This is not every single<\/em> tip to speed up WordPress, but by following the tips in this post, you should get a site that’s plenty fast without needing to pull your hair out or become an expert developer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n \ud83d\udcda Before we get into the actual optimization tips<\/a>, let’s briefly cover why your website’s speed matters<\/a> and how to tell if your site has a speed optimization problem<\/a> to begin with.<\/p>\n\n\n Let’s start with the big one, which really doesn’t need explaining because you already know the feeling:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \ud83d\udc49 Waiting for a website to load sucks<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Making your website faster can have positive effects on everything from user experience to bounce rate, time on site, and other important metrics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s not just about making your website better for humans, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your site’s page load times also matter for search engines. Google uses page load times as a ranking factor, and slow load times can also make it harder for Google to crawl your site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So whether you care about your human visitors or Google (or ideally – both!<\/em>), website speed optimization is important.<\/p>\n\n\n Ok, so website speed optimization matters. Now, how do you tell where you’re at?<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is, is your site slow? Is it in the middle? Is it already lightning fast (congrats then, you can probably stop reading!<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n \ud83d\udc49 The only way to know is to test it. There are tons of great free tools that make it really easy to run website speed tests. We’ve written about some of the best speed test tools<\/a> already, but here are the two most accessible options:<\/p>\n\n\n\n All you do is plug in your site’s URL and the tool will spit back how long it takes your site to load.<\/p>\n\n\n While there’s no hard rule about the cutoff for a “fast” vs a “slow” website, a good rule of thumb is that you want your site to load in under two seconds.<\/p>\n\n\n If you found that you have a slow website, now’s when we show you how to speed it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are a lot of ways to speed up your website – we’ve written about five quick speed tips here<\/a>, and five more wins for page load times<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, like a lot of things in life, website speed optimization follows the Pareto principle (AKA the 80\/20 rule<\/a>). That’s just a fancy way of saying that a small number of tweaks are going to have the biggest effect on your site’s load times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A caching plugin can make a big impact on your site’s load times by serving up static HTML instead of dynamically building a page with PHP on each visit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You don’t really need to understand the under-the-hood technical stuff – long story short, it’s not uncommon to see your page load times cut in half when you move to a caching plugin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We’ve collected some of the best caching plugins<\/a>. And if you want a really simple option to get you started quickly, check out Super Page Cache:<\/p>\n\n\nTwo big reasons why your website’s speed matters \ud83d\udca1<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How to tell if you have a website speed optimization problem \ud83d\udcc8<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nSix website speed optimization tips that make a real difference \ud83d\ude80<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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1. Use a caching plugin \ud83d\udd0c<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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