How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website (Simple Guide)

43 Comments

In this video, you'll learn how to speed up your WordPress website in 3 simple steps.

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Additional SEO Resources

WordPress SEO Tutorial for Beginners (Search Engine Optimization Basics) ►

WordPress SEO: Advanced Technical SEO Made Easy ►

A Basic (Yet Powerful) Technical SEO Audit for Beginners ►

SEO Audit: How to Fix Your Website's Technical SEO Issues (Tutorial) ►

The Best WordPress SEO Plugins (It's Not Yoast) ►

SEO Tips to Improve Organic Traffic in Under 15 Minutes ►

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Google has used site speed as a ranking signal for desktop searches since 2010. And as of 2018, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile searches.

Even though speed improvements will only affect a small percentage of slow websites, faster page load times lead to better user experience and ultimately, more revenue.

So, there are a number of reasons why your website might load slowly. But the most common reasons that I've seen are due to slow connectivity, caching, page size, and sometimes more technical reasons like render blocking JS.

And the 3 steps in this video should help you get better performance from your site. But keep in mind that the things we did for this site won't necessarily translate perfectly to your site.

This is because there are tons of things to consider when it comes to WordPress site speed like your theme's code, specific plugins you might be using, server configuration, image file sizes and more.

Before you do anything, run your site through some site speed checking tools, like Google's PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, GTMetrix or our own Site Audit tool.

This will help you see what you need to improve.

The first thing we did was to switch DNS providers to Cloudflare's free DNS service.

And you'll learn how this works and why this is important in the video.

The next thing we did was purchase and install the WP Rocket plugin.

WP Rocket is an all-in-one site speed optimization plugin for WordPress. The plugin handles common page speed optimizations like caching, preloading, compression, and lazy loads images to name a few.

You'll learn what you need to do after installing WPRocket on your site.

And finally, we optimized our images.

The simple solution is to compress your images using lossy or lossless compression. And there are some great plugins that'll do this for you like ShortPixel and Imagify.

And these 3-steps gave us a huge improvement, as shown in the speed checking tools we used.

If you're still unhappy with your site speed after making these optimizations, then you'll likely need more custom work done for you. So you may want to consider removing plugins and scripts, switching themes, or hiring a developer to make the appropriate fixes.

#speedupyourwordpresswebsite #pagespeed #technicalseo

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
0:58 Common reasons that impact website's load time
1:50 Run a test through page-speed testing tools
3:01 Switch to a fast DNS provider
5:23 Start with caching files
6:05 Optimize CSS files
7:41 Set up JS files loading
8:50 Optimize the media files
9:10 Set up preloading priority
9:49 Use CDN
11:09 Optimize your images

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43 Comments
    • Sophia Ruslan
    • July 4, 2022
    Reply

    Thanks a lot. My site score of 74 jump up to 98. Easy tutorial to understand & follow. 👍🏻

      • Ahrefs
      • July 4, 2022
      Reply

      Keep it up!
      -Helen

    • Chase Fly
    • February 16, 2022
    Reply

    This definitely helped boost my pagespeed scores! Thanks for giving such concrete steps that are hard to find anywhere else.

      • Ahrefs
      • February 16, 2022
      Reply

      Happy to help! 🙌
      -Helen

    • Jenatunnesa Jeny
    • February 15, 2022
    Reply

    Gone straight from 42 to 98 for mobile in page speed insight! Thanks a lot!

      • Ahrefs
      • February 15, 2022
      Reply

      Sounds great! Happy for you 🙂
      -Helen

    • WPGlob - WordPress Tutorials, Reviews & Tips
    • November 1, 2021
    Reply

    Hi. Your advice is priceless. I really benefit from this kind of tutorial. Thank you very much.

      • Ahrefs
      • November 2, 2021
      Reply

      Glad it was helpful!

    • Daniel Seman
    • October 26, 2021
    Reply

    Very clear and concise. Thank you!

      • Ahrefs
      • October 26, 2021
      Reply

      Glad it was helpful!

    • Sh3lz Pillay
    • July 22, 2021
    Reply

    Gotta say ur a great tutorial YouTuber..love ur teaching methods, love that u use examples to expand our knowledge and u freakin explain!! Awesome 😎👍. Thanx so much for making us non-techies feel techy lol🤩

      • Ahrefs
      • July 23, 2021
      Reply

      Thank you!

    • Simon Hames
    • May 25, 2021
    Reply

    Super clear and concise – thank you!

      • Ahrefs
      • May 26, 2021
      Reply

      You’re welcome!

    • Georges jean-denis
    • May 17, 2021
    Reply

    Excellent guide! Thank you very much for this information. I usually dread optimizing websites for speed but you just made my work 10 times easier.

      • Ahrefs
      • May 17, 2021
      Reply

      You’re welcome!

    • Namita Dhakad
    • March 21, 2021
    Reply

    Really easy to understand and very helpful video. Thanks!!!

      • Ahrefs
      • March 22, 2021
      Reply

      Glad it was helpful!

    • 10Web | AI-Powered WordPress Platform
    • March 19, 2021
    Reply

    This was a super great video. Really simple and so clear. Beginners will appreciate it. Thank you, you’ve done a great job with the editing as well. Looking forward to more tutorials like this.

      • Ahrefs
      • March 20, 2021
      Reply

      Glad it was helpful!

    • StanWoods
    • March 18, 2021
    Reply

    After MONTHS of searching for ANY type of solution, I finally found you.
    You have NO idea how much this helped. From 18 seconds to 3! Thank You a lot!

      • Chetan Ambi
      • March 27, 2021
      Reply

      @Stan Which of the steps helped you? Did WP Rocket helped you?

      • Ahrefs
      • March 19, 2021
      Reply

      You’re welcome!

    • Exploring Life
    • March 15, 2021
    Reply

    Excellent presentation… Precise and straight, good voice and sentences, no extras mktg words, extraordinary explanation with few words… Good content for non_tech users… Thanks a lot

      • Ahrefs
      • March 16, 2021
      Reply

      You’re welcome!

    • 420Alt
    • February 2, 2021
    Reply

    This helped improve my site speed and was very easy to follow. Thank you!

      • Ahrefs
      • February 2, 2021
      Reply

      Glad it helped!

    • House and Home Sitters Ltd
    • January 31, 2021
    Reply

    Awesome tutorial. What a gift you have in explaining complex issues in such a simple manner! Thank you 🙏🏼

      • Ahrefs
      • February 1, 2021
      Reply

      Glad it was helpful!

    • Pascal Heintz
    • December 21, 2020
    Reply

    First up, thanks for this beautifully done tutorial. You’re so professional. I followed all your steps yet can’t get nowhere near 90%.

      • Denis McCaul
      • May 6, 2021
      Reply

      He only had 7 plugins, (most wp sites have 20+), no analytics, a blog post so no page builder DOM elements etc. These page speed tutorial videos always use very basic pages or posts to optimizer so they are guaranteed top transformational before after results. You never see them take on a real life complex homepage or long service page.

    • Spanish IN Atlanta
    • December 16, 2020
    Reply

    What a great simple easy to understand tutorial!!! Muchas gracias dude! Video editing and visual elements while explaining the concepts were on point. Small businesses like mine can’t afford to hire expensive help so learning some of the basics is essential. I appreciate your work!

      • Ahrefs
      • December 16, 2020
      Reply

      You’re very welcome!

    • Tony Pearl
    • December 11, 2020
    Reply

    Fantastic tutorial – thank you so much!
    I took your advice for one of my sites that was running SO slowly, and it helped quite a bit. It’s still not quite where it needs to be, but at least it’s better for now. Thanks again!

      • Online Education
      • December 22, 2020
      Reply

      Juhjinp no ok jk our ioooo I’m 👍🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏👍🙏🔥 in this is no idea of Oki kiya I will be ok hi j in ki ki kko I ok I ki po hi to👍🙏🙏🎉❤️😭🔥👍🙏🎉🔥❤️😭😎😀😂

      • Ahrefs
      • December 12, 2020
      Reply

      You’re welcome!

    • samir samir
    • November 9, 2020
    Reply

    this is what we call a “high quality content” , thank you

      • Ahrefs
      • November 10, 2020
      Reply

      You’re welcome!

    • Sharon Kyle
    • November 1, 2020
    Reply

    I am not a developer. I set up my own WordPress site and have posted to it daily for more than a dozen years. I rely on Youtube to teach me how to do things like improve page speed, domain authority, etc. Your explanations are, by far, better than any I’ve seen in 12 years!! thank you

      • Ahrefs
      • November 2, 2020
      Reply

      That’s awesome to hear! Thank you.

    • Digital Marketing Lane
    • October 8, 2020
    Reply

    Thanks, Sam for the wonderful video. Awesome effects!

    I have two questions – We are using W3 Total Cache Free version –

    1. Can we use the ‘Enable + Combine Only’ for CSS Minify settings?
    2. Can we use the ‘Enable + Combine Only’ for JS Minify settings?

      • Digital Marketing Lane
      • October 8, 2020
      Reply

      @Ahrefs sure Sam thanks.

      • Ahrefs
      • October 8, 2020
      Reply

      It’s all site dependent. You’d have to try yourself. But I’d recommend trying in a staging environment.
      -Sam

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