How to Speed up Your WordPress Site (WordPress Performance Optimization)

We talked about WordPress Performance Optimization at the April 2014 meetup of WordPress Grand Rapids, a group I help organize. Since the meetup, I've spoken with a few clients and prospects whose WordPress sites were loading slowly, so I thought it'd be helpful to post here too.

The speed of websites has become more important than ever. I talked about it briefly in my post What does a small business WordPress website need? Here's an excerpt:

Visitors, especially mobile visitors, don’t like waiting for sites to load. You may lose a prospect, and it’s also sending a negative signal to Google. If they notice that mobile visitors are leaving your site immediately after arriving, it could negatively affect your ranking. A faster site can result in higher conversion rates and higher revenue, and a slow site could be penalized by Google, especially if it’s a slow mobile site.

At that meetup I talked about the following areas of WordPress performance optimization:

  • testing
  • hosting
  • caching
  • CDNs
  • image optimization

After I spoke, Brian Richards talked about caching, queries, and transients. Finally, the group discussed a few WordPress development tools that help in optimizing performance. See the meetup notes for specific tips, tools, and techniques for making WordPress sites faster.

If you're interested in learning (or teaching) about WordPress and you're near Grand Rapids, MI, you should join our group! You can find us on Meetup, WPGR.org, and Twitter (@wpgrandrapids and #wpgr).

What questions do you have about improving the performance of your WordPress site? Leave a comment, or contact us about an evaluation of your WordPress site.

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