If you find your WordPress server running slow, before considering a hardware upgrade, try the following tweaks first.

1. Enable caching

If your website doesn’t need to be real-time all the time, you should enable content caching on your WordPress.

You can enable caching just by installing and activating the well-known WP Super Cache plugin.

The default settings should be good enough so after you install the plugin, just go to the Settings page of the WP Super Cache plugin and make sure Caching On is checked.

This plugin caches your pages and posts as html files and serves those files to users instead of calculating and rendering the posts or pages content every time.

If you must clear the cache, you can always go to the plugin’s Content tab to delete any cached page you want or all of the cache with just one click. The new version will be generated and cached after that.

2. Use a CDN

Using a CDN will free your server from serving static files, especially images. Serving these static files uses a lot of CPU power and disk I/O and stresses your server a lot.

Enabling a CDN on WordPress is as easy as one two three and the best part about it is that you can get an unlimited CDN service for FREE as stated in this post.

Applying a CDN for your WordPress not only makes your server run a lot lighter, but also saves you a lot of bandwidth and traffic cost.

Learn how the 3 best free CDN services can speed up your website and optimize cost.

3. Enable gzip

Enabling gzip compression will make each of your web responses smaller by 2 to 3 times, which results in less network I/O and therefore makes your web server run faster.

The cost of compressing the content is a lot less than the cost of transferring the extra bytes, so after the math, your server runs more resource efficient.

To learn more about gzip and how to enable it for your WordPress, check this post.

4. Enable lazy load

If lazy load is enabled for your website, each image in your web content will not load until the user scroll to the part that it is located and it become visible on the user screen. Practically, this saves a lot of requests and responses between your server and the user’s browser.

If you have a WordPress website, you can enable lazy load by installing the Lazy Load plugin.

Lazy load not only makes your website run a lot more resource efficient but also saves you a lot of network I/O and traffic cost as stated in this post.

 

How do you tweak your WordPress server performance? Let me know in the comment!