Fortunately, improving the loading time of a WordPress website can also be done by people who do not have extensive technical knowledge, through the use of plug-ins. However, adding many plugins does not always mean that it will make your website faster, more attractive, or even better, but it may have the opposite effect. We will demonstrate some of the optimization methods you need to implement in order to ensure your website gets a faster load time.
Install a cache plugin
If you want the site to display content faster to its visitors, it is imperative to install a cache plugin. Good caching plugins also provide minimization of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, recommended by most independent testing tools.
WP Fastest Cache is a free, easy to use and configured plugin with 5 stars and over 600,000 installations.
W3 Total Cache is a free plugin with more advanced and more options, with 4.5 stars and over 1 million installations.
WP Rocket is a premium (paid) plugin that can bring impressive improvements to the site’s performance score and upload speed.
Using a CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is especially recommended for websites that have visitors from all over the world, because they load the website content from the servers closest to the visitors in order to reduce delays generated by the large physical distance between the home server and user (e.g., a server in Nuremberg and a Melbourne visitor).
Directly from cPanel, you can activate Railgun (CloudFlare service), but you can also use Amazon CloudFront or MaxCDN.
Image optimization
One of the most common suggestions for optimizing loading times is optimizing images. It means that the website displays images that are dynamically resized and are not displayed at the exact size for the space allocated on the page. For example, the website displays a 300x300px image but it is actually a 1200x1200px. This can happen for many reasons, but most often it is due to the changes made by the used website theme, as a theme can use different dimensions for the featured image than the images on the page. The easiest solution is to use the Regenerate Thumbnails plug-in that you can install, run it once, and then remove it from your WordPress installation.
Other image resizing and optimization plug-ins:
EWWW Image Optimizer
WP Smush
Kraken Image Optimizer
ShortPixel
Compress JPG & PNG Images
Using Lazy Loading
Lazy Loading is a technique used to display the content to the reader. Instead of the browser displaying the entire content at a time, it gradually displays it as it navigates on the website on the principle of prioritizing visible content. Some themes have already implemented this option (should be available in theme settings), but if it missing, you can use BJ Lazy Load.
Remove slow and useless plugins
If you’ve been using WordPress for some time now, you’ve certainly installed multiple plug-ins. Some have only been used once (e.g. Regenerate Thumbnails) or added functionality you no longer use. It’s advisable to remove those plugins you do not use permanently because all plugins use resources that you might not want to waste. Then use a plug-in to identify which of your existing plug-ins consume more resources and try to find a replacement for them, or evaluate if the features they’re offering are really useful to you.