Making your WordPress website faster

Do you notice that your WordPress installation has become slower? In this knowledge base article, we explain the different causes and what you can do about it.

The causes 

Too many plugins

The most common cause is too many plugins, which can overload the installation and ultimately make it slower. Think carefully about whether you still need all the plugins; less is more in this case.

Large images

This mainly applies to the sharpness of the images; a nice sharp image can quickly demand a lot from your resources. It is better to optimize the images using an image compression tool.

Multilingual site

When you have a multilingual site, it is useful to split your site into single sites where 1 language is maintained. This way you have the best performance and, for example, a Dutch-speaking user does not have to wait until the German version is loaded.

Theme

It is also possible that your theme is very inefficient; check whether the theme functions well and also comes from a well-regarded developer or company. Make sure you do not have multiple themes active, as this can conflict with each other.

The solutions

Activate Litespeed caching plugin

The Litespeed caching plugin, in combination with the Litespeed servers on which all WordPress hosting packages of mijn.host run, is a good solution to improve your speed. You can download and activate the Litespeed cache plugin for your WordPress installation.

Activate Quic.cloud CDN

A CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and ensures that the components of your website are already prepared across multiple locations and servers. This allows visitors to your website to load the site quickly.

You can read more information on how to activate Quic.Cloud in this knowledge base article.

Activate Redis

Redis is a so-called 'cache mechanism'. What it actually does is store a lot of data in advance, so that the visitor can retrieve it from the server at lightning speed. As a result, a large, slow MySQL database is not loaded for every visitor, but rather a scaled-down copy. The correct data is looked up and served based on each request.

To set this up, you can follow this explanation: https://mijn.host/kb/wordpress/redis-caching-activeren-binnen-wordpress

WP-Cron

WordPress uses a file called 'wp-cron.php'. WP-Cron is how WordPress handles scheduling time-based tasks in WordPress. Several core functions of WordPress, such as checking for updates and publishing scheduled posts, make use of WP-Cron. The "Cron" part of the name comes from the cron time-based job scheduler available on UNIX systems. But this is essentially not a "real" cronjob. It is better to replace this with a real cronjob via DirectAdmin.

To set this up, you can follow this explanation: https://mijn.host/kb/wordpress/wordpress-cron-taak-instellen

Clean up database

If you have been running a WordPress website for a longer period of time, your database might still have stored a lot of data that you no longer actually need. So then it is time to clean it up. You can easily do this with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress.

Go to your WordPress back-end and navigate to 'LiteSpeed Cache > Database > Manage'. Here you can click on 'Clean All'. LiteSpeed will then remove all old data, including post revisions. If yf you do not want this, you can also clean up specific things on the same page, such as spam comments or transients.

WordPress and Plugin updates

Go to your WordPress backend and navigate to 'Dashboard > Updates'. Here you will see an overview of all available updates. If you do not update everything regularly, you will retain older versions of WordPress and the plugins; it is wise to update regularly so that you have the latest versions.

Regularly, developers of WordPress and plugins will release updates that solve problems or make the plugins faster, which of course already helps with the overall speed of your website.

LiteSpeed Cache Crawler

Do you have many pages and are they not being cached properly? You notice this if the first visit to a page is slow, but the 2nd visit is very fast. The LiteSpeed Cache crawler might not be working correctly; this crawler ensures that your pages are "visited" in the background, which saves a cached version. And this process happens completely in the background, so all your pages should be cached after updates. You can check this by navigating to 'LiteSpeed Cache > Crawler' in your WordPress backend. There will be a warning on this page. You can create a ticket with our support for this, and we will set this up correctly for you.

You can also look at the 'Sitemap settings' tab on the same page; here you can enter your sitemap so the crawler knows which pages need to be cached. By default, the sitemap can be found at uw-domein.nl/wp-sitemap.xml. But if you use an SEO plugin, this might be different. In that case, check the SEO plugin for this setting.

Upgrading your package

If the above options do not help enough, you can always choose to upgrade your package. We do recommend trying the first two options first so that your WordPress site becomes faster free of charge.

You can view the WordPress packages via the following link: https://mijn.host/wordpress-hosting/