powerful network.

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 TTFB - This speed metric refers to the time needed for an HTTP request’s first
byte received by the client’s browser.

● You can test your site’s TTFB with the Speed Test feature, provided by the
SiteGround Optimizer plugin.

● Check the Geolocation of your visitors - The physical location of your website can
affect its speed performance and latency. Checking where your visitors are from
will help you figure out which datacenter is closer to your audience and choose
it as the host for your website.

SiteGround’s data centers are on four different continents, so you can select the
one that is closest to your target audience.

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GLOBALLY DISTRIBUTED INFRASTRUCTURE

Data Center and CDN Location CDN Location

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 Page Size
III & Content
Optimizations
16
3. Reduce the volume and size of
your index page content
For example, you can decrease the number of posts shown on your
homepage from the WordPress administration panel.

Go to: Settings -> Reading -> Blog pages show at most.

Then, change the “Blog pages show at most” value to a lower number.
In case you’re displaying the blogroll on your home page, you can implement an infinite
scroll plugin like WordPress Infinite Scroll – Ajax Load More for example.

It will render more posts on demand rather than loading them all together during the
initial rendering process for your site.

4. Split long posts on your index

page
If your site tends to rely on long posts, you may want to split them into
pages using the “Page Break” block within the post content. By doing
this, you will see a pagination under the page or posts and your users
will be able to navigate through them by clicking on the next pages.

This will split one big and slow page into several faster ones.

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5. Replace sliders with multiple
images with one static image
Sliders usually use a lot of JavaScript to operate. Furthermore, not
all of the plugins that enable the slider functionality on WordPress
sites are written in light and optimized code. Last but not least, sliders
aren’t particularly user-friendly on mobile devices. So, if your design
allows it, simply replace your slider with a single static image.

However, if you really need and want a slider, We recommend using Soliloquy. It comes
in a free and a premium professional version, which includes more features. This plugin
renders a fast and lightweight slider that has everything most people would need from
a slider plugin. Another good solution is the Meta Slider plugin - which is another free
and well-written extension.

Last but not least, consider replacing sliders with static images altogether. Latest
research show that moving big pieces of content tend to distract the user and they
will rarely see anything past the second slide.

6. Use appropriate image sizes

Images are an essential part of a website and may need some time
to be transferred from the server while the site is loading.

If you want to display аn image 300x300 pixels, don’t upload a

1024x1024 pixels image and then set it to be shown smaller with
HTML or CSS. What is the appropriate image size?

The appropriate size of an image depends on where it’ll be located on a website. So

if it has to be placed in a thumbnail, the image dimensions should fit it. In short, an
image’s dimensions should be scaled for the particular part of the site.

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Large-sized images with high resolution slow down your website since the browser
needs longer to scale them accordingly.

If an image’s dimensions are larger than needed, they may take longer to load since
WordPress would have to change the dimensions of the image to fit it. This adds more
time for an image to be fully loaded and displayed. Same goes for images with larger
width and height.

7. Optimize images and next-gen

image formats
Another key step in making your website user and search engine friendly
is image optimization. Images have a substantial impact on a website’s
overall page load times. Large images slow down your web pages and,
as a result, your website. This is why optimizing them is essential if you
want to increase the speed of your website.

A great plugin you can use to optimize your images is the FREE SiteGround Optimizer
plugin, created for top WordPress performance on our hosting environment. You can
have either lossless or lossy optimization depending on your needs. Furthermore,
you can easily generate WebP copies of your images that the SiteGround servers
will automatically serve if the browser supports the new format. WebP is a next-gen
imaging format already supported by all modern web browsers which provides much
better compressions without compromising with quality, resulting in stunning images
loading blazing fast.

Bear in mind that if you have multiple images on your site, optimizing all of them may
take a lot of time and hosting resources. Image optimization is important, however
lowering the size of your images without damaging their quality and removing all the
unnecessary data that your camera saves when you take a photograph (e.g. GPS
location of the photo, make and model of the camera used) adds to the overall perfor-
mance of your site.

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 Before & after image comparison following an image optimization by SiteGround Optimizer
plugin

Even if the image file is reduced by just a few KBs, when you combine all the images
on one page, the performance gain is usually significant.

8. Reduce the usage of external

fonts
Each font that you use from Google Free Fonts or another similar
service has multiple variations, weight (300, 400, 500, 700), encoding
(Latin, Cyrillic), style, and so on.

Check your website and include only the font variation that you’re
actually using. In the SiteGround Optimizer plugin, we’ve developed a method to load
fonts asynchronously and cache them on your visitors’ browsers so you can achieve
the design you want without sacrificing speed.

To address similar issues on your website, use our SiteGround Optimizer. The plugin
allows you to perform Web fonts Optimization and enable Fonts Preloading from the
Frontend optimization section.

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Last but not least, if you’re loading a font for a small piece of text somewhere on your
site, we recommend compromising with design and simply using a font you already
have on other pages.

9. Manage the number of

comments on your site
If you get a lot of comments, this may be slowing your site in two
ways. First, this makes your page more dynamic (if you have enabled
caching, it has to be cleared more often) and second, each comment
adds to the size of your page and HTML output.

A way to manage that is by tweaking your WordPress Discussion Settings from the
Dashboard. To do that go to Settings > Discussion and check the box next to “Break
comments into pages with top level comments per page and the page displayed by
default”.

The “Break comments into pages with top level comments per page and the page
displayed by default” option allows you to set the number of comments that will appear
under a post. In case there are more comments to post than the designated number,
WordPress will split them into comment pages.

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10. Enable Gzip or Brotli
compression for your pages
Gzip compresses the final HTML output of your website alongside its
other resources - JS, CSS, images reducing their size before transferring
them to your visitor. This saves a lot of time loading your site and has an
amazing effect on your speeds.

All SiteGround servers have Gzip compression enabled by default. Non-SiteGround

customers can use the SiteGround Optimizer plugin to activate Gzip compression
for their site.

Brotli is a next-generation compression method that works the same way as Gzip.It
is developed by Google and uses better compression algorithms resulting in a much
smaller size of the transferred data - approximately 20% less than Gzip and 400%
smaller than uncompressed content! On SiteGround servers, we compress the content
with Brotli if your browser supports it automatically and fall back to Gzip if it doesn’t,
so you don’t need to do anything to get these improvements!

If you are not hosted with SiteGround, you should ask your provider about the available
compression methods and what’s the best way to enable them since different providers
use different tools for that.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

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 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

GZIP/BROTLI COMPRESSION
GZIP

Decompress
&view

Server Transfer Compressed Files Visitor

gZip decompresses content before rendering, making the transfer faster.

11. Minify and combine JS and

CSS files
Minification and combination are two techniques with one purpose:
to reduce the size and number of JavaScript and CSS files that your
site loads. Minification strips all unnecessary characters by removing
precious bytes from being loaded every time you request a URL.

Combination on the other hand, combines multiple JavaScript and CSS files into one.
This reduces the number of requests your site makes.

SiteGround customers can use the SiteGround Optimizer plugin which will do both
optimizations for you with a single click. If not, there are a few plugins that do this really
well.

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12. Defer render-blocking
JavaScript
Javascript is a piece of code on your website that enables various
{;} plugins and themes functions. Render-Blocking means that these
JavaScript codes slow down the browser’s process of rendering or
JS
displaying a website.

The browser parses the HTML markup of a page before it can render it. During this
process, if the browser encounters a script (like JavaScript), it must execute it to proceed
to parse the HTML. If there are externally-loaded scripts, the browser is forced to wait
for the resource to download, which may require more network roundtrips. Eventually,
this causes delays in the first render of a page.

To address this, you can take advantage of the Defer Render-Blocking JavaScript
feature of the SiteGround Optimizer’s Frontend > JavaScript optimizations.

13. Enable caching

Caching is a great technology that saves the outcome of different
operations your site has to perform in order to produce your final
content. It then serves this ready “product” to the next visitor of your
site. With a good caching solution enabled and functioning, your site
will be as fast as a static page until you make a change. When this occurs, the page
will load dynamically for the first visitor after the modification. Then, the cache will be
refreshed and the next time it will load the cached version of the page much faster.

The easiest way to cache your site is through a plugin. This saves the cached content on
the server’s hard disk and significantly improves site performance since your content
won’t be dynamically loaded every time. You can give the SiteGround Optimizer plugin
a try if you don’t have a hosting-powered solution at your disposal.

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The File-based caching layer of the plugin has the ability to store cache for logged in
users, heating cache for the rarely opened pages. It is versatile and compatible with
various hosting environments, where you can use File-based caching on its own.
SiteGround customers can use it as an additional caching layer.

Later in the book, we talk about caching as a part of the services your hosting provider
can offer. When caching is enabled at the server level, the content gets saved not on
the hard disk, but in the server RAM. This makes the site performance gains much
greater since reading from the memory is faster than reading from the disc.

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 Theme &
IV Plugins
Optimizations
26
 Both themes and plugins are essential to the speed of your site
since they are pieces of code that your site executes every time it
gets accessed. That code often needs optimizations as well.

14. Select a reputable theme

from a solid provider
When choosing a theme, look for one either in the WordPress reposi-
tory or if you’re after a premium theme, look for a reputable company
that’s well-known in the WordPress community.

Every element of your WordPress theme affects the overall performance of your
website. Taking the time upfront to investigate the themes and their provider can save
a lot of trouble and work later on.

Read reviews for the themes, try getting some actual feedback from users, and check
whether the company is trusted in the WordPress community. You can also check our
blog post on Best WordPress Themes and see if any of the themes discussed suit your
needs. Don’t trust a theme provided by an unknown designer that does not respond
to his/her customers.

It’s important to have a well-written theme because the quality of the theme code
affects every part of your site. For example, some themes have a plugin functionality
and added features such as related posts under your normal posts. Such functionality
often causes slow loading times because of the way queries to the MySQL database
are structured. In short, you don’t have to be a good developer to have a good site, but
make sure your theme is written by a good one.

SiteGround customers can use the SiteGround Central plugin to pick from a variety
of free, well-written themes.

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15. Choose a lightweight theme
When picking a WordPress theme, aim for minimalistic, low-sized and
well-coded themes.

A lightweight theme has a small size and a well-optimized code.

Low-sized theme files ensure that your site loads faster and clean
code complements that. Too many large images or additional func-
tionalities tend to have the opposite effect.

Thus, look for a quality coded forthright theme that has a reasonable size. Additionally,
your theme should be compatible with various caching and minification plugins or
include performance improvement options.

16. Avoid bloated themes

When you’re looking for a theme for your website, you will surely stumble
upon themes that claim they can be used for virtually any kind of
website. Many of these are full of features, sliders, carousels, etc. All
of these features require JavaScript and CSS resources to work and
if you’re not using them, you’re simply wasting resources.

Functionalities such as carousels and sliders should not be part of your theme. You
can always add them using a plugin later on when you want them to be loaded.

You should also avoid themes with Page-builders, since that may prevent you from
easily changing it in the future, causing a lock-in issue. A theme-lock is when a user
is forced to continue using a theme, just because switching to a new one can elicit
data loss. The theme may be heavy and not well optimized, but still, you’ll be taught
to stick with it.

So, pick a theme that has the main functionality you need without tons of additional
features.

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17. Always use a child theme
when creating your site
WordPress updates are released often and many of them include
performance optimizations. Themes are harder to update, but the good
ones often get new versions with numerous updates. Using a child
theme allows you to keep the parent theme up-to-date while keeping
all your customizations intact. It’s easy to set a child theme, just follow
the instructions on WordPress.org.

18. Optimize for mobile devices

Every year, more and more traffic comes from mobile devices. Tablets
and smartphones are becoming even more popular for browsing than
standard desktop computers. That’s why it’s important to make sure
your site works as fast as possible on all devices.

Usually, when people browse your page on their mobile phone, they are on 4G (LTE),
which is generally a slower connection than the one they have at home. That’s why it’s
good practice to show only what users need to see on mobile, rather than a shrunken
version of your pages. Here are a few steps for optimizing your mobile site:

Step 1. Test your pages with the Google Mobile-Friendly Test which will give you
information if a certain part of your page is not well-optimized for mobile.

Step 2. Always select a theme that’s either mobile-first or has a native mobile version.
When you run tests for your website, make sure you test the mobile version as well.

Step 3. If your theme doesn’t have a mobile version, consider using a plugin such as
WP Touch that will generate a mobile version of your page. However, having a native
mobile version is always preferable.

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19. Don’t clog up functionality
with plugins
Initially, plugins are made to add extra functionality to your website.
However, if a plugin provides multiple functionalities, make sure you
use the majority of them. In other words, don’t install another plugin
if one of your active ones can already do the job.

For example, if you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin and you want to
have a Google XML Sitemap, just enable this functionality in the plugin settings page
instead of adding another plugin, even though there are dozens available in the plugin
repository.

Plugins with overlapping functionalities can cause various conflicts, errors, website
misbehavior, or poorly functioning plugin features. Multiple plugins with the same
purpose slow down your website and can lead to data fragmentation.

Thus, you must choose your plugins wisely and be careful not to go overboard with
too many of them.

20. Always keep your plugins up-

to-date
Most of the updates in plugins either offer security patches, new
features, bug fixes, speed improvements, or a combination of the
above.

In addition, there are new features, functions, etc. constantly being introduced with
WordPress core updates. A lot of them are designed to allow plugins to operate better
and faster. By keeping your plugins updated, you will get all the performance improve-

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ments from the newest release.

Keeping your plugins up-to-date will allow you to use more recent PHP versions, which
gives your site a huge performance boost.

If you’re not using a plugin, delete it. There is no need to keep them on your website.
It’s good security practice and one less thing to slow down your back-end.

21. Clean up plugin options from

your database
Some plugins leave options and settings data in your database after
you delete them. To get rid of that data, use the Scheduled Database
Maintenance feature of the SiteGround Optimizer plugin Environment
caching.

Most plugins don’t bother cleaning your database after you’ve uninstalled them. They
delete the plugin files, but the tables with different settings they’ve been utilizing
remain. When activated the Scheduled Database Maintenance feature removes all
unnecessary items from your database and optimizes its tables on a regular basis.
It clears post revisions, trashed posts, pages and comments, comments marked as
spam and expired transients.

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 Server &
V Hosting
Optimizations
33
22. Take advantage of server
level caching
WordPress specialized hosting providers often offer some form of
caching. At SiteGround, we have implemented NGINX as a reverse
proxy and developed our special WordPress plugin SiteGround Opti-
mizer. At SiteGround, we have developed a 3-layered caching system
- NGINX Direct Delivery, Dynamic caching and Memcached on server level.

SiteGround customers can use the Optimizer to enhance the way Dynamic caching
operates for their website. Along with Dynamic caching being enabled, our customers
can take advantage of the File-based Caching feature of the plugin for optimal perfor-
mance results. Moreover, the plugin allows you to enable object caching (Memcached)
as long as the feature is enabled in your Site Tools too. Combining the caching layers
on the server and the plugin can boost your site’s performance up to 5 times.

It saves the outcome of all PHP operations, database queries and more in the server
RAM and then when another visitor opens the same page, it serves the content from
the memory without even reaching the web server. You can easily enable server-level

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caching from your control panel, giving you a huge performance improvement. In
addition to caching, the plugin will cover pretty much every performance optimization
you may need for your site.

Depending on the website, your loading time can go from 2-3 seconds to 0.5 seconds!
Furthermore, using a caching service like this will increase the amount of traffic you
can handle on your account. A test with a default WordPress installation on the same
SiteGround hosting account shows amazing results:

WITHOUT WITH
DYNAMIC DYNAMIC
CACHING CACHING

26.3K HITS 207.6K HITS

for 2 minutes with for 2 minutes with
50 concurrent users 500 concurrent users

Needless to say, that’s a huge spike in traffic that’s handled without problems mostly
because of the caching system running on the server.

For websites with big databases, you can also implement object caching like
Memcached or Redis. These are services that your hosting provider must install on
their server and provide you with the ability to use them with your application. For
example, at SiteGround we provide Memcached as part of our WordPress performance
services that can be activated with a single click.

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23. Use the latest PHP version and
OPcache
Every PHP version introduces speed and security improvements. It is
important to use the latest version that works without problems with
your site. Starting with the PHP 7 branch you can easily benefit from
the so-called OPcache which basically stores the compiled result of
different scripts on your account for a super-fast execution. However,
make sure that your plugins and theme support that version.

24. Use a CDN

If you have visitors from different geographical regions, it’s a good
idea to use a CDN (content delivery network) service. CDN providers
essentially clone your website amongst multiple host nodes. Then,
when a visitor requests a URL, it gets served from the closest host
node rather than from the central server. SiteGround offers in-house
CDN service for all our customers that comes in free and premium versions.

25. Use SSL and utilize HTTP/2

SSL protects your visitors and customers by encrypting all the infor-
mation traveling between the browser and server, ensuring extra
security for your users and their data. It is essential for eCommerce
sites and those handling sensitive data, and strongly recommended
for all websites following recent developments on the web. Previously,
SSL certification was believed to slow down your website. Not anymore! If you have a

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an Ultrafast WordPress Website
server that supports HTTP/2, and a working SSL certificate, your traffic will be going
through HTTP/2.

MULTIPLEXING

HTTP 1.1 jquery.js jquery.js Server

example.css example.css

image.png image.png

3 TCP CONNECTIONS

HTTP/2 jquery.js jquery.js Server

example.css example.css

image.png image.png

1 TCP CONNECTION

The HTTP/2 protocol is much faster and allows the browser to make multiple simul-
taneous requests for resources to the server, which results in faster and safer sites.

If you’re worried about the cost of an SSL certificate, there is a free solution called Let’s
Encrypt. With it, you can maintain the security of your websites without compromising
on speed. Learn more.

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 Conclusion
Optimizing for speed is a continuous and important part of building
and maintaining your WordPress site. Without optimization, you risk
paying more, losing visitors and conversions, and even damaging your
brand and reputation.

By following the above steps, many of which can be implemented

without a deep level of technical expertise, you will be well on your way
to ensuring an optimal website experience for all your visitors.

Learn more about WordPress web hosting engineered for speed

www.siteground.com/wordpress-hosting.htm

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 About the author

Hristo Pandjarov

Hristo has been working at SiteGround for more than fifteen years
now. He’s done it all. He’s supported WordPress clients, built websites,
designed themes, written eBooks, and led the organization of Word-
Camp Sofia twice! As SiteGround’s WordPress Innovations Director,
he spends his days developing and implementing various in-house
performance-boosting solutions to help make WordPress websites
faster and more secure.

Find him on Twitter: @pandjarov

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an Ultrafast WordPress Website