Are you looking for the best methods to increase your website speed? If so, you’ve reached the right place.
A fast and secure website is the foundation for any successful online business. If your page takes seconds to open, visitors will switch to similar pages to read or buy products. It will ultimately affect your traffic and income.
Do you want it to happen?
Indeed, your answer will be a big NO. So, you should take some serious steps to reduce your page loading time and boost website speed. A faster website adds more value to your traffic-building efforts and opens new opportunities for your business.
In this article, we’ll share 15 ways to skyrocket your website speed in 2025.
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How to Test Website Speed?
These are the best free website speed test tools on the web,
GTmetrix and Pingdom allow you to test page speed from multiple locations around the world.
Monitor your page’s fully loaded time, number of requests made, and page grade to reach a conclusion. If it is too slow, you should take serious steps to increase your website speed and page visits.
How to Improve Website Speed?
Creating a lightning-fast website is not an easy process. You should perform several things- from choosing a good hosting provider to enabling lazy loading- to reduce page loading time and improve website performance.
Where to start?
1. Choose a fast hosting service
A web host is the backbone of any website. Your hosting provider should serve content faster and protect your data from hacking attempts, malware infections, and other unexpected cyber threats.
A good hosting company will use up-to-date technologies and high-quality infrastructure without compromising security. Don’t pick a web host just because of their cheap rates. Instead, analyze their key features and find how it performs in real life.
A cheap, but a slow loading website will not help you attract customers. To boost search rankings and conversions, you need a fast laoding site.
Our recommended hosting: WPX Hosting
WPX Hosting is one of the fastest web hosting companies that can load your pages in less than a second.
They provide a custom, high-speed CDN to all customers in addition to the standard hosting features. It will help you deliver websites faster through more than 41 edge points in the United States, Europe, Australia, Asia, South Africa, and others. Thus, you can ensure that your website doesn’t make visitors wait even a moment to load content.
Free malware scanning and removal is another advantage of WPX Hosting plans. They will scan all your sites daily to detect potentially dangerous threats and remove them automatically. Usually, most of the hosts charge an additional payment for this service. But WPX Hosting provides it for free.
Unlimited SSLs, unlimited website migrations, daily backups, and the implementation of the latest technologies are some other benefits you can enjoy with WPX.
You can also consider: Kinsta
Kinsta is another popular host you can consider to speed up WordPress and boost traffic. Their servers backed by Google Cloud platform, are located in 37 global locations.
You can further improve the page performance using their Cloudflare Enterprise CDN integration. It is scalable, highly secured, and best for high-traffic websites and growing businesses.
A faster and safer hosting service will be costlier than others. But it can generate guaranteed results for you in the long run. Thus, you can recover the invested amount in hosting easily.
A stunning template could be another reason for your slow speed issues. Some WordPress themes are packed with many plugins and unlimited settings to beautify your site as you like. The excessive load will create an increase in your page loading time.
If you are facing a slow speed issue, consider changing your theme.
Create a staging site and activate a default theme like Twenty Twenty first. Then, check your staging site’s speed using GTmetrix. If it loads fast, you should change your website theme.
Our recommended WordPress theme: GeneratePress
GeneratePress is the fastest, lightweight theme for WordPress. It is highly flexible and best for all types of websites.
Design your dream site as you like and customize it to any extent. GeneratePress is free, but a premium subscription is essential to get complete control over the customization.
GeneratePress is clean and responsive. It doesn’t slow down your pages anyway. If you are running a business website, online store, or blog, GeneratePress is an excellent choice.
You can also consider: Astra
Astra is another best theme for WordPress websites. It is mobile-friendly and suitable for all website types.
Install a starter template or build your website with infinite customizer settings. You can change layouts, insert tracking scripts, and customize any part easily.
Astra loads fast across all device types. Their dozens of free templates help you quickly transform websites for any business type.
A fast-loading and mobile-friendly theme can bring your business to the next level. So, you need to install and activate a speed-optimized premium theme on your site. It will also help you reduce the bounce rate and convert visitors to regular customers.
3. Reduce the number of plugins
How many WordPress plugins do you use? It is a fact that we can’t uncover the full power of WordPress without installing proper plugins. However, their excessive usage could also deteriorate your overall website performance.
Explore your website’s GTmetrix scan report to identify whatever plugins take a long time to load.
Visit the Waterfall tab and scroll through file names to check if any theme or plugin name is mentioned there. Monitor the timeline on the right side to analyze each of your plugin’s first paint and fully loaded time.
If it slows down your page significantly, replace it with another plugin (more lightweight) to handle the job.
Here’s a list of WordPress plugins that may slow down your website,
- Add This
- Broken Link Checker
- Contact Form 7
- Contextual Related Posts
- Disqus Comment System
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- Google Analytics
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Imsantiy
- JetPack
- NextGEN Gallery
- ShareThis
- WP Broken Link Status Checker
- WP Statistics
- Yet Another Related Post Plugin
You should replace these plugins with alternatives. For instance, instead of the official Disqus plugin, you can use the Disqus Conditional Load plugin, which will load only when the user scrolls down to the comment section. Thus, you can quickly serve single posts or pages to end users.
Make sure that there are no inactive plugins left on your site. If any plugin is installed and you are not using it anymore, remove it immediately.
Even inactive plugins will burden your servers and may diminish your page performance. Keep the number of plugins minimum to open your website smoother and faster.
4. Install WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the #1 caching plugin for WordPress. It is an excellent tool for caching, database optimization, minification, and preloading resources.
These are the main features of WP Rocket,
- Caching
- Database optimization
- Leverage browser caching
- Enable compression
- CDN integration
- Defer parsing of java script
- Minify javascript
- Minify HTML
- Minify CSS
- Add expires headers
- Reduce DNS lookups
- Control heartbeat
WP Rocket will also help you to self host Google fonts, lazy load images and videos, disable emojis, etc. If you are keen to increase your website speed and traffic, you should use WP Rocket on the site.
5. Limit post revisions
If you are working on a content, WordPress will automatically save it at regular intervals. It is known as post revisions. They will help you to revert changes or go back to the previous version easily.
WordPress will also create post revisions whenever you clicks on the update or publish button in the post editor. The auto save is a powerful feature of WordPress as it ensures that you won’t lose any modifications because of sudden browser crashes, connectivity error, etc. You can open revisions from the publish menu and choose a version to quickly restore it.
However, it has a downside.
WordPress will create revisions unlimited number of times and keep them in your database. Naturally, it will slow down your website. So it’s better to set a limit on how many revisions WordPress can keep for each post or page.
Open wp-config.php from the root directory of WordPress.
Enter this code,
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 2);
Thereafter, it will keep only 2 most recent revisions for each post. The old revisions will automatically be removed. Feel free to change the number as you need.
If you want to turn off post revisions completely, add this code,
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);
Open wp-config.php and insert the following code to restore post revisions on your site,
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, true);
I recommend you to keep at least 2 revisions per post. So you can quickly revert changes if anything bad happened or you failed to save the content in time.
6. Optimize your database
Database optimization is another part you should focus to reduce server load and increase your website speed. There will be so many unnecessary data on your website like post revisions, trashed pages, spam comments, unused tags, etc. You should clean them frequently to smoothen loading your pages.
Our recommended plugin: Optimize Database After Deleting Revisions (If not using WP Rocket)
Optimize Database After Deleting Revisions is a light-weight plugin to limit and delete your post revisions. It is easy to use and lets you delete trashed items, spam comments, transients, pingbacks, and other unwanted data in one-click.
Open plugin settings and set a schedule to automatically delete revisions at frequent intervals-daily or even hourly.
7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Your website will not load at the same speed in different locations. It has a decent speed in the area where your datacenter is located. At the same time, visilors in other locations may face slow speed issues. This is because your datacenter is far away from them.
So it’s really important to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve your content at the high-speed to visitors across the globe.
Most hosting companies offer a free CDN integration in their shared and WordPress hosting plans. Even though, we can’t expect a significant speed improvement with a free CDN.
A few hosting players come with a custom CDN integration to increase page performance. Better to go with them or connect your website to a third party CDN to serve content and scripts.
8. Optimize Images
Blog post images can bring massive traffic to your pages. But if you are not optimizing them properly, they may slow down your website also.
So you should optimize every image before uploading them to WordPress. You can also consider installing an image optimizer plugin to automatically compress images without lossing their quality.
Our recommended plugin: ShortPixel
ShortPixel is our favorite plugin for image optimization. It will automatically optimize your images and serve them in WebP, AVIF formats for improved performance. You can also bulk optimize images by consuming lifetime credits.
You can also consider: Optimole
Optimole is another fantastic image optimization plugin for WordPress. It is free for up to 5,000 monthly visits and automatically scale images to open them faster.
Integrated with Cloudfront CDN, you can deliver images from 200+ global locations.
Image optimization is major factor which will determine your search engine rankings and reduce bounce rate. It will also help you to create a magic in the website speed.
9. Lazyload images
By default, all your page images will load as soon as a user clicks your link. It will consume yoour bandwidth limit unnecessarily.
Image lazy loading is the best way to avoid this situation.
What does it mean?
Load images only when a user scroll down to them. Nowadays, most of the premium WordPress themes come with lazyload functionalities. WP Rocket, Shortpixel, and Optimole also allows you to lazyload images and increase website speed.
10. Optimize your homepage
Your homepage is the main landing page of your business. If your brand is famous, people will visit your site directly without any referral links. So you should optimize the homepage properly to avoid creating a bad reputation.
Do these things to open your homepage faster,
- Reduce the number of images
- Show post excerpts instead of full posts
- Use minimum ad slots
- Avoid popups
- Use minimum number of widgets
Apply these techniques to reduce your page loading time and rank higher in SERPs.
11. Regular updates
Don’t forget to update your WordPress, themes, and plugins to the latest version. It will help you to fix performance issues, security loopholes, and bugs.
Visit your hosting account and enable automatic updates for Core files, themes, and plugins. You can also create a staging area to test updates before pushing them to your production site. This helps you avoid unexpected crashes that may occur due to compatability issues.
12. Install Perfmatters
Perfmatters is an incredible WordPress plugin, developed by Kinsta hosting and KeyCDN. It lets you disable many unwanted features from your website to maximize its performance.
The plugin is light-weight and works with all hosting providers. These are the current features of Perfmatters plugin,
- Remove query strings
- Disable emojis
- Disable scripts per page
- Disable and limit post revisions
- Disable embeds
- Remove shortlinks
- Change Hearbeat API frequency
- Disable Heartbeat API
- Change autosave interval
- Host Google Analytics locally
- Disable Google Fonts
- Disable pingbacks
- Lazyload images
- Change WordPress login URL
- Manage scripts loading for other plugins
- More
Perfmatters is tiny and weighs less than 50 kb. It is clean and helps you to score up to 100/100 in page speed tests. The plugin is high in quality but cheap in pricing that costs just $24.95/year with 15% renewal discounts. It works best to skyrocket your website speed.
13. Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
If anyone links to your content, you will get a pingback notification in the WordPress admin area in the form of comments. It is automatically sent by the system, but on the other hand, trackbacks are being sent by the publisher to inform you about the linking.
Both ping backs and track backs waste your time, create unnecessary database calls, and add more entries to your pending comments. So it’s better to disable them.
Open your settings > Discussion and uncheck ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs’ to turn off ping backs and track backs on your posts.
If you want to enable them on individual posts, open the post in editing mode, scroll down to locate ‘Discussion’ settings and check ‘Allow track backs and ping backs on this page’ box.
Self pingbacks are also there. If you link to other content in the same website, WordPress will create self pings for them. You can use the Perfmatters plugin to turn off self pingbacks in one-click.
14. Minimize external HTTP requests
Sometimes, your WordPress theme and plugins needs to access files from external sources. It includes Google fonts, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, Facebook pixel, etc.
Keep your external HTTP requests to a minimum level. Otherwise, it will affect your website speed and page loading time.
Daan van, a Dutch developer, has created two simple WordPress plugins to host Google fonts and Analytics locally. They will help you to fix relevant warnings on GTmetrix and enhance your website speed.
15. Disable image hotlinking
Image hotlinking is very common these days. It is a bad practise implemented by some webmasters to steal your images and bandwidth.
For instance, you want to use images from other websites on your blog. So you just copied the original image URL (instead of downloading the file and uploading it to your server) and inserted it on your page. In this example, the image will appear on your site, but it originally serves from another location.
Some people even use this technique to illegally use premium images that you have purchased. Open your .htaccess file from the root directory and insert the following code to disable image hot linking on WordPress. Alternatively, you can edit the file with Yoast SEO or Rank Math SEO plugins.
| RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?yourdomain.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?google.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?bing.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?yahoo.com [NC] RewriteRule .(jpg | jpeg | png | gif | svg)$ – [NC,F,L] |
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This code specifies which websites can access your images. Replace example.com with your domain to indicate who can directly link to your image.
If you want to allow search engines to index your images, mention their address as next. It includes Google, Bing, Facebook, and Twitter. Replace website.com with relevant website names. Add more lines if needed.
Don’t forget to apply these tips to reduce your page loading time and skyrocket your website speed. If you have any other queries, let us know through comments.
FAQ
How can I check my website speed?
GTmetrix and Pingdom are the best tools to check your website speed. They can analyze your page performance from different global locations and device types. Google PageSpeed Insights is another popular tool to monitor page speed on desktop and mobiles.
What is a fast speed for a website?
If your website loads in less than 1 second, we can say that it is faster than 90% of other sites on the web. Try to load it in 0.2 to 1.5 seconds, otherwise, you will see a serious decrease in conversions and search rankings. According to experts, a two-second delay can cause people to abandon your page and increase your bounce rate.
What factors influence website speed?
Factors like server response time, page size, image optimization, caching strategy, efficient code implementation, and the use of CDNs all play a role in determining your website’s speed.
Why is website speed important?
We live in a time when no one has time for anything. If your page takes two seconds to load, visitors will go looking for other similar content. That’s why Google introduced Core Web Vitals. It evaluates your text, media, scripts and other elements and gives you a ranking grade based on the time it takes to load.
The faster loading sites and pages rank higher in search engine results. If you have a slow website, take necessary steps to increase performance and ranking.
What is browser caching and how does it affect website speed?
Browser caching enables the storage of static website files locally on a user’s browser, which reduces the need to download them repeatedly. This results in faster page loading times for returning visitors.
Why should I minify CSS and JavaScript files?
Minifying CSS and JavaScript files removes unnecessary characters, whitespace, and comments to reduce file size. Smaller files load faster, resulting in improved website speed.
What is server response time and how can I improve it?
Server response time is the duration between a user’s browser sending a request and the server responding. Optimize server configuration, database queries, and utilize caching methods to improve response time.
How can a Content Delivery Network (CDN) help improve website speed?
A CDN distributes your content across multiple servers worldwide, reducing latency and improving load times by serving content from the nearest server to the user.
Should I use a plugin or script for website speed optimization?
Plugins or scripts can automate tasks like image compression, caching, and minification, benefiting website speed optimization. However, excessive use of plugins can have a negative impact on performance.
What are some advanced techniques to optimize website speed?
Advanced techniques involve implementing lazy loading for media content, utilizing the HTTP/2 protocol, optimizing database queries, employing browser prefetching and preloading, and using server-side caching methods to optimize website speed.
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