Having a good website speed is essential for your website’s SEO and user experience. Website speed is also a ranking factor for major search engines like google and bing. Another reason why you should improve your site speed is slow speed leads to lost visitors.
Here are some statistics:
- Between 2000 and 2015, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 to just 8 seconds.
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load within two seconds or fewer.
- 40% abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
- 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with a website’s performance are less likely to return.
- One second delay reduces conversions by 7%.
And if you are using wordpress, you must think downloading a few free “speed boosting” plugins will solve everything. But the truth is especially if you have a lot of plugins (like close to 20) adding more plugins won’t solve the issue.
More plugins means more code and more unnecessary code isn’t going to do any good for your site speed. That is why I will give you tips on how to improve your site’s speed without plugins.
But first, if you want to see any before and after difference, I would like you to check your site speed before doing anything so you can see the difference.
You can use Page Speed insights, Gt metrix or Pingdom as they are best tools for site speed checks. And these tools will give you some recommendations which can confuse you, especially if you don’t know coding. But you will understand these 12 tips I am going to share with you for optimizing your wordpress website without any plugins and not knowing any coding skills.
1. Ask help from your cloud hosting provider
This is a simple hack that most people aren’t even thinking about. Since they host your website, they might give you some advice that is tailored to you.
This is an easy “hack” you can try.
2. Delete what you don’t need (plugins)
It would shock you to know how many people keep stuff they don’t need on their website. By simply removing some plugins, pages or media items your website will be in better shape. Remember that having 20 plugins is too many and they will affect your website speed drastically.
3. Optimize your homepage
If your homepage is too complicated, it is normal that it will load slower. Instead, making your website simpler will make your website faster and more “eye friendly”. If there are fewer items on a page, that page will load faster. Bad example below.
4. Use lightweight theme
Not all wordpress themes were made equal. Some themes are slower than others. And if the speed is your concern is speed, using paid themes will be better for you. You can find some great ones in themeforest.
Here are some of the fastest wordpress themes for 2021.
5. Reduce the size of your images
While using plugins for this job (like shortpixel) could be faster, we are going to take a plugin free route. But before you will need to download an image optimization program on your computer.
When you have the program, download all your images to your computer (use FTP for this) then run all your images through the program and upload the optimized images to your website.
Changes might be hard to notice for the human eye, but this will make your site faster. Plus, I would recommend you to not to go too far with animations or other visuals and use them only when necessary.
6. Check if the Website and the Database are in the Same Data Center
Ok. This might sound overwhelming at the first sight. But it is easier than you think.
When talking about hosting and servers, closeness is always better. A positive thing for website success is to have the website and its servers in the same data center. This would make it much quicker and easier to fetch articles and interact with the database.
But how do you do that? Again, you will need to contact your friends at your hosting provider for support. Often, businesses will show their server positions during the sign-up process.
7. Disable Hotlinking
Hotlinking is a term used where one website uses the services of another one. For example, if someone has copied an image from your website, it loads the image from your website until his website is loaded. This means they will use your servers’ resources and this will slow down your website.
This is a killer hijacking that will harm your website.
If you want to stop this, you just need to add the following lines in your WordPress. htaccess file to prevent such hijacking.
- RewriteEngine on
- RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
- RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?EXAMPLE.com [NC]
- RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
- RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/EXAMPLE [NC]
- RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC, F, L]
Also, check out this video and if you want some extra help, don’t be afraid to contact your hosting support.
8. Use Ezoic site speed accelerator
Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator is a tool where you can improve your website speed by adding no plugins, and you don’t need to know anything about coding.
And this is not a plugin. Ezoic uses their own servers to optimize your website performance. If you’re concerned about its safety, you don’t need to since it is safe to use.
However, using this service will cost you some money. Since they are doing a lot of optimization for a fraction of the price compared to the money, you would need to pay someone.
There is also a 7 day free trial for you to test the service.
And, this is one of the easiest ways to speed up your website on this list.
9. Minify JavaScript and CSS Files
Ok, this is a common problem. If you tested your site with Page Speed insights, you probably saw this.
In order to reduce server response time and limit file sizes, you need to reduce JS and CSS calls. By minimizing them, you’ll find that the loading speed of your site is much higher than before. This will potentially help you in saving the use of spare capacity.
There are many plugins to minify JavaScript. But if you want to do this plugin free, your easiest option would be the ezoic site speed accelerator.
Or, you can do this yourself if you are good at coding. Check out this video for more help.
10.Post Revisions
This is a “good feature” of WordPress, but it is not good for speed.
Post revisions are basically when you update an old post, a new copy of the post is placed in the archive any time you change the content, instead of removing the previous one.
So you will still have a chance to turn around. This increases the size of the database, and a large database size will create several problems (like speed problem).
To do this, you will need to play with some coding but don’t be scared yet. Before this you should backup your website to not lose anything. First you will need to go to your cPanel. Open “wp-config file” and you will need to add some code.
To limit post revisions-
Use this code: define (‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3);
The number of changes will be limited to 3. In other words, the WordPress would be limited to saving just three revisions.
To disable post revisions-
Use this code: define (‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);
For your WordPress account, it will completely disable post revision. But it’s not the safest practice to disable yourself entirely. It is better to just limit.
This video will explain the whole process to you easily.
11. Use CDN Content delivery network
But what is a content delivery network?
Let’s assume that your website is stored in servers of Singapore. And if you have users in London, it will take more time for British users to load your site compared to someone in Singapore.
This is a big choice for speeding up the WordPress platform and is also a CDN (Content Distribution Network). A faster loading time for your website is the key feature of a WordPress CDN, no matter what kind of site you run.
This especially will work for you if you have users all around the world. So as a CDN you have some great options to use like CloudwaysCDN, CloudFlare, and jsDelivr. So, which is the recommended one?
You should check out all of them and choose the best for your needs in terms of pricing and features. Based on my experience and previous needs, I would recommend choosing CloudwaysCDN.
CloudwaysCDN is a simple-to-use CDN that offers one-click integration at a cost around $1/25 GB/month for your WordPress account.
Features:
- Mobile optimization
- A global network to serve fast DNS
- Analytics of your website traffic
- Apps for a faster, safer and one-click simpler site
As another choice, JsDelivr.
JsDelivr is a free product that allows any artist, such as CSS, JavaScript, jQuery plugins, and fonts to host their files. CloudFlare and MaxCDN are supporting JsDelivr.
12. Choose a better web host
This one is a must, especially if you use an elementor page builder.
First off all, you need to identify the right host for your website that is optimized for performance. With older versions such as PHP 5, many hosts are still running. As they provide massive performance improvements, a performance-optimized host should definitely offer PHP 7+.
Your choice to host service should have these specifications to Optimize Elementor Website Efficiency:
- PHP 7+
- MYSQL 5.6+
- WordPress memory: Minimum 64MB and ideally 128MB+
Recommended Hosting services for sites using elementor
You may also like to check out the article on Top 5 Hosts for WordPress.
Conclusion
Improving your wordpress website speed isn’t the easiest task on wordpress, but it is necessary and it is becoming more important every day.
Hopefully, these tips were helpful for you to optimize your website speed. Check your site speed in the end to see if you were able to make improvements.
