Speed Up Your Slow WordPress Website A Comprehensive Guide

When visitors land on your website, the first impression is all that matters, website speed which is now one of the most important factors for ranking in Google and other search engines. If your website loading is like turtle, it results in a bad user experience & de-ranking. So, you need to improve WordPress site speed for better results.

We will guide you to do WordPress speed optimization to get the 90 to 100 scores or A to A⁺ Grade on speed testing tools such as GTMetrix, Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights.

In this article, we’ll learn the most used techniques and tools for optimizing your website for speed, performance and loading time.

Requirements for How to Speed Up Your Slow WordPress Website

Required Plugins to speed up your slow WordPress Website

In this section we will use 3 best plugins to optimize WordPress Website

LiteSpeed Cache or WP Rocket

Super Page Cache for Cloudflare

Redis Object Cache – Optional

LiteSpeed Cache

One of the best and most used free plugin to optimize WordPress website. First check your server technology as it works best with LiteSpeed web server. You can use it with other server Technlogies like Apache, NGINX. In our experience, we will recommend you to use it only with LiteSpeed Web server. For others use WP Rocket.

How to speed up your slow WordPress Website with LiteSpeed Cache Plugin

Step 1: Install and activate LiteSpeed cache plugin. Go to LiteSpeed cache general settings “turn off” automatic upgrade and notification option, “turn on” these all options Guest Mode, Guest Optimization and put your server ip address in Server IP Box to reduce DNS fetch delay, if you don’t know your server ip address leave it blank. Leave the Domain Key box empty do nothing to this setting as we will use Cloudflare CDN setup at the end. Click on Save Changes. Check the picture below for guidance.

Step 2: Go to cache settings and “turn on” all options. Click on Save changes.

Step 3: go to purge settings option, “turn on” all options and “turn off” Serve Stale option. Click on Save changes.

Step 4: Go to Excludes option and put this code in Do Not Cache URIs box.

/wp-admin*
/wp-login*
/(.*)sitemap(.*).xml
/(.*)sitemap.xsl
/sitemap_index.xsl
/sitemap_index.xml

or any post or page URL that you don’t want to cache like checkout page , cart page etc. If you are using WooCommerce it will detect your pages that don’t need to be cached. In Do Not Cache Query Strings box put this line of code.

?swcfpc=1

In option Do Not Cache Roles, check Administrator and Author. Click on Save Changes.

Step 5: In the ESI Settings, turn off Enable ESI, turn on Cache admin and cache comment. Leave other settings to the default and click on save changes.

Step 6: This setting is only applicable when your hosting supports it. Ask your hosting providers to enable MEMCACHED or REDIS. If enabled or disabled LiteSpeed Cache will auto detect it. If enabled apply these settings otherwise check in cPanel or ask hosting support to enable this for you.

The most effective technique on a high traffic website. It decreases the server load when you have higher number of requests. Generally, it speeds up the database response time and decreases database number of requests to reduce load on server. You will not notice any difference on low traffic websites.

Now do these settings to optimize your database speed. Turn On Object Cache option, Select Method provided by hosting (Use only one method MEM or Redis. Redis is Better), put other settings provided by hosting like host or ip address of your server (127.0.0.1) and Port defined by server it’s different from other default ports, put 360 in Default Object Cache Option.

If you are using Redis then Put Redis Database ID 1 or 2 any number that you have not used before. Note that if you are hosting 2 websites on same hosting package then Redis Database ID should be different for both websites like 1 for website 1 and for second it should be 2, 3 or any number.

Turn On Persistent Connection, Turn Off Cache WP-Admin and Store Transients. In the Username and Password box put the data provided by cPanel or hosting support if they didn’t give leave it empty and click save changes.

Step 7: Go to Browser settings Turn On Browser Cache and put the value 31557600 in Browser Cache TTL box. Click on Save Changes.

Step 8: Go to Advanced setting tab. Turn Off Improve HTTP/HTTPS Compatibility & Instant Click and leave empty or default value in Login Cookie box. Click on Save Changes.

Step 9: Open Image Optimization from LiteSpeed Cache Menu and go to Image Optimization Settings Tab and Turn ON Image WebP Replacement & WebP For Extra srcset. Turn Off all other settings and click Save Changes.

Step 10: From LiteSpeed Cache Menu open Page Optimization and go to CSS Settings. Turn On CSS Minify, CSS Combine, UCSS Inline, CSS Combine External and Inline, CCSS Per URL, Inline CSS Async Lib and Select SWAP in Font Display Optimization option. Turn Off Generate UCSS, Load CSS Asynchronously. Click on Save Changes.

Purge All Cache From Upper Bar and open your website in private browser window. If your website loaded without any error you are good to go. Anything goes wrong then Turn Off CCSS Per URL and click on Save Changes then again Purge All Cache and visit your website again in private browser window. Chek the image below for Purge Cache.

Step 11: Open JS Settings Tab. Turn On all options and Select Deferred in Load JS Deferred option. Click on Save Changes.

Step 12: Open HTML Settings Tab. Turn On all options and leave boxes empty. Click on Save Changes.

Step 13: Open Media Settings Tab. Turn On Lazy Load Images, Lazy Load Iframes, Add Missing Sizes. Turn Off Responsive Placeholder, LQIP Cloud Generator, Generate LQIP In Background and leave others to the default values. Click on Save Changes.

Step 14: Open Viewport Images Tab. Turn Off all options. Do nothing on Media Excludes Tab, leave it to their default values. Click on Save Changes.

Step 15: Open Localization Settings Tab. Turn On all options, put 604800 in Gravatar Cache TTL box. In Localization Files box leave it to the default value. Click on Save Changes.

Step 16: Open Tuning Settings Tab. Turn On Optimize for Guests Only option. Select Administrator and Author in Role Excludes option. Leave other boxes to their default values. Click On Save Changes. Do nothing in Tuning Settings – CSS Tab, leave all the values to their default.

Step 17: Open LiteSpeed Cache Database Menu then open DB Optimization Settings Tab. Put 2 in Revisions Max Number box and Put 7 in Revisions Max Age box. Click on Save Changes. You can change these numbers to your own choice.

Step 18: Open LiteSpeed Cache Crawler Menu then open General Settings Tab and Turn Off Crawler. Click on Save Changes. Open Crawler Sitemap Settings Tab and Turn Off Drop Domain from Sitemap. Click On Save changes.

Leave all other settings to their default values. Don’t make any changes to other settings which we have not mentioned in this guide. LiteSpeed Speed Optimize section has been completed now. We will configure CDN Settings now. Always Configure CDN at the last step. The reason is that when you configure CDN at very first stage may be you don’t see any changes that you have made.

Step 19: Open LiteSpeed Cache CDN Menu then open CDN Settings Tab. Turn Off all other options and Turn On Cloudflare API option. Put Your API Key in Global API Key / API Token box, Put your email in Email Address box, put your domain name in Domain box. Don’t include any www or http: https: protocol in domain name. Click on Save Changes.
Get The API KEY from this Guide.

We have covered all technical settings of LiteSpeed Cache plugin that will supercharge your WordPress Website and will Improve WordPress Site Speed. If there is anything else you want to know just comment below.

A Free Content Delivery Network & Superpage Cache For Cloudflare

for remaining section of the guide, how to speed up your slow WordPress website, please check our these following guides where we have covered all the major technical points for CDN setup and Superpgae Cache For Cloudflare plugin settings. For Wp Rocket and Object Cache please visit below guide. If you are using LiteSpeed Cache you don’t need to use any Object Cache Plugin or any other cache plugins. Just Use CDN and Superpage Cache with LiteSpeed Cache. Hope this guide helped you to fix the slow speed of WordPress website.

Remaining topics of the guide: how to speed up Your Slow WordPress website.

Speed Up Website with Free Cloudflare CDN
Optimize WordPress with Wp Rocket
Optimize WordPress with Object Cache
Optimize WordPress with SuperPage Cache with Cloudflare

FAQS: