Speed Up Your WordPress Website

One of the most important parts like a WordPress developer is having your website loading faster.
Also if you have a fast web loading if you have to many visitor the website will load with some milliseconds of delay. Here are some way that saved me in the past and still save me in the present :).

1- Enabling HTTP Compression

Http compression formats use gzip and is accepted from the new browser, how to enable HTTP compression?

I suggest make a quick research on google how to do the .htaccess before you change your own .htaccess on your server. Here is a good one:

[code]
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
# For Olders Browsers Which Can’t Handle Compression
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

[/code]

2- Minifying and Combining Css and Js files

Minifying files means removing the white spaces from the css, js, html files. This consume some milliseconds during the website loading, this is one of the reasons why you should work with a clean code in all files, avoid the unnecessary classes, id on css and div on html pages. After finished coding your website there are a lot of websites free for minifying your code or WordPress Plugins. From my point of view i can suggest Autoptimize Plugin.

3- Image Compression

You can do it manually or you can do it in the smart way. You can use WP Sumsh.it or Ewww Image Optimizer .

Both are quite ok optimising you website images, also if you are familiar with Photoshop or Gimp you can optimise yourself.

4-Chossing a Good Host Provider

From my point of view do not hesitate to save money on this, also if you do a good website optimisation if your host is not good enough all your work will not take effect. Try to make a good research on Google to check top host providers, do not forget to check for coupon discount before 🙂 .

5-WordPress Theme

If you look for WordPress themes, free or paid , choose a good one, check the reviews and comments on that theme, check the ratings also.

6-Update WordPress and Plugins

Check regularly if WordPress, Themes, or Plugins have new updates. Updates mean more effective code, and solve some of the precedent issue.