You can look at the header request in Pingdom or use Chrome DevTools to see the value of the last-modified header. The ETag header is also very similar to the last-modified header. It is also used to validate the cache of a file. And as far as Nginx goes, the ETag header has been enabled by default since You can enable the ETag header manually in Nginx using the following code.
The vary: Accept-Encoding header should be included on every origin server response, as it tells the browser whether or not the client can handle compressed versions of the content. By using the header you can ensure that your web server and or CDN delivers the appropriate version.
You can add the vary: Accept-Encoding header in Apache by adding the following to your. You can add the vary: Accept-Encoding header in Nginx by adding the following code to your config file. They define the memory limits in the file.
These are two different things. Add the following to your wp-config. Jan Reilink also has a great blog post which describes the WordPress memory limit issue in more detail. He also gives a variation on the code you could use. Front-end typically involves anything that is handled entirely by the client-side browser, such as CSS, JavasScript, images, etc.
Two of the most important objectives you should have when it comes to front-end optimization are:. This usually means you need to run a speed test. There is a multitude of ways you can do this, check out our list of 15 awesome website speed test tools. Check out our in-depth guides on how to use Pingdom and how to use GTmetrix. Here are a few things to keep in mind when speed testing:. They all have different ways of measuring and quantifying speed, so pick one tool and stick with it throughout all of your testing and optimizations.
Even Google says to pick one. Many of the tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights all have some type of speed or performance score. The score is there to help gauge how well you are doing. And bigger sites with lots of external scripts and advertisements will never get a perfect score, which is perfectly OK.
The location you choose when speed testing matters quite a bit. As we went discussed in an earlier section, the reason is that this is all relative to the data center location you choose. TTFB, network latency, all come into play. So test your site both from a location that is close to your data center and one that is far away. You can then take the average.
A common warning or recommendation people see in speed test tools is that you should remove query strings. What is this all about? Some servers and proxy servers are unable to cache query strings. So by removing them, you can sometimes improve your caching.
You can use a premium plugin like Perfmatters which has an easy one-click option to remove query strings. A better alternative would be to use a free plugin like Code Snippets to add the code. Versioning on files is typically used by WordPress developers to get around caching problems.
For example, if a plugin developer pushes out an update and changes style. If you remove the query strings and update a plugin, this could result in the cached version to continue serving.
In some cases, this could break the appearance of your site until the cached resource expires or the cache is completely flushed. Also, some CDNs can cache query strings. The Kinsta CDN can and does by default. See our in-depth tutorial on how to remove query strings from static resources. A warning about render-blocking JavaScript and CSS might appear when you have files preventing the page from loading as fast as possible.
You can prevent them from becoming render-blocking by using async and defer attributes. Check out this video to find out more about how to eliminate render-blocking resources:.
Moving JavaScript out of the critical rendering path is typically done by adding either the defer or the async attribute to the script HTML elements that call JavaScript resources. Optimizing the delivery of CSS essentially means you need to figure out how to make it non-render blocking. Doing all of the above can sometimes be a tricky process and definitely takes some tweaking based on the scripts you have loading on your site.
Here are a couple of WordPress plugins that can help:. For a more detailed explanation and walk through, we recommend checking out our post on eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS.
In the past, a quick way to fix this is to concatenate your CSS files, or combine them so that they are loading in a single request. In some instances, we have seen this still speed up WordPress sites. It depends on the size of the files and how many of them there are.
Therefore, this is one optimization we recommend you still test on your site. It also supports loading them from your CDN. You can also do this with the WP Rocket plugin. Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters like comments and whitespace from the source code.
You can use the free Autoptimize plugin or WP Rocket to easily minify your files. Once the server sets a cookie for a particular domain, all subsequent HTTP requests for that domain must include the cookie. This warning is typically seen on sites with a large number of requests. We have an in-depth post on how to deal with the serve static content from a cookieless domain warning.
The cost of a new connection is usually costlier than streaming everything over the same connection.
One easy way to fix this warning is to use a CDN provider that can ignore cookies as well as strip cookies which will completely prevent the client from receiving the Set-Cookie response header.
By default, you can see the following two options are enabled. This is an easy alternative without having to mess with moving and configuring your site to deliver static assets from a separate subdomain. CloudFlare includes their own security cookie in your header. Again these cookies are very small and the performance implications are extremely minimal. But if you use CloudFlare, there is no way to get around this warning. A second way to get around this is to re-configure your WordPress site to deliver the static assets from a new domain or subdomain.
When they released WordPress 4. This allows users to embed YouTube videos, tweets and many other resources on their sites simply by pasting a URL, which WordPress automatically converts into an embed and provides a live preview in the visual editor. With the update, WordPress itself became an oEmbed provider.
This feature is useful for a lot of people, and you may want to keep it enabled. However, what this means is that it also generates an additional HTTP request on your WordPress site to load the wp-embed. And this loads site-wide. While this file is only 1. The request itself is sometimes a bigger deal than the content download size. Similar to embeds, in WordPress 4.
The big issue with this is that it generates an additional HTTP request on your WordPress site to load the wp-emoji-release. While this file is only There are a couple of different ways to disable Emojis in WordPress. You can do it with a free plugin or with code. A busy comment section on a site can cause a lot of performance issues. Just think about the resources that go into making comments work:. Here are four different options you can do to speed up WordPress comments :.
Remember, comments can impact your SEO as Google will typically crawl these as additional content on the page, so you should only approve high-quality comments. Check out these three easy ways to disable comments:.
Your second option would be to optimize the native WordPress comment system. One way would be to reduce the number of comments loaded with the initial page load. Another option you have is to use host Gravatars on your CDN.
This is the approach we take at Kinsta. So if a page is loaded up with comments from 50 different commenters, 50 HTTP requests will be required to download all of those Gravatars. As you can imagine, this can impact your page speed. If you look at Gravatars on the Kinsta blog, you can see they are loading from Kinsta.
Check out how to load gravatars from your CDN. Your third option is to use a third-party comment system. If your site is hosted on a cheap, resource-starved shared server, then using a third-party commenting system may speed up pages with lots of comments. Take a look at all the separate requests Disqus generates as shown below.
Here are a couple of plugins you might want to check out:. Resource hints and directives such as prefetch and preconnect can be a great way to speed up WordPress behind the scenes. KeyCDN has an excellent article and overview of resource hints. DNS prefetch allows you to resolve domain names perform a DNS lookup in the background before a user clicks on a link, which in turn can help improve performance.
Prefetch is also supported by most modern browsers. Check out our tutorial on how to add code to your WordPress header. Or you can easily implement DNS prefetch using a plugin like Perfmatters.
Preconnect allows the browser to set up early connections before an HTTP request, eliminating round-trip latency and saving time for users. Preconnect is an important tool in your optimization toolbox… it can eliminate many costly roundtrips from your request path — in some cases reducing the request latency by hundreds and even thousands of milliseconds.
Or you can easily implement preconnect using a plugin like Perfmatters. Another very powerful way to speed up WordPress is to dig through each request that is loading on your pages and posts. Again, this plugin is developed by a team member at Kinsta. Well, it is a little more complicated than that. For example, if you have a plugin like Contact Form 7, it also has shortcodes which allow you to place it anywhere. This includes dropping it in a widget.
With WordPress, it is much harder to query data from them when you dequeue scripts as opposed to querying data from the post or page metadata. Therefore, a lot of times this is due to usability issues. The less chance they have for a plugin to break, the fewer tickets and support they will have. However, with a lot of plugins on the marketplace, there are ways to get around this and code for performance if they wanted to. Unfortunately, sometimes the sheer number of downloads and users makes coding for usability a priority.
You then have the following options:. Everything is grouped together by the plugin or theme name. This makes it super easy to disable an entire plugin at once. You can then test in a website speed tool to ensure the scripts are no longer loading on the page or post. Make sure to clear your cache first! And if anything goes wrong on your site visually, you can always re-enable it in the settings to return to normal. In a speed test by woorkup , they were able to decrease the total load times by On their homepage alone they were able to reduce the number of HTTP requests from 46 down to Their page size also shrunk from For other ways to do disable scripts, check out our blog post on how to disable WordPress plugins from loading.
Basically, anything you call externally from your site has load time consequences. What makes this problem even worse is that some of them are only slow intermittently, making identification of the issue even more difficult.
A third-party external service could be considered anything that communicates with your WordPress site from outside your own server. Here are a few common examples we encounter on a regular basis:. How much do some of these third-party trackers impact performance?
In our own case study , we saw that third-party scripts increased the page load times by Ghostery also measured the top US domains in Alexa, and the results were astounding, although to us, not surprising.
Websites were 2x slower when no trackers were blocked at all. Which means these third-party tracking scripts are one of the primary contributors to slow page load speeds on the web. You have to be very careful on your WordPress site. Just one bad third-party API call could timeout your entire site!
New Relic provides an excellent and easy way to monitor your external services over time. In this example below, we can see external calls being made to twitcount. The less the better! Google began rolling out its mobile-first index on March 26th, Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your WordPress site for indexing and ranking. This helps improve the search experience for mobile users. When it comes to optimizing your site for mobile-first, speed is one of the most important factors to focus on.
Speed plays a major role in everything from usability to bounce rates and determining whether or not potential buyers will return to your site. In fact, speed is now a landing page factor for Google Search and Ads for mobile searches. Bad mobile experiences will lead the majority of users to never return. According to the latest Google page speed report, the average time a mobile site took to load in was 15 seconds.
Can you imagine waiting that long to load a single page? Users demand and deserve better. As page load times increase by just a few seconds, the likelihood of someone bouncing climbs exponentially. Here are a few things to consider when optimizing for mobile. Look at the data. In , your website better be responsive! This means it utilizes media queries to scale things down automatically on mobile devices. All of the WordPress themes we mentioned earlier in this post are fully responsive and look awesome on all devices.
In the past, it was very important that you upload images to scale and not let CSS resize them. However, this is no longer as important since WordPress 4. WordPress automatically creates several sizes of each image uploaded to the media library. By including the available sizes of an image into a srcset attribute, browsers can now choose to download the most appropriate size and ignore the others.
See an example of what your code looks like below. Image optimization is now important forever. The project relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages.
To put it simply, it offers a way to serve up a stripped down version of your current web page. We have kind of a love and hate relationship with Google AMP, and so does a lot of the community. Every website is different, and Google AMP is constantly being improved.
Check out our in-depth tutorial on how to get Google AMP setup. And if you need it, how to disable Google AMP. As you can probably tell, we are obsessed with all the different ways you can speed up WordPress.
Having a fast site helps boost your rankings, improves crawlability for search engines, improves conversion rates, increases time on site, and decreases your bounce create.
Not to mention the fact that everyone loves visiting a fast website! We hope that this speed up guide was helpful and that you were able to take away a few things and apply them to your WordPress site. If so, please take a moment and share it. Did we miss anything important? If so, we would love to hear about it.
Let us know your speed up WordPress tips below in the comments. All of that and much more, in one plan with no long-term contracts, assisted migrations, and a day-money-back-guarantee. Okay guys, this has to be the longest blog post I have ever read. Kinsta was the logical choice for many reasons, especially performance. WooCommerce plugins are very bad at loading on every page, when say an Authorize. Thanks Luke! Yes, WooCommerce plugins are notably bad in terms of site-wide loading scripts.
Kinsta articles are top quality content. One of the few blog that writes really useful articles. Regards Claus. Great article that brings everything together to put it mildly!
Very well done! I really enjoyed every part of this great article. Thanks a lot for sharing these valuable information. So glad you enjoyed it Bassem! As you can tell… we are obsessed with speeding up WordPress. Wow, I found your article just when I ran into a problem, my site is loading slowly.
Thanks for 25k words : I will try to use yours recomendation at my site. This is a fantastic guide! The instructions are clear and precise. Thanks Patrick! We wanted to touch on as much as possible in terms of WordPress performance all in one post.
I am surprised by the quality of your articles, they are really good! Maybe too much for the average WordPress user though. Removing files will not really increase the performances, but removing the useless Media entries will. I love these solutions. Thank you for your kind words, glad you like our content! I wish I could read this post earlier. Everything that you guys mentioned here are a gem. Thank you so much for sharing your 15 years of experience. This post is the single source of truth which groups all the things that is matters for WordPress Performance for any kind.
Comprehensive guides like this one are the reason I decided to host my business on Kinsta. Incredibly helpful, thank you for putting this together! How did you setup this plugin to not hurt your page speed? I know you mentioned in your article regarding blog articles and I am trying to speed up this plugin. For example, I see you used svg and other web fonts and just curious! Your article is awesome! You should give us a donate button!
I use the Kinsta blog articles all the time to advance my WordPress site development. Thanks for publishing such in-depth articles that cover everything including process and options. I tested the GeneratePress premium theme I want to use Grill with Google Pagespeed Insights, and the desktop version scored a 98, however the mobile version only scored a The Pingdom test scored an 80… a B rating. Load time ms.
This seems like a very mediocre score considering this is without any added plugins or additional functionality. Thanks, Kinsta! You are providing us the best content for how to speed up our WordPress site. Thanks again. Hi Stephen, agreed! Query parameters can have a huge effect on page speed and PHP worker usage. Our analytics tool provides data on top uncached requests, and our support team is able to force cache any query parameters.
Amazing article, thank you! I have a question about theme selection I would really appreciate help with. Do i have to tell them to purchase a theme like astra for any future sites they develop for me and will they have issues working on that? EG: Them refusing to use a theme like astra since they have no experience with it?
The code to remove the Query Strings posted in this article is incomplete. By submitting this form: You agree to the processing of the submitted personal data in accordance with Kinsta's Privacy Policy , including the transfer of data to the United States. You also agree to receive information from Kinsta related to our services, events, and promotions. You may unsubscribe at any time by following the instructions in the communications received. Your current host could be costing you time and money — get them back with Kinsta.
Learn more. Learn WordPress. Shared WordPress hosting. Kinsta hosting architecture. Kinsta had essentially perfect LoadStorm and Blitz tests. This is why using a content delivery network CDN is important. Using a CDN helps you improve your page speed significantly. A CDN is a network of multiple servers distributed throughout various locations around the globe.
Whenever someone visits your website, CDN identifies their geographical location of that visitor and serves the static files through a server that is closest to them.
We use MaxCDN on all our projects. Best of all, it complements your existing WordPress caching plugins for improving page load time. Images often account for most of the downloadable bytes on a web page. By optimizing your images for speed, you can improve the page load time of your site.
Compress images : We highly recommend you optimize your images for the web before uploading the heavy image files directly from your phone or camera. Alternatively, you can also use an image compression plugin on your site. Lazy loading : Are you using too many images on a web page? Each additional file is an HTTP request.
Combining all those files into a single file is one of the best ways to reduce HTTP request and speed up your website. This can be done with a free plugin, Asset Cleanup. First Name. Last Name. Nickname do not fill out. I agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Send me GTmetrix news, tips and offers. Log In Got an account? Log in now! Forgot your password? Enter your e-mail address below to begin the process of resetting your password. Your own web hosting server will also be faster since the CDN is doing a lot of the work.
It works well with WordPress websites and compliments your existing WordPress caching plugins for even faster loading times. You can directly upload audio and video files to your WordPress site, and it will automatically display them in an HTML5 player….
Hosting audio and videos will cost you bandwidth. Hosting large media files also increases your backup sizes tremendously, and makes it difficult for you to restore WordPress from backup.
They have the bandwidth for it! Find out more details on how it works in our guide on embedding videos in WordPress. If you are making a podcast website with WordPress , then we recommend podcast hosting service Blubrry for the best performance. Some beautiful and impressive-looking themes are actually poorly coded and can slow your site way down. You can always add those features using quality WordPress plugins. You can also check out our article on selecting the perfect WordPress theme for advice on what to look for.
Before you activate your new theme, see our guide on how to properly switch your WordPress theme for a smooth transition. Poorly coded WordPress plugins often load too much bloat whether your site needs it or not.
This increases your page load speed and slows down your site. To help you choose the best plugins, we often publish our expert pick of best WordPress plugin showcases. We pay special attention to ease of use, user experience, and most importantly performance. Apart from our own recommendations, you can run your own tests. Simply run speed tests before and after installing a plugin to compare its impact on performance.
But every fraction of a second counts. The following tips are a little more technical, with some requiring you to modify your site files or have a basic understanding of PHP. Readers tend to love blog posts that are longer and more in-depth.
Longer posts even tend to rank higher in search engines. WordPress comes with built-in functionality to do that. Do that again if you want to split the article on to the next page as well. For more detailed instructions, see our tutorial on post pagination — how to split WordPress posts into multiple pages.
Many WordPress plugins and themes load all kinds of files from other websites. These files can include scripts, stylesheets, and images from external resources like Google, Facebook, analytics services, and so on. But if your plugins are making a lot of these requests, then it could slow down your website significantly. You can reduce all these external HTTP requests by disabling scripts and styles or merging them into one file.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of poorly coded WordPress themes out there. They ignore WordPress standard practices and end up making direct database calls, or too many unnecessary requests to the database.
This can really slow down your server by giving it too much work to do. They simply have no other way to find out what language your site is in. But if you are customizing your site using a child theme , then you can replace these database calls with your specific information in order to reduce all those database calls. Review your parent theme for instances like this that can be easily replaced with static information. For improved performance, you can optimize your database to get rid of all that unnecessary information.
This can be easily managed with the WP-Sweep plugin. It allows you to clean your WordPress database by deleting things like trashed posts, revisions, unused tags, etc. See our guide on how to optimize and clean up your WordPress database for improved performance. Post revisions take up space in your WordPress database. Some users believe that revisions can also affect some database queries run by plugins.
You can easily limit the number of revisions WordPress keeps for each article. Simply add this line of code to your wp-config. This code will limit WordPress to only save your last 4 revisions of each post or page, and discard older revisions automatically.
One way this happens is when other websites serve your images directly from their URLs on your website, instead of uploading them to their own servers. Simply add this code to your. You may also want to check our article showing 4 ways to prevent image theft in WordPress.
Some content scraping websites automatically create posts by stealing your content from your RSS feed. You can check out our guide on preventing blog content scraping in WordPress for ways to deal with automated content theft. If you add many images, multiple video embeds, and photo galleries to your blog posts, then your site can benefit from lazy loading.
It replaces all other images and video embeds with a placeholder image. You can lazy load images, videos, and even WordPress comments and gravatars. For WordPress comments see our guide on how to lazy load comments in WordPress. A WordPress firewall plugin helps you block brute force attacks , hacking attempts, and malware.
However, not all firewall plugins are the same. Some of them run on your website, this means attackers are already able to reach your web server before they get blocked. This is still effective for security, but not optimal for performance.
These firewalls block maclious requests even before they reach your website. This has a small but noticeable performance impact. You can reduce this by manually fixing all URLs. WordPress is mainly written in the PHP programming language. It is a server side language, which means it is installed and runs on your hosting server. However, it is possible that your hosting company is running a slightly older PHP version.
The newer PHP 7 is two times faster than its predecessors.
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