Category Archives: WordPress

Advice & Tutorials, wooCommerce, WordPress

Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

WordPress is a great way to get your online store up and running quickly and cheaply – but in the wrong conditions, it can run pretty slowly.

If it takes anything longer than a second or two to display pages, customers will turn away.

So what to do? Here are some suggestions that can help to speed things up.

Web Server

There’s not a lot you can do if your site is being served from an old laptop stashed in your IT guy’s cupboard at home (which, hopefully, it isn’t..)

Have a look at the hosting level you’re set up for – cheaper monthly fees will generally result in lower processing power and memory availability, which can be a false economy resulting in customers turning away because of slow page load times and lower Google rankings.

Memory Limit

This can be set at the WordPress and server levels. Depending on the number of plugins you’ve got running, it should be between 96M and 128M – higher if you have the server capacity.
In your wp-config.php file
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '128M');
In php.ini
memory_limit = 128M

Change the ‘128M’ part if you wish, but it should really be at least 96M or you can run into problems with some plugins not working at all.

Plugins

Go through those and deactivate / remove any that aren’t being used (or are out of date) The more features a plugin has, the more load it’s going to put on the server.

Caching

Caching plugins won’t speed up the admin area but will make the customer experience a lot faster.
Depending on your needs, experience and server resources, some choices are better than others. Here’s a good article that discusses the top three.