A slow WordPress website can frustrate visitors, increase bounce rates, and even hurt your search rankings. Since 2010, Google has used site speed as a ranking signal for desktop searches, and since 2018, it’s also been a factor for mobile searches. Beyond SEO, faster sites simply provide a better user experience and can lead to higher revenue.
If you’ve been struggling with site performance, don’t worry. In this article, I’ll show you three simple steps to speed up your WordPress site, just like I did for a friend’s website. These steps helped him go from mediocre performance scores to lightning-fast load times.
Step 1: Switch to a Faster DNS Provider
When someone types your domain into their browser, a DNS lookup happens to find your server’s IP address. Slow DNS providers can add unnecessary delays to this process. That’s why one of the easiest performance wins is switching to a faster DNS.
I recommend Cloudflare’s free DNS. It’s one of the fastest available and simple to set up:
- Create a free account at Cloudflare.
- Add your site.
- Review your DNS records.
- Update your nameservers at your domain registrar.
This change alone can make your site noticeably faster for your visitors.
Step 2: Install WP Rocket for Caching & File Optimization
The second step is to optimize how WordPress delivers content. For this, I highly recommend WP Rocket, a premium caching and optimization plugin. While there are free alternatives like Autoptimize or W3 Total Cache, I’ve personally had the best results with WP Rocket because it’s beginner-friendly and very effective.
Here are some of the most important optimizations:
- Caching: Store copies of your pages for faster delivery.
- Minification & Combination: Reduce file sizes by removing whitespace and comments, and combine CSS/JS files where beneficial.
- Defer JavaScript: Load important content (HTML/CSS) first, and delay JS until later.
- Lazy Loading: Load images and videos only when they come into view.
- Preloading: Tell browsers which resources to prioritize.
Why Defer JavaScript is Critical: Out of all these optimizations, deferring JavaScript often has the biggest impact on site speed. JavaScript files are usually large and can block rendering, meaning the page won’t fully display until scripts finish loading. By deferring them, your visitors can start reading your content almost instantly, while scripts load quietly in the background. This creates the feeling of a much faster site and drastically improves user experience.
If your audience is global, consider enabling a CDN (Content Delivery Network) through WP Rocket. A CDN caches your site’s content on servers worldwide, reducing latency for visitors far from your hosting server.
Step 3: Optimize Your Images
Images often make up the largest portion of a page’s size. Even with lazy loading, oversized images above the fold can slow down your site. To fix this, use an image optimization plugin like ShortPixel or Imagify.
Benefits of image optimization:
- Reduce image file sizes with lossy or lossless compression.
- Serve next-gen formats like WebP for even smaller file sizes without sacrificing quality.
- Save server storage and bandwidth.
For example, after compressing images with ShortPixel, file sizes dropped dramatically, and the site’s load times improved significantly.
That said, the best long-term solution is to optimize images before uploading them to WordPress. By compressing photos into the WebP format on your computer and then uploading them directly, you eliminate the need for extra plugins, reduce server load, and keep your media library lighter from the start. This approach ensures your website stays fast and efficient without additional processing overhead.
Final Thoughts
These three steps – faster DNS, caching & optimization with WP Rocket, and image compression – can make a huge difference in WordPress performance. While your results may vary depending on your theme, plugins, hosting, and scripts, these optimizations are a solid foundation.
If your site is still slow after trying these fixes, you may need more advanced solutions like switching to a lighter theme, removing unnecessary plugins, or tweaking server settings.
Give these tips a try and see how much faster your WordPress site becomes!
