How To Optimize Wordpress Speed Without Plugins

We are asked more often than expected how to optimize WordPress speed without plugins. And there are good reasons why some site admins want to optimize WordPress speed without plugins – some sites are having complex multisite setups or have extremely high traffic and more plugins. That means more complexity.

Here are our top recommendations for speeding up a WordPress site or any website for that matter without using a plugin. By following these steps you should be able to load your WordPress site extremely fast BUT maybe not as fast as if you were using a plugin to do things like page caching and image optimization. photos, so keep that in mind.

Common mistake

From what we see every day, there is a common misconception that many plugins are ALWAYS inferior in speed. However, this is not the case, so if you are avoiding plugins just because of this, we suggest you rethink your stance as there are some great site speed plugins like WP Rocket will make a complete difference. do.

Identify the root cause so you don’t waste time

A very common mistake people make when working with their site speed is randomly testing tools and tactics without identifying the root cause of their slow loading site. Before doing anything, we strongly recommend doing a site speed test first to identify the fruits at your fingertips.

Our SiteSpeedBot speed test tool is 100% FREE and will give you detailed recommendations on what to do in less than 60 seconds!

How to optimize WordPress speed without plugins

Some of the suggestions below are a bit technical, so if you have questions or need clarification, feel free to leave a comment below.

1. Use a good server
   Web hosting is critically important to everything you do online, whether it’s SEO, Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, or the inquiries, calls, and emails your website generates. Better hosting means better user experience and better user experience will increase your conversion rate.
   
   That being said, it is clear that fast and reliable hosting will pay off soon. A quality web host is one of the key factors in WordPress speed optimization without plugins. A good hosting provider uses a solid state drive (SSD) which operates much faster than a standard hard disk drive (HDD) and thus allows for faster page load times and good overall performance than. Some servers also offer new NVME drives that are even faster than standard SSDs. Good providers have higher bandwidth and RAM which also means better speed and more power for your website.
   
   Another important factor to consider is the location of the servers. In most cases, websites will run 1 second slower outside of the country where the server is located. That’s why it’s so important to use a server located in the country or continent where most of your visitors come from.
   
   Surprisingly, in 2021, the price difference between a high-quality web host and a junk web host is almost negligible, so here is a list of web hosts that we generally recommend:

Cloudways offers cheap hosting plans starting at $10/month. These guys use VPS servers on a speed-optimized server stack to provide high speeds while offering over 60 locations worldwide.
Siteground stands out as one of the more affordable options and still delivers decent site speed, making it a much better choice than other cheap web hosts.

WPX Hosting is a dedicated WordPress hosting that implements edge caching with its WPX cloud and offers incredible cost/speeds with data centers located in the US and UK .
Kinsta is more expensive, but it is one of the best options for sites with a lot of traffic. These guys do server level page caching without a plugin, just like WPengine.

2. Use HTTPS

Running a website in HTTPS mode allows the browser to use the newer HTTP2 protocol, which increases the speed at which the browser can download the web page compared to the older HTTP 1.1 protocol. Keep in mind that many low-cost providers don’t support HTTP2, so if your host doesn’t have it, it means their infrastructure is old or not equivalent.

3. Use the highest PHP version supported by the site

PHP is the programming language or framework on which WordPress is built. Overall loading speed usually increases 10-20% with each new PHP version. In March 2021, the latest version 8.0.3. PHP version is released. Most themes and plugins will not support this version yet BUT you should check which PHP version your site can support and upgrade to it – 7.4 is the pre-v8 version and most the site will support that version.

WPEngine has a free plugin that can check your website’s PHP compatibility on any host. Usually you will have a few plugins that fail their automated tests, but more often than not if you check with the plugin vendor and confirm the PHP version their plugin can support. aid.

4. Using Cloud Flare

Even with the worst hosting providers, Cloudflare can significantly reduce your load times. Even if you use the free plan, it will make a big difference in loading speed. Here are the services provided by Cloudflare to increase the performance of your website:

1. DNS hosting is a service that exposes your website to users who entered its address in the URL bar. Cheap providers often have slow DNS hosting, resulting in failed or slow connections, causing extra load times. Cloudflare is among the 10 fastest DNS servers in the world (see https:
   //dnsperf.com for rank). In most cases, DNS hosting from Cloudflare will significantly speed up your website
2. 
   Cloudflare also offers firewall and security features that provide better protection for your site, reducing the load on the host as it filters out some of the crawlers and crawlers that attack the site. web helps to increase website speed. This article details some of the policies we use to improve security and performance using Cloudflare.
3. The $5/month APO service does efficient page caching at the edge. Edge caching essentially means that the entire page is cached on Cloudflare’s servers, offloading your hosting and bringing the entire site closer to your visitors.
4. 
   The $20/month plan offers additional features such as a comprehensive web application firewall (WAF), better image optimization, and some additional site acceleration features.

If you can’t use Cloudflare, at least use a CDN service (with built-in image optimization, like Bunny CDN).

5. Enable site speed optimization in your theme

Many WordPress themes come with speed optimization features, such as slow loading, which means images won’t load until the viewer reaches that part of the page, or a combination of CSS and JavaScript, which helps reduce the number of network requests the browser has to make.

Many themes also have more up-to-date optimizations, such as just-in-time preload, which preloads the page just before the user clicks it (see https:
//instant.page for examples).

You should check your theme for these settings to make sure they’ve turned on and off any theme features that you’re not using, as many load extra javascript and CSS.

6. Compress photos before uploading

Compressing images before uploading them to your website can reduce your page load time by 1-2 precious seconds and thus increase website performance. It is important that you use lossless compression, which can reduce the image size by 20-50% and keep the image quality intact.

Lossless compression can extract more from your images, but degrades the quality a bit, so use with caution. Imageoptim is a great tool for compressing images. If you still want to use the plugin, check out our article on how to compress and insert website images in WordPress.

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7.Make sure your database uses Innodb storage engine for all tables

MySQL uses two storage engines for its InnoDB and MyISAM database tables. Innodb is faster for WordPress sites, but many older sites will use MyISAM. Converting these tables to Innodb will greatly improve the speed of database heavy websites like Woocommerce.

You can do this conversion in PHPMyAdmin at the database level but we usually use a plugin called Servebolt Optimizer which allows you to do it with a few clicks in the WP backend.

** Make sure to backup your database before playing with this one. 8.

8.Disable any plugins and tools you don’t use

This tip is especially important for older sites. Check the list of plugins and tools your site uses and make sure to remove or disable any plugins and tools that are no longer in use. From a speed perspective, fewer plugins means better performance. Be careful with plugins that load content from other websites as they can slow down your site speed. Other plugins that can significantly reduce the speed of a website are those that implement tracking codes, live chat, or remarketing.

Moving these tracking codes to Google Tag Manager and using the Window Loaded trigger OR pausing them with the Delay JS feature in WP Rocket can speed them up dramatically

9. Use Google Tag Manager

You’re probably familiar with Google Tag Manager. Migrating code like the Google Analytics and Google Adwords tracking code to GTM and activating it with a window load trigger can greatly reduce their impact on load times. With this trigger, the tag fires after all page content has been fully loaded, including all embedded resources (images, scripts, etc.). You can find this trigger by going to Triggers (in the GTM interface) > New > Loaded Window. GTM allows for management of beacon activation: the later the beacon is activated, the less it affects the page load speed

10. Move the code to the footer

Moving as much JS code to the footer as possible (for code in the section, move it as close to the closing section as possible) will load the code later in render-allowing The device processes more HTML than before. Usually the code is inserted at the beginning tags can slow rendering instantly and change the displacement simply at the end part can make a big difference.

11. Fix 404 error! 404 errors are terrible for speed!

Disappointed customers are not the only result of broken links. Overall website speed and performance are also affected. The problem is that the page can be listed in search results causing search engines to keep trying to crawl that nonexistent URL instead of spending time and resources crawling the actual pages.

Conclusion

Website loading speed is essential these days. If your site loads quickly, you’ve instantly made a great first impression, and that’s a quick win for user experience. We consider fast loading websites professional and reliable. Also, site speed affects your Google rankings. So, there are many reasons why site speed is important and should be good on your WordPress site. There are many WordPress speed optimization services, but how to optimize WordPress speed yourself without any plugins? We show you how!

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