From time to time I receive questions about speeding up the public-facing side of WordPress. In this article, I’ll cover what I do to improve the speed of my personal websites in hopes it will help you with your WordPress website.

Cloudflare.

Set up your content delivery network (CDN).
Cloudflare is the number one free option in my book. Cloudflare can be set up with any website hosting company.

The free version of Cloudflare will cache your most accessed pages and files, and help to reduce the load spikes that may cause your website to load slowly at times.

Your Cloudflare TODO:

1. 1. Once your WordPress website’s DNS settings have been updated, be sure to install and set up the Cloudflare plugin within your WordPress.
   2. Consider doing a bit of research in Google search related to the term, “WordPress Page Rules”. The free version of Cloudflare includes an option to add a few WordPress related page rules as well.
   3. Consider paying $5 a month for the WordPress Automatic Platform Optimization service to better optimize how Cloudflare caches your WordPress content.

Smaller sized images equals faster page loading.

ShortPixel Image Optimizer is my go-to image optimization plugin. EWWW Image Optimizer will handle image optimization nicely as well.

The ShortPixel Image Optimizer plugin has quite a few more features than EWWW Image Optimizer, though does require a bit of an initial learning curve to set up.

The EWWW Image Optimizer, on the other hand, is pretty much plug-and-play. I recommend installing and testing them both plugins to see which best fits your website’s needs.

LiteSpeed Hosting.

Move your site to LiteSpeed server hosting with cPanel.
LiteSpeed hosting will greatly improve your websites performance at the same or lower cost than you are paying now for shared hosting. There’s really no reason to not make the switch—at least not cost wise.

Your LiteSpeed TODO.

1. Once your site has been migrated to a LiteSpeed Hosting company, log into your hosts cPanel. Click the “LiteSpeed Web Cache Manager” option within cPanel. Then scroll down to the “WordPress Cache” section on that page. Click the “Scan” button at top of page, select your website(s) using the check-boxes, then click the “Enable” button. This will install the LiteSpeed Cache plugin into each of your WordPress installation(s).
   
2. Once the LiteSpeed Cache plugin has been installed, log into your WordPress Dashboard. The LiteSpeed Cache settings are not fully optimized for WordPress out-of-the-box. Many necessary settings are actually disabled by default to help reduce potential conflicts. Below are a few hints on how to set up the necessary settings for WordPress:

Configuring LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress.

1. 1. General Settings. See the “LiteSpeed Cache” > “General” menu.
      TODO:
      – Enable “Automatically Upgrade”.
      – Request your “Domain Key”.
      – Enter your “Server IP”
   2. Toolbox download. See the “LiteSpeed Cache” > “Toolbox” menu.
      TODO:
      – The LSCache Profiles are a pre-tuned set of options for WordPress. Click this link to download the Advanced profile file now, https://lscache.io/LSCWP_Profiles/LSCWP_Advanced.data
      – Once downloaded, click the Import button to import the Advanced profile file. This will help further optimize LIteSpeed for WordPress.

Personal note. The advanced profile settings have worked well with every website I’ve tested. Though there are quite a few other settings you may wish to tweak as time permits.

Conclusion

Moving your WordPress website to a shared LiteSpeed server (with the Advanced profile settings), and establishing Cloudflare service, along with an image optimization plugin will greatly improve the overall speed of your website on day one.

If need help with any of the recommendations above, please feel free to ask me and I’ll help set this up for you today.