I just got back from being down the ‘Page Load’ rabbit hole . . .

First year bloggers like me often start off neglecting their website’s loading speed in favor of fancy visual elements – from large image backgrounds and carousels to interactive widgets on the top of the page.

But, after looking at GTmetrix page speed results, we realize that what we really need is a blog that loads fast, maximizes readability, and delivers the information our visitors want – like now.

You may think your website is running fast enough from the GTmetrix results, but a power tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights  can wreck your world view. It digs brutally deep. Even big sites like Facebook have scores of less than 90. My first results were in the 30s. Ouch.

Put simply, it is a performance optimization tool that analyzes the speed of your website, detects issues that affect speed, and provides a list of suggestions along with helpful resources.

Click on PageSpeed Insights , go ahead and enter your blog’s URL and click ‘Analyze.’

You probably won’t like your results . .

Well, here are some strategies to remedy slow ‘page speed loading’ that I uncovered while being ‘down a rabbit hole’ for 2 weeks studying the conflicting information about different plugins, server setups, and hosting services. I hope it helps lessen your headaches. I’m still fiddling with all the settings, but some sites are under 2 seconds.

Here’s where I started my own fix

Let’s start with a personal look at the broadest upgrades that give a good ‘bang for the buck’ response, and move to the more gritty specifics. Some, like upgrading your hosting, can cover many other categories.

The bar has been set very high.

Once we’ve ‘created the goods’ – we’ve still got to ‘deliver the goods’ at electronic speed.

Upgrade your hosting plan

This is #1 with a bullet. As shiny new bloggers, we need to keep costs down and focus on what we can do – create content.

So naturally at step 1 we find the $6/month starter hosting plan for 1 year and then get to work. This makes sense to get started. WE ALL DID THIS. My version was BlueHost, then HostGator.

But step 2 is to upgrade your hosting expectations. A more user-friendly plan where quality matters usually includes:

• 24/7 Customer Service teams that speak your language fluidly.
• Chat on the CS screen that stays running while you respond to their instructions in other tabs. This really helps to optimize your time with them.
• A choice of plans with advanced servers and proven technology. For me that meant finding hosts with Litespeed Servers and CDN integration.

I didn’t find that in the $6/month world, so I moved on after 10 months – plus my skills were better.

So, after some comparison shopping & checking referrals, mine is now A2 Hosting at $10/month on their Turbo Plan. I got my referral from Adam at WP Crafters. He includes a discount coupon and ties it all together with a detailed setup video on YouTube. (He’s one of my secret weapons.)

I chose them because they use Litespeed Servers that are up to 20X faster than Apache ones. (I’ll settle for 5X at this point . . .) Plus, they migrated everything over from my old host for free, included a free SSL, and kept in touch day by day.

With that, I get Server MemCaching, server side Image Compression, GZip Compression, and easy integration with my CDN provider.

Plus I have access through their integrated WP plugin to a server-side dashboard for things like database optimization & the A2 Optimized plugin for settings.

It has already been worth the upgrade. And since I deleted my 1 paid plugin, the $$ layout each month is the same. If this sounds like techno-babble, keep reading.

Use a CDN

This is #2 – no bullet. With a Content Delivery Network or CDN, you can leverage an entire network of remote proxy servers to speed up the transfer speed of your website’s data to distant users.

You can set the users by location, which helps with the pricing.

The best part is that CDN service providers see to it that their servers are distributed across key locations around the globe. This significantly reduces the problem of latency that visitors from distant areas normally experience.

I’m using Bunny CDN from a recommendation from WP Crafters that included a detailed setup video on YouTube. He is quite a resource for us bloggers, especially on his YouTube channel.

Change WordPress

Find a Better Theme

I’ve discovered that it’s best to look for themes that aren’t full of unnecessary visual details, like image sliders, animated GIFs and CSS effects. I had an animated front blog page, but any galleries or YouTube elements were below the fold, so they loaded after the top 1/2. I’ve been dialing in my load speeds for 10 days after the move to A2 Hosting, Litespeed, and my new Kadence WP theme so we’ll see. You can probably see the difference in the site already.

You can check for these elements yourself by previewing themes, which is a staple feature in the WordPress theme directory. I only pick from their directory, since it minimizes the risk of installing a site-wide problem and I’m a cheapskate.

There are a number of theme repositories that provide great premium themes for a fee. Many are good, many aren’t. It’s still the wild west after all. I’ve been looking at different themes for 3 months, but I won’t pick one without a reference from a trusted source. I found myself that I like the content from Adam at WP Crafters, Alex from WP Eagle, or Darrel Wilson. There are ‘Best Theme’ lists for this everywhere . .

Learn the Block Editor

Many features that are common to site building tools like Elementor, Brizy, and Divi are also part of the Gutenberg block editor built into your core WordPress download. The code load is less, which speeds up your site – plus it reduces conflicts with utility plugins.

The 2020 block editor is literally where all the innovation in the WordPress ecosystem is happening. If you want to work leaner and meaner, I guarantee you’ll need to understand creating posts and pages using the block editor. I have used 5 different site builders and bailed out after my 3rd overnight update that crashed my site. Since then, no crashes.

My favorite feature is the ‘Re-usable Blocks’ element that allows you to easily create content you can re-use across posts or pages, as explained in this old tutorial on WP Beginner. I keep a ‘Sandbox Post’ draft going at all times to create & save these elements.

UPDATE: As of 9/2023 the core WordPress editor has expanded exponentially & with it the Block Themes category of site themes that are driven by those changes. ‘Re-usable Blocks’ is now called ‘Patterns’ but the functions are the same.

The Gutenberg Block Editor won’t crash – it’s at the center of WordPress.

Minimize Landing Page Posts

A Content Management System like WordPress, has a long list of themes that can showcase blog posts upon landing on your site. In the Home Page settings of the Customizer, there is that choice. The other is a static page like a traditional web page.

Since you use smaller renderings of high-quality 1200 pxl featured images for each post, users will inevitably need more time to load your Posts page. As a result, I display only 12 posts on my post page for good measure.

Granted, browsers may pull up your blog post titles — sometimes including a description or the first few lines of your content — while images are being loaded. But that still diminishes the overall fluidity of the user experience on your website.

From your main WordPress dashboard, click Settings > > Reading section. Find the Blog pages show at most setting. Tweak the default value to 6 or less and check if this improves your website’s loading speed.

Don’t Overdo the Ads

It’s best if you let your audience focus on the important elements of your blog and keep ads, like Google AdSense at a minimum, since they take up bandwidth.

I’m not willing to compromise the experience of my readers for the sake of an extra income — as you can see on my website with absolutely zero ads.

I just set affiliate links as my primary monetization strategy. These are contextual links pointing to products or services that can often be helpful to users.

UPDATE: My ads are all gone now. The machinations to keep up-to-date with Amazon & others wasn’t justified by the cutback in income. I felt trapped & used, so “I’m outta here . . “

Optimize the Best Pages First

Start optimizing the performance of your most popular pages and posts.

It won’t make sense for you to prioritize posts that barely get any traffic. On the flip side, making your top pages a priority means your efforts will benefit the most users.

Google Analytics is another free tool that will help you identify your top active pages. On the left menu, expand the Behavior sub-menu and click Overview. Your top 10 pages should be visible under the “Page” section.

UPDATE: This too has been upgraded into Google’s GA-4 analytic model. Google it . .

Pick Combo Plugins

Many plugins have a combination of features set into one dashboard. Most of the time these work well, but sometimes (30%) there are conflicts with other plugins. This is especially true of optimization and caching ones. Test each installation for compatibility . . .

A few examples include:

UPDATE: Since I moved to A2 Hosting, I manage all these functions through their plugin dashboards that access my sites Turbo Litespeed servers.

Remove Extra Plugins

Your plugin can be a 2-faced little devil. You can’t just load up your website with as many plugins as you like. Too many plugins on one page can eat up server resources and slow your site down to a crawl.

Even though I have never used more than 30 plugins at any stage of a site’s development – I should end with 12 maximum.

My fullest categories are add-ons to the Gutenberg Editor. Since the move to A2 Hosting, I’ve deleted all my old optimization and caching plugins, since their functions are now being run on the Turbo Litespeed Servers.

Fully Optimize Your Images

Image compression is only one of the things you should do if you’re a fan of visual content – and that is what the web is about. Full optimization includes cropping, compression, scaling, and alt-tagging your images.

Work with the Media Library to edit a few images to see what all these settings do to an image as seen in the browser. The more the image is tuned up, the easier it is for the server to send it to the browser – all of which helps user experience (UX).

I’ve turned off my paid WordPress plugin called ShortPixel and now use the Image Optimization tab on the A2 Litespeed Server that compresses, auto-converts images to the WebP format, and manages image lazy loading instead. The savings paid for the difference in the move to A2 Hosting from HostGator . . .

Always Use Lazy Loading

It’s also best to enable any Lazy Loading checkbox in any plugin that compresses post archives, thumbnails, images, iframes, and other types of content. Again, this is now part of my Litespeed Server’s workload, rather than inside WordPress. Double check the settings responses as you work, just in case.

Minify & Combine the HTML/CSS/JS Codes

The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code under your site can also bloat the size of your web pages.

The fix? Minify and Combine them by removing any unnecessary characters within the code and others such as white spaces, extra lines, and comments from the developer.

These extra characters do not, in any way, affect the function of the code, but they do increase the overall file size. This means browsers have to take longer to download the code when loading your page. It’s a variation on compression.

Double check each responses as you work, just in case. I’ve had 2 failures with these settings.

Tune Up the User Comments

WordPress blogs have a graphical feature that can pull in the profile photo of your visiting commenter via the Gravatar service. Although gravatars add a nice touch to your blog’s comment section, they do impact a busy website’s loading speed. This compels some Webmasters to disable them.

To do the same, go to Settings > > Discussion. Look for the Show Avatar option below the Avatar Display section and deselect it.

Another checkbox to increase speed on a heavily commented site is to use Comment Pagination. This splits the comments on your posts into multiple pages – reducing the time it takes for browsers to load and render them.

To use pagination, simply head back to Settings > > Discussion. Then enable the option to Break comments into pages with 50 top level comments per page.

Try reducing the number of comments visible per page from the default value of 50 to anywhere less than 20. This should significantly improve the loading time of comments and, in turn, your blog content.

6 Server Changes

Tidy Up Your Server Folders

Always make sure your hosting account still has ample server disk space to keep your website running smoothly. Go to Cpanel >> Files >> Disk Usage to see the overall disk usage available from your hosting account.

Some of the housekeeping things you can do:

Move Backups to Cloud Drive A slower website can sometimes have gigabytes of backups stored on their hosting server. Downloading them into a cloud drive and deleting them from your server is a great way to free up space. If you migrate sites, this is usually required for the move.

Delete Inactive Accounts If you have inactive account sites from older clients in your hosting plan, remove them for good. Since this is an irreversible process, consider creating a cloud backup of the account first before deletion. Never say never with web clients . . .

Delete .TMP Files WordPress and other CMS may generate temporary files from tasks like plugin updates and session data tracking. It should be safe to delete them, but it won’t hurt to create a cloud backup of your “tmp” folder for safety purposes, either.

When in doubt, contact your hosting service provider’s customer support on how to save disk space. Part of that discussion could be about the options for Litespeed Servers too.

Enable Page Caching

With page caching, your blog is almost instantaneous for returning visitors.

Simply put, caching is the technical term for storing data including scripts, images, media files, and other forms of downloadable content in a temporary storage area. This improves a site’s performance since a lot of a page’s content is already available and does not need be processed in order to be displayed for a user. This reduces the number of requests a browser has to make, which reduces the load on various server systems.

I almost always recommend using the server-side caching that is available in your hosting environment. Again, see Web Hosting above for my Litespeed discussion.

Enable Hot Link Protection

Inline linking, or hotlinking, is a grubby practice where another site links directly to your image, folder, PDF, or file – allowing them to display these resources on their own page. In other words, they’re using your server space for their purposes. Mmmm.

Sure, having your content shared on other websites is great when done with mutual agreement. But with hotlinking, these sites ultimately use the bandwidth you’ve paid for by pulling content from your site without your consent. That’s why hotlinking is also commonly referred to as bandwidth stealing.

In Cpanel > > Security > > Hotlink Protection. Then click enable. Leave the URL box and Extension lists as they are.

Enable GZIP Compression

GZip compression is another tool that reduces the size of text-based files – similar to the process of compressing your laptop files into a zipped folder for an email. The main reason why GZip compression is widely used in speed optimization is that it’s been effective since the dinosaur age of HTTP version 1.1 in the early 1990s.

Use a tool like the GZip Compression Test from GiftofSpeed.com to verify that your server is set up with this. Just enter your website’s URL and click the  Check button.

The tool should verify whether or not Gzip compression is activated on your website. It will also show you its compression percentage, along with its sizes before and after compression.

If it’s not activated, it’s time for a chat with your host’s CS staff.

Optimize Your Database

The MySQL database sitting on your server contains virtually everything there is to find on your WordPress website, including posts, comments, dates, and other pieces of content. CMS like WordPress constantly creates tables automatically in your database as you add more information to your site. All normal, all good.

But like your sofa, your database will also accumulate all sorts of junk over time, including pingbacks, spam comments, and post revisions — steadily growing in size and affecting your website’s performance.

To check on the status of your MySQL database, one option is to look in your Cpanel > > Databases > > MySQL Databases > > Check Database button.

As a rule of thumb, always create cloud backups of your databases before you perform any optimizations. Download them onto a cloud drive to save your hosting account’s disk space.

Just be sure you don’t have any post drafts since a full sweep of your database tables will also delete them. While you’re at it, check your unapproved comments so you don’t accidentally remove questions, valuable feedback, and other concerns voiced out by your readers.

Render-Blocking Resources

If you run PageSpeed Insights and get told to eliminate render-blocking resources, you’ll need to do some research to get your hands dirty with coding for blog performance. What the heck is render-blocking ?

In a nutshell, render-blocking resources are codes that obstruct the loading of a website’s core HTML content. That means your logo, menus, posts, and other essential elements of your page won’t load unless the problematic resources are loaded first.

Render-blocking resources can be stylesheets, HTML imports, and various scripts. PageSpeed Insights should provide you with a complete dropdown list of these codes.

Don’t worry if this tip seems too technical.

This is a deeper dive than most WordPress content producers want to try without help. That’s why it’s last on the list here.

Call it speed week

Your website’s loading speed may seem like a superficial factor, but it can upset the success of your blog – not just from a UX perspective, but also in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Now, I know you won’t be able to apply all the strategies above in a single day, so take a week. This is a dense list full of interconnected details and scary steps. Don’t overstep. If you don’t understand, pull back. I haven’t completed my testing and tweaking my new setup with all these moving parts yet.

If you have a greater understanding of Litespeed servers, CDNs, and caching – hey I’m open to new and better information . . . Quality comments are always welcome.