Below we'll list a few standard actions which should improvement the performance of any WordPress website.


Disclaimer: 

  • These are just some general guidelines. We cannot guarantee how much the website speed will be improved. This depends on a lot of factors - hosting, amount of content on pages, how much optimization is applied, ...
  • Please note that all improvements below include 3rd-party plugins. But the good news is that all of them a free (from WordPress.org repository).


Improvement #1: Enabling caching.

This is possible using a caching plugin. 


The most popular plugins are W3 Total Cache, WP SuperCache, and similar.


Improvement #2: Merging javascript files. 

Downloading each file separately is expensive in terms of site loading speed. 

So, it's beneficial to merge some of them and deliver from your server as a single file. 

This is done by plugins, and one of the most popular is Autoptimize.


Please note: This plugin offers also to merge CSS files.

We advise against doing that, at least for the first phase. 

Reason: Merging CSS files sometimes changes their order, so some CSS functionality *could* get broken.


Improvement #3: Optimizing images.

Sometimes, uploaded images are larger than necessary. 

Their size could be reduced, hence reducing the page load time.

Images can be optimized through WP dashboard, using a plugin like Smush Image Compression and Optimization.


Improvement #4: Choosing a good and fast hosting.

Shared hosting tends to be slower than other types of hosting.

Much better performance is usually obtained with:

  • managed WordPress hosting (SiteGround, WPEngine, CloudWays, ...);
  • VPS (virtual private server) (Linode, DigitalOcean, Vultr, ...).



Final note:

Before you try out some of these improvements, it is strongly advised to backup the site, just as a precaution. 

However, none of these plugins should be invasive, and modify/delete anything on your site.

And if the pages get broken after enabling some of the plugins, no worries - as soon as the corresponding plugin is disabled, the functionality will revert to the old behavior.