How to Boost WordPress Speed & Performance on Your Website

Table of Contents

Last update on July 22, 2024

Boosting your WordPress speed and performance is essential for improving your Google ranking. Visitors are also more likely to stay and engage when your website loads quickly, leading to higher conversion rates.

This article is a comprehensive guide to boosting your WordPress speed and performance. It covers many actions and recommends the best plugins for enhancing page speed.

Measuring your WordPress performance is straightforward with the right tools, allowing you to understand where your site stands and identify areas for improvement.

Before diving into performance tests, we’ll answer some important questions about WordPress performance and key settings, such as the optimal server configuration. You’ll also find a comprehensive checklist to select the right hosting plan and learn all the crucial performance optimization techniques to make your website faster.

Should I Choose a Static or Dynamic Site?

It’s simple but accurate: it depends on the type of website you are building. If your website needs to be dynamic, you’ll know it. The question to ask yourself is, do I want everybody to see the same content, or do I want to provide a more customized approach with real-time interactivity? You need a dynamic site if you are looking for the last option.

Imagine you are building a WooCommerce site based on user preferences. You may want to have a section “Products you may like.” This is another example of a dynamic site.

Check out how Sephora openly tailors product recommendations for each customer using a banner ‘Chosen for you”. By using data from past purchases and browsing habits, they offer highly relevant suggestions:

Products you may like (dynamic site) – Source: Sephora

On the other hand, a static site is enough if you want to showcase your CV, portfolio, or landing pages.

Example of a static site for a CV – Source: Foxdsgn

Static vs dynamic site

Static = appears the same for every user that accesses it and only changes if you (or your developer) change the code. For example, an online store shows all visitors the same type of clothes or a CV/portfolio site.

Dynamic = presents different information to different visitors. For example, an online store might show winter clothes to a visitor from a country during the cold season.

Why Dynamic & Benefits

A dynamic WordPress site generates content on the fly using a database. It provides greater flexibility, auto-generated content, real-time interactivity, customized display, and scalability, making it a better choice for most users.

An excellent example of a dynamic site is Netflix or Spotify, which displays songs and movies you may like based on what you have already watched or listened to.

Example of a dynamic app – Source: Spotify

Here are three key advantages of using a dynamic site:

A more personalized user experience

Dynamic sites enable you to customize your website’s content for each visitor, resulting in a more engaging user experience. You can target customers more efficiently, which can lead to higher conversions.

A more powerful server-side capabilities

With a more advanced server-side code, dynamic sites can unlock advanced features that are not possible in a static site.

Ease of updates

Making updates is much easier and faster on dynamic websites. You can quickly and easily implement changes without updating the source code for each HTML file.

Why Static and Shortcomings of Using it

While static sites can offer speed advantages, they come with several drawbacks that might limit their usefulness for more complex needs:

Limited functionality

Static sites are less capable of handling complex interactions, such as user logins, real-time updates, or e-commerce functionalities.

Maintenance complexity

Manual changes to HTML files are required when content is updated frequently on a static site, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors.

Scalability issues

Maintaining a static site can become increasingly cumbersome as your site grows, especially if you need to update multiple pages frequently.

Lack of dynamic content

Static sites cannot provide personalized or dynamic content, limiting user engagement and interactivity.

Which WordPress Host to Choose for Good Performance?

For a hassle-free experience and better performance, consider WordPress-managed hosting such as Bluehost, SiteGround, or WP Engine. While they may be slightly more expensive, they save you time and provide peace of mind by handling maintenance and technical tasks.

WordPress – Managed hosting benefits – Source: WP Rocket

💡 Pro tips when choosing a hosting provider:

– Avoid hosting providers promising unlimited resources.
– Pick a scalable option to accommodate your website’s growth (content and traffic).
– Choose a host with cPanel and a cloud server.
– Check our curated list of the best WordPress hosting services for small businesses and blogs.

While we recommend WordPress-managed hosting, let’s go over the four main types of hosting:

1. Shared Hosting

Multiple websites share the same server resources, making it cost-effective and easy to use.

2. Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting

It provides more resources and greater control by partitioning a physical server into virtual servers.

3. Dedicated Hosting

It offers exclusive access to an entire server, delivering maximum performance and security.

4. WordPress-managed Hosting

It is tailored specifically for WordPress sites, offering optimized performance, automatic updates, and enhanced security.

In the table below, we’ve summarized the pros and cons of each type of hosting and the types of business needs for which they are best suited.

	Pros	Cons	Ideal for
Shared Hosting	Cost-effective. Easy to use. Beginner-friendly setup. Not limited to WordPress.	Limited resources and inconsistent performance during peak traffic. Limited ability to customize server settings. Security control.	Beginners and small websites and blogs with low traffic.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting	Increased resources. Greater control. Scalability.	Higher costs. Requires technical knowledge.	More advanced users are looking for more freedom to manage their servers.
Dedicated Hosting	Full control. High performance. Enhanced security.	Expensive.	Larger businesses and high-traffic websites need robust performance and security. Companies handling sensitive data.
Managed WordPress Hosting	A dedicated environment optimized for your WordPress website. Hassle-free management. Enhanced security.	Limited to WordPress.	Agencies that need to install WordPress on many sites. Agencies that need to update and manage a large amount of WordPress sites efficiently.

Why Upgrading to the Latest Version of PHP Improves Performance?

We recommend using the latest version of PHP to improve WordPress performance. Your website will benefit from faster script execution, better memory management, and enhanced security features, resulting in faster page load times and a more secure website.

💡Hint: Check the official WordPress site with the latest PHP news.

Should You Choose Apache, Litespeed, or Nginx for Better Performance?

Choosing a fast web server is essential for performance. If you’ve ever shopped for web hosting, you’ve probably noticed various companies advertising their web server technology, such as Apache, Nginx, and LiteSpeed. The good news is that all three can be great when the host correctly configures them.

Here’s a quick overview:

LiteSpeed: Offers the highest performance with minimal resources, advanced security features, and efficient PHP handling for dynamic content.
Nginx: Known for its flexibility in server setup customization, low memory usage, and excellent performance in high-traffic scenarios. It also provides reverse proxy capabilities for load balancing and is scalable for various server setups.
Apache: The most popular option due to its reliability and compatibility with different operating systems. It is renowned for its flexibility and compatibility with various applications, including WordPress. Its open-source nature and extensive module support make it popular, offering robust and time-tested performance.

Chemicloud performed a speed test comparing the performance of the three servers. LiteSpeed has the fastest response time (15 ms), compared to 32 ms and 43 ms for Nginx and Apache, respectively.

The three servers’ performance -Source: Chemicloud

Why Choose InnoDB, MariaDB, and Mysql?

Selecting the right storage engine and database server can significantly improve performance and functionality when setting up or optimizing your WordPress site.

When talking about InnoDB, MariaDB, and MySQL, we compare two different WordPress database management layers. InnoDB is a storage engine for MySQL, while MySQL and MariaDB are the actual database server software.

Choose InnoDB for: a storage engine that supports transactions, data integrity, and high traffic handling for WordPress.
Choose MariaDB for: a fully open-source, feature-rich database server with community-driven improvements.
Choose MySQL for: a stable, long-established database server for reliable performance in WordPress.

Choosing the right storage engine and database server is essential for optimizing your WordPress site’s performance and reliability.

You can use a plugin like WP Rocket to optimize your database.

Why Switch to HTTP/2 or HTTP/3?

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are newer versions of the HTTP protocol, designed to reduce latency and improve the speed and security of web communications. Switching to HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 ensures a faster and more secure online experience, providing uninterrupted service regardless of user environment changes.

Why is Premium DNS Better?

A DNS (Domain Name System) translates domain names (like www.example.com) into IP addresses, allowing browsers to load Internet resources. A premium DNS offers a superior infrastructure that provides faster response times, improved performance, and enhanced protection, ensuring a more reliable and efficient connection for your website visitors.

Choosing the Right WordPress Theme and Plugin

When selecting a WordPress theme and plugin, consider these four criteria:

Popularity and number of installs

Check the theme and plugin’s popularity and number of installs on WordPress.org or purchase from ThemeForest. A more popular theme or plugin often indicates reliability and quality.

Public support and reviews

Look at the public support answers and user reviews to gauge the theme and plugin’s reliability and the developer’s responsiveness to issues.

Regular updates

Ensure the theme and plugin receive regular updates to stay compatible with the latest WordPress version and maintain security.

Performance

Choose a fast theme and plugin that are optimized and free from extra bloat, ensuring your site loads quickly and efficiently.

Optimized WordPress settings

These settings and practices will help you fine-tune your WordPress site for better performance and a smoother user experience. Here’s a short list of key settings to consider for improving performance:

1. Set a static front page

A static front page can reduce the load on your server by avoiding unnecessary queries to your posts.

✅ Solution: Go to Settings > Reading and choose a static page for your homepage instead of displaying recent posts.

2. Enable caching

Caching speeds up your site by serving stored versions of your pages instead of generating them anew for every visitor.

✅ Solution: Install a caching plugin like WP Rocket.

3. Optimize WordPress image settings

Optimized images reduce load times and improve site performance.

✅ Solution: Use plugins like Imagify to compress and optimize images. Also, ensure that images are in the next-gen formats like WebP or AVIF.

4. Configure your permalinks

Clean and simple permalinks improve SEO and site performance.

✅ Solution: Go to Settings > Permalinks and select the Post name option for user-friendly and SEO-friendly URLs

5. Disable post revisions

Limiting post revisions can reduce the size of your database and improve performance.

✅ Solution: Add the following line to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5);  // Limit to 5 revisions per post

6. Minimize plugins and themes

Fewer plugins and themes can reduce load times and conflicts.

✅ Solution: Regularly review your plugins and themes. Deactivate and delete any that are unnecessary.

7. Update your WordPress core, themes, and plugins

Updates provide performance improvements and security patches.

✅ Solution: Go to Dashboard > Updates to check for and apply updates for WordPress core, themes, and plugins.

8. Optimize your WordPress database

Regular database optimization can improve performance by cleaning up overhead and reducing bloat.

✅ Solution: Use a plugin like WP-Optimize or WP Rocket to clean up your database and run optimizations.

Which Caching Option to Activate?

Caching is a critical part of optimizing your WordPress site’s performance. There are three main types of caching:

1. Server Cache

Most hosting services offer server caching, which stores cached data on the server to speed up page delivery and reduce database load.

Example: SiteGround and Bluehost offer built-in server caching to boost performance.

2. CDN Cache

CDN caching distributes your site’s content across multiple servers worldwide to improve loading times and reduce latency.

Example: Cloudflare APO optimizes your site’s performance with global content delivery and advanced caching features.

3. WordPress Cache

This caching method stores static versions of your pages to speed up load times and reduce server load.

Example: WP Rocket is one of the best caching plugins for WordPress – and much more. In addition to caching, WP Rocket offers powerful and advanced features to optimize CSS and JS files, lazy load images and videos, preload cache and links, optimize the database, and more – all with a click.

When it comes to optimizing WordPress performance, choose a WordPress cache plugin that activates the following caching options upon activation:

Page caching: stores static versions of your pages to speed up visitor load times.
Mobile cache: ensures that mobile users receive your site’s fast, cached version.
Browser caching: stores files in visitors’ browsers to reduce load times on return visits.
Optimize critical images: automatically optimizes the images located above the fold, including the Largest Contentful Paint one, so that they can be rendered faster for the user.
Gzip compression: compresses files to reduce their size during transfer, speeding up page loads.
Cross-origin support for web fonts: ensures fonts are loaded efficiently across different domains.
WooCommerce refresh cart fragments cache: optimizes WooCommerce cart fragments to improve e-commerce performance.
Optimize Google Fonts files: reduces the size of Google Fonts to enhance page speed.

Other Key Features to Look for in a Cache Plugin

Lazy loading: delays the loading of offscreen images until they are needed, improving initial page load times.
Minify CSS and JS files: reduces the size of CSS and JS files by removing unnecessary code.
Remove unused CSS: eliminates CSS not used on your site, reducing file size.
Load JavaScript deferred: delays loading JavaScript files until after the page content has loaded.
Delay JavaScript execution: postpones JavaScript execution to improve initial page load times.
Database optimization: cleans up and optimizes your WordPress database for better performance.

💡Hint: WP Rocket automatically applies 80% of web performance best practices upon activation. WP Rocket also offers all the must-have performance features mentioned above, so you will immediately benefit from faster loading times.

Optimize Your Images

Unoptimized images are often the culprit behind slow-loading pages. Image optimization is essential to improve performance. Optimization means:

Use compression techniques to reduce the file size while maintaining image quality.
Use next-gen file formats like WebP or AVIF, which save on file size compared to traditional formats while maintaining a similar visual aspect.

Check out sample images from the Google WebP gallery. The site compares JPEG and WebP images of similar quality, showing that WebP files are significantly smaller despite maintaining comparable visual quality to the JPEGs.

JPEG vs WebP: similar quality but smaller file size with WebP – Source: Google WebP gallery

💡Hint: Use an image compression plugin like Imagify to compress images easily without affecting their quality and convert them to AVIF or WebP.

Why Use a CDN?

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) uses a network of servers (PoPs—Points of Presence) to deliver content more efficiently worldwide. Instead of loading data from the origin servers, a CDN uses caching to deliver it via PoPs located around the world. For example, you can use RocketCDN; it’s easy-to-use, fast and reliable with more than 120 PoPs available around the world. It comes with a free WordPress plugin that does all the technical setup for you.

What’s a content delivery network (CDN) – Source: RocketCDN

Benefits include:

Improved loading time worldwide: content loads faster no matter where your users are.
Reduced latency: content is served quicker with local PoPs, minimizing delay.
Lower bandwidth costs: a CDN reduces the load on your primary server, saving on bandwidth expenses.

Repair Error Codes

When it comes to performance issues on your WordPress site, focusing on 4xx and 5xx errors is essential. These errors often indicate problems that can affect your site’s functionality and user experience. Here are the top 5 performance-related error codes and how to solve them quickly.

Add Cache-Control and Expires Headers

Adding cache-control and expiration headers is an effective way to boost WordPress performance. These headers tell the browser how long to keep resources like images, CSS, and JavaScript files before fetching them again from the server. By setting these headers correctly, you can achieve the following benefits: faster page loads, reduced server load, and improved user experience.

HTTP response headers in WP Rocket website – Source: WP Rocket

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to add cache control and expires headers to improve your site’s performance:

Connect to your server using FTP and use your preferred FTP client to connect to your server.
Find the .htaccess file in the root directory of your WordPress installation.
Download a backup copy.
Edit the .htaccess file with the following code snippet on the top of the .htaccess file:

## EXPIRES HEADER CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/svg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus one month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES HEADER CACHING ##

Of course, you can adjust the expiration times for different file types.

Save and upload the .htaccess File

Save the changes and re-upload the .htaccess file to your server.

💡Hint: If you don’t want to worry about the cache control concept, you can use WP Rocket. The plugin enables browser caching (and expires headers) by default as soon as you activate the plugin.

Would the Etag Header Be Activated?

ETags help manage caching by allowing the server to determine if a resource has changed. If the resource is unchanged, the server does not need to resend the complete response, saving bandwidth and improving performance.

Example: If a user’s browser has the ETag “v1.0” for an image and the server’s current ETag for the image is still “v1.0”, the server simply tells the browser to use the cached version.

How Etags Improve Performance

ETags speed up resource loading by reducing unnecessary data transfers. The server sends less data because it only sends the resource if it has changed.

Why Etags are Better than Last-Modified for Cache Freshness

The Last-Modified headers rely on timestamps to check for changes, which can be less precise than Etags. The latest provides a unique identifier for each resource version, which is more reliable for cache validation.

Why Add a Vary: Accept-Encoding Header

The Vary: Accept-Encoding header instructs the server to provide different versions of the same page based on the Accept-Encoding request header sent by the browser. It allows the cache to store different versions of a page based on whether the browser requests GZIP compression or not.

Simply put, it ensures that browsers get the correct page version, whether compressed or not, depending on the request.

💡Hint: WP Rocket will automatically add this to the .htaccess file upon activation.

Now that we have covered WordPress performance, let’s move on to how to test your website’s speed.

How to Test Your WordPress Site Performance and Measure Speed Results

Testing your WordPress site’s speed and performance might seem daunting at first, but if you have all the tools at your disposal, it really shouldn’t be. Your visitors expect the performance to be top-notch, otherwise, they are just going to click away to something else and all the work you put into designing and creating your site goes to waste.

To make a good first impression and to rank high on Google you really should be focusing on optimizing your site’s speed and performance as much as possible.

Let me tell you a short story that became the first golden rule I give to all of my clients as a marketing consultant.

A couple of years ago, I suggested testing the performance of our online shop to my CEO. He said that the website seemed to be fast enough on his computer, therefore we did not need to run any tests. That was of course a mistake because when you visit your own website very frequently, browsers like Chrome actually save the content to pre-load it for the next visit.

We explained to him that with the right tools, a performance test could be easy (and free) to perform.

We ended up conducting the test and we found room for improvement and particular optimizations that made us improve the overall user experience of our shop!

🚀 The first golden rule: always test the speed of your WordPress site. Don’t assume that you have a fast website just because it loads instantly on your computer. Keep in mind that a regular visitor coming for the first time may not have the same experience as you do.

If you are curious to know how your website is performing, keep reading. We are going to show you how to test your WordPress site with the most popular speed tools and how to interpret the metrics of the performance results.

You can watch our video to learn everything you should know about measuring the speed of your site, or you can keep reading the article to learn more.

5 Web Performance Tools to Test the Speed of Your Site

When you’re creating a website and launching it to the world, you’ve got very little room for error. But don’t worry, there is a wide range of tools out there that all aim to measure site speed and page loading time. We’ve pulled out the top 5 to get you started:

PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a tool from Google itself that looks at your site, reports on the performance across devices, and then also provides suggestions about how that page can be improved on mobile and desktop.

Testing our WordPress site with PageSpeed Insights – PSI

It collects data in a controlled environment (the lab data), as well as a real-world field environment (the field data) so you have full visibility on your Core Web Vitals and you can prevent any potential problems curtailing online performance and SEO.

GTmetrix is a tool that analyses your site specifically for speed-related optimization opportunities.

Testing our WordPress site with GTmetrix – GTmetrix

The statistics it generates are incredibly useful to monitor when your pages are slow, and when you track them over time you get some really interesting patterns that can help you optimize how your site is running.

Pingdom provides easy and affordable online experience monitoring, capturing various insights about your site’s availability, performance, and page loading time, so you can take action on potential weak spots.

Testing our WordPress site using Pingdom – Pingdom

They offer both synthetic monitoring where visitor interaction is simulated, as well as real user monitoring which gives a more accurate sense of how your site is performing out in the wild. Pingdom generates a performance grade, a total page load time, the total page size, and the number of requests you get on your website.

WebPageTest allows you to run a free website speed test from around the world across multiple browsers at connection speeds that are typical of your user base.

Testing our WordPress site using WebPageTest – WebPageTest

Once it’s gathered those results, it can make various suggestions to help optimize how your site is running and what you can do to improve things. The specificity you can include when it comes to geography makes this a really interesting and powerful tool.

Yslow is an open-source project that analyses web sites of all types and grades them based on performance and speed. It’s certainly the rawest of the website testing tools, but it has an incredible community of developers behind it and can be useful for spotting some of the more opaque concerns. YSlow works by crawling your website and comparing it against a list of 23 rules, based on Yahoo’s rules for high-performance websites.You can use GTMetrix to see the Yslow score (it’s a grade from A to F).

Understanding the Performance Metrics of your WordPress Site

When using any of these tools, there are some common metrics and other considerations that you should be paying attention to. Let’s dig into the main loading metrics to look at:

The First Contentful Paint (FCP) marks the first point when a user can see anything on the screen, and it is considered the perceived load speed as a result.
✅ Your FCP score should be less than or equal to 2.5 seconds.

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a Core Web Vital metric that measures how long it takes the largest visible element on the site to be rendered.
✅ Your LCP score should be less than or equal to 2.5 seconds.

The Total Blocking Time (TBT) measures load responsiveness and quantifies the non-interactivity of any specific page before it becomes usable.
✅ Your TBT score should be under 50 ms.

The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how visually stable a page is by quantifying how often users might experience unexpected shifts to the layout. It’s another Core Web Vital metric.
✅ You site should strive to have a CLS score of 0.1 or less.

The First Input Delay (FID) is the third Core Web Vital metric and aims to quantify the experience that users feel when they try to interact with an unresponsive page. Essentially, it’s the time from when a user first clicks something to the time when the browser actually starts to process that interaction.
✅ A good FID score should be under 100 ms.

The Time to Interactive (TTI) is a metric that identifies cases where a page seems interactive to a user, but it actually isn’t. The aim here is to minimize the time between the FCP and the TTI.
✅ A page is considered fully interactive when the page responds to user interactions within 50 ms.

Load Time: how long it takes for your website to finish loading completely.

Total Page Size: Also called the “page weight”. It’s a term to describe the amount of data on the page. For example, a 7 MB picture can increase the score. This will have an impact on the “fully loaded time” criteria.

Total page size - Pingdom — Total page size – Pingdom

Requests: The number of file requests to display a page.

Waterfall analysis: The request-by-request visualization of the page load:

Waterfall Chart showing the list of the request over a Timeline – GTmetrix

All of these metrics can be a bit technical, but with the tools we mentioned above, they will often aggregate a lot of this into performance and speed scores, which measure these various components and then grade it against other similar sites to identify where you stack up compared to others.

As such, it’s a good idea to have a basic understanding of these performance metrics, but you can rely on tools to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the actual measurements and the final diagnostics.

Some of the other considerations that you should think about when using these tools are as follows:

Where does the tool test from geographically? For example, GTmetrix and Pingdom test from 7 key global regions whereas WebpageTest can test from 50 different locations around the world:

Choose where you want to perform the speed test from and the device – WebPageTest

PSI on the other hand doesn’t let you choose where it tests from. You want to look into these locations and aim to test from as close as possible to your target audience. Here’s another example with Pingdom:

Choose where you want to perform the speed test from – Pingdom

How is the performance score measured? As mentioned above, most of these tools will have their own proprietary way of grading your site’s performance and it’s worth spending some time to understand the methodology of whatever you’re going to use so that you have more context as to what you’re trying to accomplish. Don’t fall into the trap of comparing them directly. Google, for example, uses Lighthouse technology to measure their Google Core Web Vitals, and it uses field data based on real users.

📌 Sum-up

If you need a tool to do simple speed tests and get an overall loading time analysis with: go for Pingdom Tools
If you need to be more detailed in your test (dev scenario, for example) change locations and create waterfalls data, then check out WebPageTest
If you want detailed test results, pick test location and change the connection speed, based on your requirements: go ahead with GTmetrix
If you are looking for an actionable diagnostic that affects SEO and the user experience: choose Google’s PageSpeed Insights to optimize your Core Web Vitals

🏃‍♂️ In a hurry to optimize your site? We got your back! Check our summary below to make up your mind:

	PSI	Pingdom	GTmetrix	WebPageTest
Development scenario/custom testing	❌	❌	❌	✅
Waterfall analysis	❌	✅	✅	✅
Browser selection	❌	✅	✅	✅
Core Web Vitals scores	✅	❌	✅	✅
Test based on my location	❌	✅	✅	✅
Connection throttling (changing intentionally the connection speed)	❌	❌	✅	✅
Test on mobile and desktop	✅	✅	✅	✅
Pricing	Free	Freemium from €8.33 /month	Freemium from €8.50 /month	Free

How to Run a WordPress Speed Test and Measure Loading Time and Performance

Before you start with your WordPress speed test, there are some recommended settings and testing principles that you should keep in mind in order to do it accurately and efficiently:

Always test multiple times. There are a number of factors that can affect your test and so you don’t want one anomaly to mislead you about how things are really going. Run multiple tests to get a couple of different readings which will provide a much more accurate average to use as your final result.

Test from different locations. We touched on it earlier, but especially if your target audience is global, test from a couple of different geographies as they do have slightly different contexts and circumstances. If your target market is concentrated in specific areas then it is worth weighting those results disproportionately, but the wider you can go the better in most cases.

Make sure your website caching is turned on. This means that you can test how effective caching is in improving your website performance. WP Rocket is a great plugin for this exact purpose as it can immediately and proactively look after all your caching without you having to worry about any of the technical stuff.

Check to see if your Content Delivery Network (CDN) is running. This is the equivalent of a global content repository where your content can be cached on servers all around the world, making things faster for those visiting your website from other countries and regions. This can be optimized using RocketCDN.

Test from a mobile perspective. In today’s modern world, the majority of your traffic is going to come through mobile devices so it’s important that you test the performance with that in mind. For example, PSI has a mobile and desktop part of their test, so be sure to consider both. If your site runs well on desktop but not on mobile, you’re actually missing out on a lot.

Once you’ve got those in check, it’s time to run a speed test on your WordPress site. Let’s run through an example.

Example: Testing a WordPress Site Speed

In this example, we’re going to start with Pingdom. So we head to their website and we’ll be greeted by a dialog box for us to enter our site’s URL and a drop-down menu where we can select the location from which we are going to test.

Putting your website’s URL in the URL field – Pingdom

Remember to select the location closest to your target audience as we discussed earlier. Once we’ve clicked the ‘Start Test’ button it will queue our site and start running the various performance tests on the URL we entered.

After a little bit, the tool will show us the report it has generated about our site’s speed and performance.

Overview of the results section – Pingdom

In Pingdom’s results section, they show a performance grade for the site as a whole, a load time, the page size, and the number of requests that the tool sent. This will differ according to the tool, but you’ll see similar types of breakdowns no matter what you use.

Tips for improving the page performance – Pingdom

Underneath the results breakdown, you’ll see a number of recommendations for how you can optimize potential weak points and you can use that to chart how you are going to improve things.

As discussed, you’d look to run this test a couple of times and then move onto another tool perhaps.

Let’s look at PSI for some further optimization of the Core Web Vitals.

The Core Web Vitals scores with PageSpeed Insights – PSI

In a similar fashion, we would input the desired URL into the top dialog box and let the test run. You can see that there are some more granular metrics that are displayed by PSI and that can be useful to break down some of the performance aspects of our site that need some work:

It really is as simple as that. Running the test is easy. The interpretation of the results is pretty straightforward too:

Interpreting the Core Web Vitals scores – PSI

Overall, your global grade is colored according to these ranges:

0 to 49 (red): Poor
50 to 89 (orange): Needs Improvement
90 to 100 (green): Good

To provide a good user experience, you should strive to have a good score (90+). In any other cases, there is something major to fix.

🏆 Google says that a “perfect score of 100 is extremely challenging to achieve and not expected” but WP Rocket’s website is a pretty good student that gets a score of 99!

However, the optimization and the improvements are where the hard work is. Thankfully, WP Rocket helps you optimize your Core Web Vitals.

Finally, sometimes your site is not impacted so much by the content that you’ve published, but rather by the theme that you’re using. If you’re struggling with website speed it might be worth testing to see whether another theme might give you better performance.

Example: Testing the performance of the Hello Theme by Elementor

Follow those steps to check your WordPress theme performance:

Create a blank WordPress installation
Install and activate the theme of your choice
Don’t add any demo content and don’t play with the settings
Test the website through one of the tools. We’ll use GTMetrix, Pingdom, and PageSpeed Insights to see the results both from desktop and mobile.

Testing Hello theme on a blank WordPress sandbox – GTmetrix

GTMetrix Speed Test Result (Desktop)

GTmetrix Grade: A (Performance: 93% – Structure: 99%)
Fully Loaded Time: 1.4s
Total Page Size: 15.1KB
Requests: 5

Speed test results for Hello theme – GTmetrix

Pingdom Speed Test Result (Desktop)

Performance Grade: 97 (Grade A)
Load Time: 94 ms
Page Size: 18,3 KB
Requests: 6

Speed test results for Hello theme – Pingdom

Core Web Vitals Speed Test Result (Using Google PageSpeed Insights)

The device used for the analysis: Mobile

Core Web Vitals scores of my WordPress site using the Hello Theme – PSI

Conclusion: When it comes to page speed, performance, and lightweight files, the Hello theme is exemplary. All my Core Web Vitals and other key metrics are in the green!

Other ways you may want to explore to test the performance of your WordPress theme

Go to the theme store where you got your theme and look at the demo sites exhibited there. You should be able to take the URL of those demo sites and run through the same process as above, before comparing that to other themes out there. As long as you keep everything else constant, you’ll get a somewhat DIY comparison between themes which can be quite useful.

It’s also worth doing some research online and leveraging the work of others. There are a lot of speed and performance comparisons online, especially of the more popular themes, so it’s worth looking into those as well to get a sense of where your theme sits in the pile.
You’re in luck, WP Rocket already tested the 13 fastest free themes of the WordPress ecosystem.

Check WPSpeedster: they tested almost all the themes from the WordPress repository (they’re using Google PageSpeed to run the analysis.)

What to do if you encounter an error?

If you’re running your WordPress speed test and you encounter an error message of some sort, make sure of the following:

You’ve included the correct URL in the box, without spelling errors.
Write “https” and not “http”.
You don’t have any firewall settings getting in the way depending on geography.
Your site is published by your hosting service.
The tool you’re using is operating correctly.
Your site settings are nominal.

If you’re still having trouble, then it’s worth reaching out to the customer support team of that particular tool as they will be well placed to assist you.

Practical tip: If one of the tools shows some errors coming from your website (e.g some downtime) then we suggest you monitor your website. With Pingdom for example you are instantly alerted before your customers even notice.

How to Analyse WordPress Speed and Performance Results

On a high level, here’s how you should think about your speed and performance results:

Performance Grading: Every tool will collate a range of factors and come up with a grading score (often out of 100) that aims to summarize the key factors. The higher the score, the better. This is then broken down into more granular statistics as mentioned below.

Load Time: This is sometimes referred to as the First Contentful Paint (FCP) and here you’re looking for it to be as small as possible. The faster the load time, the better.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This is similar to the load time and you want it to be as low as possible.

First Input Delay (FID): The lower this number the better, because it tracks how responsive a site is to the first interaction which is a key point of the customer journey that sets expectations. If it’s too high, then a visitor is likely to click away.

Important note: the FID score is only available for Field data so if you don’t have sufficient real-world speed data you can look at the Total Blocking Time (TBT) metric instead. TBT is located in the lab data and both provide a similar analysis.

Time to Interactive (TTI): It’s the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive. And what makes a page fully interactive? When the page responds to user interactions (like a click on a button) within 50 milliseconds. In other words, this measures the time between the FCP and the TTI and ideally you want to minimize it as much as possible.

Each tool will give you very clear visual cues about each factor, often using red, orange, and green to grade performance. You can use these for basic triage, identifying the ones that are most dire, and prioritizing the fixes accordingly.

How to Fix Speed and Performance Issues

You’ll need to look carefully through your test results to identify the ones that are affecting you. However, there are some that are more common than others, so let’s look through some of them at a high level to give you a sense as to what can be done.

Here are the actionable steps that you can take to speed up your WordPress site after getting a not-so-good result :

Compress your images so they aren’t as large in size.
Lazy load your images.
Implement a caching solution.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Try using a different theme that performs better.
Optimize your databases.
Optimize your render-blocking CSS and JavaScript.
Reduce JavaScript execution time.
Choose a good hosting provider.
And much more…

All of this work on speed and performance goes hand in hand with SEO, so if you want to appear in the first few Google results, where all of the clicks go, you should always optimize your site using a tool like WP Rocket.

WP Rocket is a powerful performance plugin that can deliver significant improvements on your site without you having to do any coding whatsoever. Essentially, the tool proactively builds your website cache after just a few clicks and tweaks as necessary to improve the most relevant performance metrics.

In addition, WP Rocket also optimizes for all the Google Web Vitals that are coming in June 2021, so you can be sure that your SEO and general user experience will be natively suited to the Google algorithm.

This can only serve to drive traffic to your site and improve conversions overall:

Performance Issue	Testing Tools	WP Rocket Features
Images are too slow.	PSI is best to identify the largest content to load.	WP Rocket and Imagify compress the images without the need for any coding.
Sub-optimal caching.	PSI, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, Pingdom	WP Rocket Cache Preloading.
CSS and JavaScript files are too large.	PSI (tells you which files) Pingdom, GTmetrix WebPageTest	WP Rocket can combine CSS and JavaScript files to make them faster and lighter.
Lack of a Content Delivery Network (CDN)	GTmetrix, Pingdom, WebPageTest	WP Rocket can integrate an external CDN in seconds, or alternatively you can use the native RockedCDN built right into the platform.
No GZIP compression	GTmetrix, or Pingdom	WP Rocket adds GZIP compression rules to your .htaccess file automatically

Wrapping Up

So, there you have it! Performance scores vary because different tools use different methodologies and configurations. You can use two of them for example and compare the results against each other.

Google PSI helps to optimize the Core Web Vitals which measure the user experience and impact your ranking on Google. So even if there is no equal comparison in the tools and in their way of scoring, I’d still advise running the test on PSI so your website is ready for the changes coming in Google’s algorithm.

For many of these optimizations, WP Rocket remains your best weapon, as it caches your site automatically. It’s also the easiest way to level up your WordPress site without having to know any of the technical jargon.

Make it fast. Make it efficient. And you’re off to the races!

Last update on July 22, 2024 Share on

About Marine Larmier

I have six years of experience writing and producing rich SEO content in the WordPress ecosystem. I worked remotely for four years at WPML while traveling the world. Based between France and New Zealand, I love traveling, yoga, sunsets, and world cuisine.