Offloading traffic to other servers can also reduce server load. Abusive traffic such as login Brute Force attacks , image hotlinking other sites linking to your image files from high traffic pages or DoS attacks can also increase server load. Identifying and blocking these attacks is very important.
Making sure you are using the latest software is also important, as software upgrades often fix bugs and enhance performance. Your theme will have a huge impact on the performance of your site. A fast, lightweight theme will perform much more efficiently than a heavy graphic-laden inefficient one. Deactivating and deleting unnecessary plugins is a very important way to improve performance. Making sure the images in your posts are optimized for the web can save time, bandwidth and increase your search engine ranking.
The first and easiest way to improve WordPress performance is by looking at the plugins. Deactivate and delete any unnecessary plugins. Try selectively disabling plugins to measure server performance.
Look at the plugin documentation or ask for support in the appropriate plugin support forum. Paying more for higher service levels at your hosting provider can be very effective. Digital Ocean can make a big difference. Increased number of processors and processor speed will also help. Make sure you are running the latest operating system version e.
Linux, Windows Server and the latest web server e. Apache or IIS, database e. Perhaps you are unable to perform the tasks, and follow up on the tips, below. Just ask your hosting provider to do them for you. A good hosting provider will upgrade or move your account to an upgraded server, to match the recommendations. For more eCommerce features, like an online store, consider starting with a WordPress.
You can change your Site Language, which is the language your readers will experience at your site. You can also change the language you see while working on your site in the dashboard.
The language you write on your website is up to you! Every paid WordPress. Try WordPress. Learn more about Professional Email. It is possible to import your blog content from a variety of other blogging platforms, including Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Tumblr, Wix, Typepad, Xanga, and more. You can also import your content from a self-hosted WordPress site. No code, no manuals, no limits. Managed WordPress hosting, with more speed, security, bandwidth and storage. Your own domain, a world-class support team, real-time backups and updates, and so much more.
Over While this is awesome, it also means there are thousands of different themes, plugins, and technologies all having to coexist. In our previous guide on page speed , we went over a lot of the fundamentals of performance and how it can have a huge impact on the success of your business. We always give WordPress sites a classification: static or dynamic. Static would typically include sites such as blogs, small business sites, lower volume news sites, personal, photography sites , etc.
By static, we mean that the data on these WordPress sites is not changing very often perhaps a couple of times a day. Even most of our Kinsta site would be considered a static website. This becomes incredibly important as many of the requests can be served directly from cache on the server at lightning-fast speeds!
This means they will have fewer database calls and not as many resources will be needed to achieve google performance. On the flip side, we have highly dynamic sites. By dynamic, we mean that the data on these WordPress sites is frequently changing server transactions are taking place every few minutes or even every second.
This means that not all requests to the server can be served directly from cache and require additional server resources and database queries. These sites also typically have a large number of concurrent visitors and sessions. On an informational or corporate WordPress site which is mostly static, a visitor might stay for five or 10 minutes until they find what they need and this is a high number, usually bounce rates are much higher.
On dynamic sites, you have the opposite happening. Visitors typically come to the site to engage with something or someone. You can see where this is going. The concurrent visitors connected to your WordPress host adds up fast.
You sign up for a plan and all your images, content, videos, etc. The WordPress host gives you an easy way to access the data, manage it, and route it to your visitors.
Pretty simple right? Well, not quite. Because shared hosts tend to overcrowd their servers , which in turn can impact the performance of your site. Or even worse, website downtime. Any issues that pop up with other sites can trickle over into your site.
Especially when you attribute support into that. The way they make a lot of their money is on upselling and hidden fees. These upsells include things like migrations, domain registrations, SSL certificates, etc. Another common tactic is to provide huge signup discounts.
But once the renewal comes around, you get the real bill. You have probably all seen this. Well, there is no such thing in the real world as unlimited resources. What hosts do behind the scenes is throttle the clients using up a lot of the resources. Customer service and support with shared hosting are almost always subpar due to the sheer volume of sites vs. Shared hosts have to spread themselves very thin to even make a profit and this usually leads to an unpleasant experience for the client.
Make sure to check out an in-depth article from our CFO on the shocking truths behind how cheap WordPress hosting really works. They are the DIY crowd. These folks are typically still trying to save money, but they are also usually concerned with performance and realize its importance in the success of their business.
The DIY approach can cut costs, but it also means that you are responsible if something breaks, and for optimizing your server for performance.
Your time is worth money and you should be spending it on growing your business. The third type of hosting is what we offer at Kinsta and that is managed WordPress hosting.
These types of hosts handle all the back-end server related tasks for you, along with providing support when you need it. They are typically fine-tuned to work with WordPress and usually include features such as one-click staging environments and automatic backups.
Their support teams will be more knowledgeable when it comes to knowing their way around the CMS as they are focused on one platform on a daily basis. Kinsta however, takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level. Our entire infrastructure is built on Google Cloud Platform and is different from traditional shared, VPS, or dedicated infrastructure, making it one of the fastest WordPress hosting solutions available.
This means that the software that runs each site is completely private and is not shared even between your own sites. During our testing, we found that migrating a WordPress site from a general purpose VM to a C2 VM resulted in a 2x increase in performance! Thank you kinsta for handling today's traffic spike without issue. It's comforting to know your site can handle surges. Every year Review Signal releases their WordPress hosting performance benchmarks , and we are proud that five years in a row, Kinsta has proven to be the best company across all tiers!
And not just on one or two of our plans, but every plan, from Starter all the way up to Enterprise. Our entire support team is made up of WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers many of whom have managed their own servers, created themes and plugins, and contributed back to core. You get to chat with the same support team members that back our Fortune and enterprise clients.
To learn more about why you should choose Kinsta for managed WordPress hosting, read why us — how Kinsta is different. But regardless of who you choose as your hosting provider, you should always look for these following server features to ensure your website runs as fast as possible. PHP 7. This can also impact your WordPress admin dashboard responsiveness.
Faster speeds plus improved security, is why Kinsta always offers the most recent versions of PHP. You can change PHP versions with a single click. Behind the scenes, every WordPress host uses a web server to power your WordPress sites. The most common choices are Nginx and Apache. We strongly recommend going with a host that uses Nginx because of its roots in performance optimization under scale. Nginx often outperforms other popular web servers in benchmark tests, especially in situations with static content or high concurrent requests, which is why Kinsta uses Nginx.
According to W3Techs , Apache powers But if you look at the most popular web server among high-traffic websites top 10, , Nginx powers Read more in our web server showdown: Nginx vs Apache. Back in Google announced its standard tier network, which is a slower network but at a cheaper cost. At Kinsta we utilize the premium tier network for all of our hosting plans. While this is an extra cost for us, it ensures you get lightning-fast speeds.
How much of an impact does this have? While networking only makes up a fraction of your total page load times, every millisecond adds up! As you can probably tell by now, a lot is going on behind the scenes when it comes to networking. These are now obsolete optimizations. One of the very first things you should do when hosting your WordPress site is to determine where the majority of your visitors or customers are coming from.
Why is this important? Because the location at which you host your website plays a significant factor in determining your overall network latency and TTFB. Network Latency: This refers to the time and or delay that is involved in the transmission of data over a network. In other words, how long it takes for a packet of data to go from one point to another. Nowadays this is typically measured in milliseconds; however, it could be seconds depending upon the network.
The closer to zero the better. Check out our in-depth post on network latency. TTFB: This stands for time to first byte. To put it simply, this is a measurement of how long the browser has to wait before receiving its first byte of data from the server.
The longer it takes to get that data, the longer it takes to display your page. Again, the closer to zero the better. Check out our in-depth post on TTFB. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to choose a server closest to your visitors. You can determine the best location by following the tips below. One of the very first things you can do is look at the geolocation of your visitors in Google Analytics. So in most cases, you would want to place your WordPress site on a server in the United States.
You could also filter down the data even further to cities. But typically we would recommend a central location like Iowa, USA. If you run an eCommerce store, make sure also to check to see where your customers are coming from. This is of course how you generate revenue, so these are your most important visitors. This should coincide with your traffic above; however, this is not always the case.
If you have eCommerce data setup or goals in Google Analytics, you can easily overlay that information on top of the geolocation data to make a more informed decision. There are a lot of handy free tools out there to measure latency from your current location for different cloud providers.
This can help you quickly evaluate which region might be the best choice for your site. In this example below, we can see that the Oregon, USA us-west1 is the fastest from where we are located. However, if you are serving customers across the entire United States, it might be better to choose Iowa, USA us-central1 to ensure low latency for visitors from both the west and east coast.
Here at Kinsta, we offer 28 different data centers across the globe. You can easily choose a site that will have both low latency and low TTFB! This also helps to reduce network hops. Your visitors and customers should always be your priority. The data center location you choose has an impact on how fast your SFTP download and upload speeds transferring files with an FTP client are, as well as the responsiveness of your WordPress admin dashboard.
So while you want to make sure and choose a location that is best for your visitors, also keep in mind that it can affect site management. Tasks like uploading files to the WordPress media library will be faster when your site is hosted on a data center closer to you. We consistently hear from clients at Kinsta that they are surprised by how much faster their admin dashboard is with us.
There is a multitude of factors that influence this, but having 28 different data centers is a big one! Pick a location that works both for your visitors and for you! DNS , short for Domain Name System, is one of the most common yet misunderstood components of the web landscape. To put it simply, DNS helps direct traffic on the Internet by connecting domain names with actual web servers. Essentially, it takes a human-friendly request — a domain name like kinsta.
One big reason for choosing premium DNS is speed and reliability. And they are blazing fast with under 20 ms average response times around the globe as seen below. However, one caveat with Cloudflare is that it also has more downtime than a lot of other providers.
They have a reputation for providing some of the best DNS uptime over the past decade. Does downtime matter that much with DNS providers? The answer to this is really yes and no. Everybody loves a brand new WordPress theme, but be careful before you go out and grab the one with all the new shiny features. First, you should check out our article on the differences when it comes to free vs.
In regards to performance, every element you see in a theme has some impact on the overall speed of your website. And unfortunately, with thousands of themes out in the wild, there are both good ones and bad ones. So how are you supposed to know which one to choose? We recommend going with one of the following two options:.
Things such as Google Fonts , Font Awesome icons, sliders, galleries, video and parallax scripts, etc. Instead, you should start or switch to a WordPress theme that is either lightweight from the beginning or gives you these options. We run a few speed tests with each theme using the following configuration:.
Built by Tom Usborne, a developer from Canada. It is actively updated and well supported. Even a few Kinsta team members use GeneratePress for their projects. There is both a free and premium version available. One of the great things about GeneratePress is that all the options use the native WordPress Customizer, meaning you can see every change you make instantly before pressing the publish button.
Just how fast is it? We did a fresh install of GeneratePress, ran five speed tests in Pingdom, and took the average. The total load time was ms with a total page size of only We then ran another set of tests with one of the pre-built themes from the GeneratePress site library.
This contains images, backgrounds, new sections, etc. Now of course, in a real-world environment you might have other things running such as Google Analytics, Facebook remarketing pixel, Hotjar, etc. But you should be able to aim for under the 1-second mark easily. Check out an in-depth review of GeneratePress over on woorkup. The OceanWP theme is lightweight and highly extendable.
Built by Nicolas Lecocq, it is also actively updated and well supported. Just like with GeneratePress, there is both a free and premium version available. If you take a look at the WordPress repository , the free version currently has over , active installs, and another impressive 5 out of 5-star rating over 2, people have given it 5 stars.
We did a fresh install of OceanWP, ran five speed tests in Pingdom, and took the average. The scripts in OceanWP are slightly larger, but nothing to write home about. We then ran another set of tests with one of the demo themes from the OceanWP site library.
This contains images, backgrounds, new sections, and required the Elementor page builder plugin. You can check out a more in-depth review of OceanWP on our blog. It is very lightweight less than 50 KB on frontend and offers unparalleled speed. Built by the team at Brainstorm Force, it is actively updated and well supported.
You might recognize them as the creators of the popular All In One Schema Rich Snippets plugin which has been around for many years. If you take a look at the WordPress repository , the free version currently has over , active installs, 1. We did a fresh install of Astra, ran five speed tests in Pingdom, and took the average.
We then ran another set of tests with one of the demo themes from the Astra Starter kit site library. Note: the images in this demo were fully compressed, but they chose very high-resolution ones from the start. The important thing we wanted to show you is that all of these WordPress themes are blazing fast, both out of the box and full demos!
As you probably noticed, OceanWP and Astra both required page builders to use their site library themes. Here are a few things to keep in mind when using a page builder plugin :.
With that being said, we are still big fans of page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder. For the most part, they are developed with performance in mind and only add a little bit of overhead. For most, the functionality and usability are worth it, as these plugins allow you to create anything you can dream up!
It will also be interesting to see how the new Gutenberg editor will play a role in site design over the next couple of years. Now for the scoop on WordPress plugins. There, we said it. Just like with themes, it matters how the plugin is developed and if it was built with performance in mind. We have many clients at Kinsta that are running plugins and their sites still load in well under a second. With that being said, there are of course not so great plugins out there which you want to stay away from.
Talk about a needle in a haystack! We try only to share things we use on a daily basis. And yes, we use WordPress plugins on our site just like the rest of you. Ad Inserter is one of the best WordPress plugins and will allow you to place ads from all kinds of sources. Making matters even better is its support for Google Ad Manager. With this, you can place ads just about anywhere on your site.
Creating engaging ads will also be a piece of cake with the visual advert editor. Moreover, other advanced features include Adblock detection, timed ad rotation, integration with Google Site Kit, and much more. With the dedicated Gutenberg block for ads, adding advertisements to your posts has never been simpler. With this, you can create, test, and manage an unlimited number of ads.
On top of that, it has features like rotation, scheduled ads, targeted ads, etc to help you make the best of your site. To help you out, we have listed out the best WordPress plugins to copyright protect your website. With it, you can prevent save yourself a lot of trouble by disallowing right clicks, preventing visitors from saving images and disallowing copy and selection. Secure Copy Content Protection is a basic and lightweight plugin that will handle a lot of the content protection features for your site.
Check this free plugin out and see for yourself. By disabling right clicks, drag-and-drop, copy shortcut keys, and other website scraping tools, you can ensure that your intellectual property is protected. When it comes to showcasing ads and listing on your website, WordPress has you covered as well.
These are the best classifieds plugin that will allow you to do just that. Just take a look! WPAdverts is a simple plugin that can help you create beautiful classifieds listing in just minutes. This plugin was built with beginners in mind is highly user-friendly as a result. Despite that, the plugin is surprisingly powerful as well and even has premium add-ons to further add to the features.
It can accommodate all kinds of classifieds listing with a bunch of different options for how things look in the front end. Not only that, but you can also even charge users to submit items to your premium listing as an additional source of revenue.
It supports payment via bank transfer but also has add-ons for integration with PayPal and Stripe. There are many more popular articles which we think will be very useful for you even though they are not specifically categorized. A powerful plugin from the brilliant team behind WordPress itself, Jetpack is a must-have plugin for every WordPress website. As the name suggests, it offers a pack of awesome features for your website to fly up high and make it a success.
This starter WordPress plugin takes care of your site security, website performance, traffic growth, image optimization, website appearance, and a lot more. It features enhanced distribution which automatically shares your published content to third-party services like search engines and helps to increase your reach and traffic. Rich Snippets are basically the extra pieces of information like star ratings, images, number of reviews, etc.
As the best schema. This helps your site rank better as well as get more click-through rates. Broken pages can leave your visitors with a poor impression of your site. To deal with that, there is a handy plugin that will monitor your website for all the broken links. Just install the free plugin Broken Link Checker and take a nice nap because it will do the job automatically. The plugin checks all your posts, comments, and other content for broken links and instantly notifies you if any are found.
In addition, it reports on the missing images as well so that you fix them quickly. Furthermore, the plugin has options to prevent search engines from following the broken links, display the broken links differently, etc. As the name suggests, Disable Comments is useful to globally disable comments on your entire site or certain post types.
It provides full-fledged features that you need to avoid comment spamming. And they were the best WordPress plugins that every website needs in my view. As stated above, these plugins provide the basic features, improve the site SEO, optimize speed, harden security, and help to market your content and products in a better way.
You should now have an idea about what plugins to install on WordPress. If you are already using them, write your feedback in the comment box below. Do make sure to check our plugins collection for more must-have WordPress plugins as well. If you think we missed any essential WordPress plugin, leave a suggestion in the comment box below. Your email address will not be published.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Nice article! Thank you, your article helped me. My mistake was that at the beginning, I installed too many plugins, and because of this, the speed of my site slowed down a lot. After reading your article, I realized which plugins I need and which I can get rid of.
Thanks for the help! Happy to know that our article could help you. Please keep coming back for more of our articles. WordPress is a great platform to build a website and do SEO. It has amazing plugins to optimize the websites. Thank you for sharing these awesome website builder plugins with us. Thank you so much Elena for the compliments. Thanks for sharing this valuable post. It helps me a lot in choosing the best plugins for my website.
Thank you for your post, very positive and clear, spetialy with the best wordpress plugins, just with that it is worth it to read your blog. Thank you. Hello there! A wonderful list of plugins that can be used. It is ver handy for content writing. Sometimes it is easy to get so carried away while writing that you forget to make it SEO friendly. When you have a plugin like Yoast it makes it easier. I will give the other worpress plugins a try sooner or later. Thanks for this post, really helpful.
Thanks for such a comprehensive article. I am continuously checking to see if I can optimise my website a bit more and some of these plugins look great! Can you recommend any? Hello Jacky, We have made the list of best WordPress social media automation plugins as well. You can visit it for more. This was the most useful post I saw. I downloaded more than half of your suggestions. Thanks a lot. Most of the time I use Contact Form 7 and Jetpack.
All in one seo is another plugin that goes with almost all of my wordpress installations, if not for all in one seo, rankmath plugin gives you good suggestions. I would only install the plugins you really need. Some do similar things.
Others will just slow down your site. You might also find this post very helpful. These are my favorite plugins. Hello Ketan, Hope these plugins will help you grow your website. The SEO Plugins all depend on your needs. Hello Raghu, We have also created a list of best WordPress page builder plugins. You can select any of them that suit your needs. Good List. But you have missed this awesome tool for Frontend.
I am also not a coder. This post really helpful for newbie like me. However, I would like to recommend a theme platform, VeryUtils is a good platform which has lots of free Plugins and Themes, you may search VeryUtils in google and go to this website to download some free Plugins and Themes. Very useful material added to his bookmarks.
I tried many different services for creating online calculators, among which Contact Form 7 and uCalc plugin were the most popular. Pretty good tools for creating calculators. Thanks for the information, please guide me on which social sharing wordpress plug in i can use for my blog site. The site may have lots of content after some time. Please suggest me the best free option as I am confused with so much choice.
Was wondering about an update for ? This post is very helpful for the people who are looking for a list of WordPress useful plugins. These are amazing and the most downloaded WordPress plugins ever. Helen, yoast seo is an excellent plugin. I am also interested in this collection: Elfsight widgets. Have you checked any of them? I think, they are worth checking. I really need the social sharing viewer! I need the same plugin that you have in your website where all people can see how many times the article is shared.
Thanks a lot for your article and sharing your thoughts on the different social media plugins. Maybe this is an inspiration for a new list or a comparison of the different free automation tools for social media. Anyways, thanks for your helpful article. Nice post, thank you for sharing, I have been reading your previous valuable posts.
You write a great interesting blog and have some great contents. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook. Trusted by over 1. Get FREE access to our toolkit — a collection of WordPress related products and resources that every professional should have! Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission.
See how WPBeginner is funded , why it matters, and how you can support us. Looking forward to getting on with implementing all relevant strategies — as soon as I can get Admin access back for my site! Glad you found our guide helpful. Glad you found our recommendations helpful. Glad you found it helpful. Glad our guide was helpful. This was incredibly thorough and helpful! In about 20 minutes this morning I sped up my current ad landing page lead time from 7.
They are different sites that scan different stats the specific scores should normally be different. Thank you. We manually create our table of contents at the moment. I use several plugins that have to do caching my web. It is called redundant? I have installed so many themes and plugins. Some plugins are inactive.
Does the inactive plugins slow down my website? I have a question. And No one never written about this. Question is When actually should we worry about the page speed? My website speed is more than Even I have seen this website speed also not more than So when should we worry about page speed?
I am waiting your answer. There is a large amount of debate on when to focus on speed, the main time would be when it becomes an issue for you and once you have your site speed where you would like it, you would keep an eye on when the speed starts to change to look at optimizing again.
Thanks a lot! I caanot thank you enough. Glad our recommendations could help. Thanks Bhai! Today This Post is Very Useful. Thanks Again. Glad you found our post helpful. But I must commend you guys, how much your articles and videos have helped a beginner like me is immeasurable.
Please help me sir. Really useful article, but bits of it are beyond this WP Beginner! I really need to limit the number of revisions on my posts, but am nervous about coding and changing php. Can you direct me to where I might find more detail about where to enter this code, preferably with screen shots?
Many thanks for such a useful article. Thanks for amazing useful guide. We would like to make a wordpress web promoting all the cafe-restaurants, hotels and other businesses in the country.
And we estimate that there will be , pages on this website such as tripadvisor. Would you suggest we do it in WordPress?
You could certainly create a site to do that, you would want to make sure your hosting can handle a site that large. Thanks WPBeginner, It helped me to speed up my website. Great post. Thank you, glad you liked our post. My website had load speed 10sec. My website load speed is 4 sec. Glad our article could help speed up your site.
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