7 Easy Ways To Improve WordPress Site Vitals Score (2021)

Let me guess. You have a WordPress site & its speed is slow. You want to increase the speed. Great! You are on the right post.

Google will roll out its Page Experience Update in Mid-June 2021. The page experience update will consider several page experience signals, including the three Core Web Vitals metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS.

Hence, to rank your website in search engines, your site should load fast & maintain a good page speed score. Having a fast website also attracts more visitors.

How To Check Speed?

While many websites help you to check website speed, one of the easy & simple ways is to use the MonsterInsights plugin. This is one of the best analytics plugins.

MonsterInsights shows a site speed report directly inside the WordPress dashboard. You don’t need to manually go to other websites & check. The plugin does this thing for you.

Once you install & activate the plugin, go to Insights > Reports > Site Speed. You’ll see an overall score of your website load time for desktop and mobile in the report.

Besides that, the report also shows other metrics to speed up your WordPress website, along with a goal and how to improve each metric to make your website load quicker.

Ways To Increase WordPress Site Speed

Now, let’s move to the main thing – increase website speed. Here are things that you can implement to make your WordPress site load fast. Most of them are free to implement but some require money.

1. Use Fast Web Hosting

If you are serious about your website, don’t go with a shared hosting plan. They suck! Shared hosting is good for beginners only. It is the worst for professionals.

But wait, there are some good options in shared hosting too. A2 Hosting & Bluehost are the best & recommended budget-friendly web hosting. You can rely on their service.

If you are getting more traffic, upgrade to cloud hosting. It can handle more users & load your website fast. Hostinger provides affordable cloud hosting plans. Another good one is Cloudways.

If your website is built with WordPress, you can try Managed WordPress hosting. They are specially tweaked for WordPress sites. EasyWP & LiquidWeb offers good hosting plans.

2. Use CDN

CDN stands for Content delivery network. It helps to serve static content of your website to users from their nearest location. This is a great factor to load your website in less time.

For example, if your web server is located in the USA, a visitor in France will have to request the resources from your server in the USA which will take more time.

If a CDN provides a location in France, the visitor will request the resources from the CDN server in France which will make your site load fast.

The cheapest CDN service you can use is BelugaCDN. It offers a free trial to try out its services. Another great CDN provider is StackPath (previously MaxCDN). A free option is Cloudflare.

Also Read – Top 5 Cheap CDN Providers

For serving images, you can use ImageKit. It offers on-the-fly image optimization. A great feature of ImageKit is that it serves Webp images automatically to users.

3. Use a Caching Plugin

Caching is a basic but effective technique to make your website load fast. In simple words, caching refers to the process of creating static versions of your content, and serving that to visitors.

Not going in-depth, implement caching on your site. Various WordPress plugins offer caching services. You can use W3 Total Cache, Autoptimize, Litespeed Cache plugin. They are free!

If you have some budget & want a premium plugin, use WP Rocket. It has a ton of features like minification, lazy loading, deferring JS, compression, CDN integration, etc.

Many web hosting platforms have built-in cache systems. You don’t have to install a cache plugin. A2 Hosting provides caching service on their turbo servers.

4. Use a Fast Theme

If you are using a heavy theme with a lot of customizations & animations, throw it away. It makes your website slow. You don’t require a multi-purpose theme for a simple blog.

There are many free WordPress themes that you can use. My favorites are Kadence & Blocksy. These are lightweight & fast loading themes. They have very little impact on your site’s speed.

If you want a premium theme, many bloggers recommend Generatepress & Astra theme. They are blazing fast & lightweight. You can find many other premium themes on MyThemeShop & Themeforest.

5. Optimize Images

You should never use heavy-sized images on your website. They take a lot of time to load & hence decrease your site speed score. You need to optimize them.

To reduce the size of your images, you can use websites like TinyPNG, Compressjpeg, etc. These help you to decrease the size of images without losing the quality.

You can also install an image optimization plugin. ShortPixel, Optimole, Imagify, Smush are some good plugins that optimize images for free.

Another tip – use Webp & JPEG format images. Use PNG only for transparent images. The size of PNG images is high than JPEG. Webp offers the smallest size with lossless compression.

6. Remove Google Fonts

If you are using custom fonts or Google fonts, removing them helps to load the website fast. It also helps to reduce the CLS score which is a part of Page Experience Update.

Instead of using custom fonts, use web-safe fonts. They are already installed in the system. So, you don’t need to request & download fonts from Google’s server.

To fully remove Google fonts from your WordPress site, you can use this plugin. It ensures that Google fonts will not load on your website.

7. Remove Unused Plugins

If you have a lazy loading plugin installed, remove it as WordPress now has an in-built lazy loading feature. Just like this, you may have more plugins that are doing nothing, just sitting on your server.

Removing unused plugins will help your website load fast. These plugins load unnecessary CSS & Javascript on your website. They also take up some space in your database.

Conclusion

So, there were 7 easy ways to make your WordPress site load fast. Remember, it is important to make your website load in under 3 seconds. Don’t ignore your site speed.

You can easily reduce the loading time for FREE! You don’t need to pay any amount to speed up your site. WordPress plugins are available for free, Cloudflare is free, fast themes are available for free.

However, if you want to make the website faster & have a good support option, it is good to go with the premium options. They offer updates, support & security.

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