How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

WordPress Performance Optimisation

A fast website improves user experience, reduces bounce rates, and boosts your search engine rankings. Here are proven techniques to speed up your WordPress site on SillyHost.

Enable Caching

Caching serves stored versions of your pages instead of generating them from scratch on every visit:

• LiteSpeed Cache: SillyHost uses LiteSpeed web servers. Install the free LiteSpeed Cache plugin for the best performance. It integrates directly with the server for superior caching.
• Alternative: WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache if you prefer other options.
• Enable browser caching within your caching plugin so returning visitors load assets from their local cache.

Optimise Images

Images are typically the largest files on any website. Optimising them can dramatically improve load times:

• Install ShortPixel or Smush to automatically compress images on upload.
• Use WebP format where possible — it is significantly smaller than JPEG or PNG with comparable quality.
• Enable lazy loading so images below the fold only load when the user scrolls to them. WordPress includes basic lazy loading by default since version 5.5.

Minimise and Combine Assets

• Use your caching plugin or a tool like Autoptimize to minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files.
• Combine multiple CSS and JavaScript files into fewer requests to reduce HTTP overhead.
• Defer non-critical JavaScript so it does not block page rendering.

Optimise Your Database

• Use WP-Optimize to clean up post revisions, spam comments, trashed items, and transient options.
• Limit the number of post revisions WordPress stores by adding define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5); to wp-config.php.

Use a CDN

A Content Delivery Network serves your static assets from servers closer to your visitors. Cloudflare offers a generous free plan that integrates easily with SillyHost and provides both CDN and additional security features.

Reduce Plugin Bloat

Every plugin adds code that must be loaded. Audit your plugins and remove any that are not essential. Replace multiple single-purpose plugins with fewer multi-purpose ones where possible.