How fast is my wordpress site

Generally speaking, anything below two seconds is good. Once your loading times start to creep above that two-second line, your bounce rate tends to rise sharply. Ideally, you should be aiming for times closer to the one-second mark. Loading times can vary from one minute to the next depending on traffic, how much load your server is under, and a lot of other factors. With that in mind, we recommend that you run at least three tests using the same server, and calculate an average from those results.

You enter the URL you want to test, hit a button, and wait a few moments for the results. Instead, PageSpeed Insights focuses on providing you with in-depth information about how you can speed up your website. It will find areas that can be improved, and offer suggestions about what to do next:.

However, the best feature of this tool is that it provides you with unique results for the desktop and mobile versions of your site. You can jump between both reports by clicking on their respective tabs at the top of the screen:. Paying attention to your mobile optimization has become particularly important in recent years. People spend more time browsing the web using mobiles than desktop computers.

As you probably know, not all hosting plans are made equal. Some will hold up just fine under moderate traffic, but crumble when you start getting too many views. This means that even if your website loads quickly according to speed testing tools, it might not hold up too well when several people browse it at once. The best way to figure out if your server can handle higher levels of traffic is to use a stress testing tool. Moreover, you can use this tool without signing up for an account, just by entering the URL you want to test:.

The test will take a few minutes to run. For instance, you can:. As with Pingdom, you can expand any of the suggestions to view more specific information. The difference is a little complicated for casual users. A good option for… developers or advanced users looking to test both desktop and mobile performance.

When you set up a test with WebPagetest, you can use the Advanced Settings area to:. By default, WebPagetest runs the test three times to get more accurate data Pingdom and GTmetrix only run it once.

If you want to dig into what all this means, Moz has a great post explaining all the data. A good option for… casual users who want to test the mobile version of their site. Then, Google will tell you how long your site took to load using a mobile device and simulating a 3G connection :.

You can then click the Get My Free Report button for some personalized tips on how to speed up the mobile version of your site and make it more mobile-friendly. Learn more here :. If you have a low PageSpeed Insights score alongside poor page load times, we wrote a whole post on how to improve your PageSpeed Insights score with things like caching plugins.

And for that, your WordPress hosting is still going to play a big role we tested it! To round things out, I want to cover two important factors to pay attention to when you run a WordPress speed test.

Where you run your test from will naturally have an effect on page load times. If you notice your site loads slowly from certain locations, you might want to look into a content delivery network CDN. Pingdom uses onload time, while GTmetrix uses fully loaded time. Or start the conversation in our Facebook group for WordPress professionals.

Find answers, share tips, and get help from other WordPress experts. Looking for some free blog sites to help you start sharing your writing with the world? So you want to create a WordPress blog… Congratulations! The longer it takes to get that data, the longer it takes to display your page.

Again, the closer to zero the better. Check out our in-depth post on TTFB. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to choose a server closest to your visitors. You can determine the best location by following the tips below. One of the very first things you can do is look at the geolocation of your visitors in Google Analytics. So in most cases, you would want to place your WordPress site on a server in the United States.

You could also filter down the data even further to cities. But typically we would recommend a central location like Iowa, USA. If you run an eCommerce store, make sure also to check to see where your customers are coming from. This is of course how you generate revenue, so these are your most important visitors. This should coincide with your traffic above; however, this is not always the case.

If you have eCommerce data setup or goals in Google Analytics, you can easily overlay that information on top of the geolocation data to make a more informed decision. There are a lot of handy free tools out there to measure latency from your current location for different cloud providers. This can help you quickly evaluate which region might be the best choice for your site.

In this example below, we can see that the Oregon, USA us-west1 is the fastest from where we are located. However, if you are serving customers across the entire United States, it might be better to choose Iowa, USA us-central1 to ensure low latency for visitors from both the west and east coast.

Here at Kinsta, we offer 28 different data centers across the globe. You can easily choose a site that will have both low latency and low TTFB! This also helps to reduce network hops. Your visitors and customers should always be your priority. The data center location you choose has an impact on how fast your SFTP download and upload speeds transferring files with an FTP client are, as well as the responsiveness of your WordPress admin dashboard.

So while you want to make sure and choose a location that is best for your visitors, also keep in mind that it can affect site management. Tasks like uploading files to the WordPress media library will be faster when your site is hosted on a data center closer to you. We consistently hear from clients at Kinsta that they are surprised by how much faster their admin dashboard is with us.

There is a multitude of factors that influence this, but having 28 different data centers is a big one! Pick a location that works both for your visitors and for you! DNS , short for Domain Name System, is one of the most common yet misunderstood components of the web landscape. To put it simply, DNS helps direct traffic on the Internet by connecting domain names with actual web servers. Essentially, it takes a human-friendly request — a domain name like kinsta.

One big reason for choosing premium DNS is speed and reliability. And they are blazing fast with under 20 ms average response times around the globe as seen below. However, one caveat with Cloudflare is that it also has more downtime than a lot of other providers. They have a reputation for providing some of the best DNS uptime over the past decade.

Does downtime matter that much with DNS providers? The answer to this is really yes and no. Everybody loves a brand new WordPress theme, but be careful before you go out and grab the one with all the new shiny features. First, you should check out our article on the differences when it comes to free vs.

In regards to performance, every element you see in a theme has some impact on the overall speed of your website. And unfortunately, with thousands of themes out in the wild, there are both good ones and bad ones. So how are you supposed to know which one to choose?

We recommend going with one of the following two options:. Things such as Google Fonts , Font Awesome icons, sliders, galleries, video and parallax scripts, etc. Instead, you should start or switch to a WordPress theme that is either lightweight from the beginning or gives you these options. We run a few speed tests with each theme using the following configuration:.

Built by Tom Usborne, a developer from Canada. It is actively updated and well supported. Even a few Kinsta team members use GeneratePress for their projects. There is both a free and premium version available. One of the great things about GeneratePress is that all the options use the native WordPress Customizer, meaning you can see every change you make instantly before pressing the publish button. Just how fast is it? We did a fresh install of GeneratePress, ran five speed tests in Pingdom, and took the average.

The total load time was ms with a total page size of only GeneratePress fresh install speed test. We then ran another set of tests with one of the pre-built themes from the GeneratePress site library. This contains images, backgrounds, new sections, etc. GeneratePress full website speed test. Now of course, in a real-world environment you might have other things running such as Google Analytics, Facebook remarketing pixel, Hotjar, etc.

But you should be able to aim for under the 1-second mark easily. Check out an in-depth review of GeneratePress over on woorkup. The OceanWP theme is lightweight and highly extendable. Built by Nicolas Lecocq, it is also actively updated and well supported. Just like with GeneratePress, there is both a free and premium version available. If you take a look at the WordPress repository , the free version currently has over , active installs, and another impressive 5 out of 5-star rating over 2, people have given it 5 stars.

We did a fresh install of OceanWP, ran five speed tests in Pingdom, and took the average. The scripts in OceanWP are slightly larger, but nothing to write home about. OceanWP fresh install speed test. We then ran another set of tests with one of the demo themes from the OceanWP site library. This contains images, backgrounds, new sections, and required the Elementor page builder plugin. OceanWP full website speed test. You can check out a more in-depth review of OceanWP on our blog.

It is very lightweight less than 50 KB on frontend and offers unparalleled speed. Built by the team at Brainstorm Force, it is actively updated and well supported. You might recognize them as the creators of the popular All In One Schema Rich Snippets plugin which has been around for many years. If you take a look at the WordPress repository , the free version currently has over , active installs, 1. We did a fresh install of Astra, ran five speed tests in Pingdom, and took the average.

Astra fresh install speed test. We then ran another set of tests with one of the demo themes from the Astra Starter kit site library. Note: the images in this demo were fully compressed, but they chose very high-resolution ones from the start.

Astra full website speed test. The important thing we wanted to show you is that all of these WordPress themes are blazing fast, both out of the box and full demos! As you probably noticed, OceanWP and Astra both required page builders to use their site library themes.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when using a page builder plugin :. With that being said, we are still big fans of page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder. For the most part, they are developed with performance in mind and only add a little bit of overhead. For most, the functionality and usability are worth it, as these plugins allow you to create anything you can dream up!

It will also be interesting to see how the new Gutenberg editor will play a role in site design over the next couple of years. Now for the scoop on WordPress plugins. There, we said it. Just like with themes, it matters how the plugin is developed and if it was built with performance in mind.

We have many clients at Kinsta that are running plugins and their sites still load in well under a second. With that being said, there are of course not so great plugins out there which you want to stay away from. Talk about a needle in a haystack! We try only to share things we use on a daily basis. And yes, we use WordPress plugins on our site just like the rest of you. Many of the team members at Kinsta even develop and sell plugins.

One big issue with WordPress plugins is the uninstall process. Whenever you install a WordPress plugin or theme, it stores the data in the database. The problem is that when you delete a plugin using one of the standard methods, it typically leaves behind tables and rows in your database. Over time this can add up to a lot of data and even begin to slow your site down. In our example, we uninstalled the Wordfence security plugin, and it left behind 24 tables in our database as seen below.

And besides the database, a lot of plugins also leave behind additional folders and files. In our experience, this is commonly seen with security and caching plugins which create additional directories for logging. Well, they do. The good news?

There are ways to clean up and get rid of a plugin properly. Now to move on to optimal WordPress settings. Here are a couple of changes you can make to help speed up your WordPress site. Many of these are very subtle changes, but everything helps!

One of the problems with this is that all of the bots, hackers, and scripts out there also know this. By changing the URL, you can make yourself less of a target, better protect yourself against brute force attacks, and decrease the bandwidth used by the bots that hit this URL repeatedly.

Slow WordPress admin dashboards can be impacted by the network, data center location, and even PHP versions. But another factor that not a lot of people talk about is the WordPress update checker that runs in the background. This is one instance where having a lot of WordPress plugins and themes could hurt you. Sometimes this can be periodic or very frequently. This is more of a problem with how the update checker in WordPress is built.

The remedy is to disable automatic updates. Warning: Only do this if you intend to check for updates manually. Many updates include security and bug fixes.

You could easily set yourself a calendar reminder, disable the plugin once a week, check for updates, and then re-enable it. A pingback is an automated comment that gets created when another blog links to you. There can also be self-pingbacks which are created when you link to an article within your own blog. We recommend simply disabling these as they generate worthless queries and additional spam on your site.

Remember, the less calls your WordPress site has to make the better, especially on high-traffic sites. Not to mention the fact that a pingback on your own website is just downright annoying. Follow the steps below to disable pingbacks. When it comes to disabling self-pingbacks you have a couple of options.

You can use the free No Self Pings plugin. Or you can use a premium plugin like Perfmatters. Warning, editing the source of a WordPress theme could break your site if not done correctly.

This means you never have to touch your theme. For those that run high-traffic blogs, your homepage is the most important page of your site, and you want this to load fast.

The fewer requests and media the better in terms of performance. Also, this is precisely why pagination was invented as seen below. Pagination is what you see at the end of blog feeds that allow you to browse to the next page.

Your WordPress theme will most likely already have customized pagination built-in. We recommend somewhere between 8 and Caching is by far one of the most important and easiest ways to speed up WordPress!

The result is your website, complete with all of the files and elements that make it look the way it does. For instance, you might have a header, images, a menu, and a blog. Since the server has to process all of those requests, it takes some time for the complete webpage to be delivered to the user—especially with clunky or larger websites. Caching instructs the server to store some files to disk or RAM, depending on the configuration.

Basically, it reduces the amount of work required to generate a page view. As a result, your web pages load much faster, directly from cache. Caching at the server-level is by far one of the easiest approaches for the end-user. What this means is that the WordPress hosting provider handles it for you. At Kinsta, we utilize the following four types of cache , which are all automatically done at the software or server-level:.

The page cache is configured to work right out of the box with standard WordPress. Simply launch your WordPress site and page caching will start happening. We also have caching rules in place for ecommerce sites such as WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. By default, certain pages that should never be cached, such as cart, my-account, and checkout, are excluded from caching.

Based on our experience, we recommend one of the following:. You can also check out some additional options in our in-depth post on WordPress caching plugins. We also fully support WP Rocket at Kinsta!

However, as of WP Rocket 3. This allows Kinsta clients to use our fast server-level caching but still take advantage of the fantastic optimization features WP Rocket has to offer.

No cache speed test. As you can see the TTFB with no caching is ms. Caching enabled speed test. As you can see server-level caching decreased our page load time by This site we tested is also fairly optimized, so larger unoptimized sites are bound to see even greater differences.

CDN cache is also equally as important as cache from your WordPress host. Membership sites contain a lot of uncacheable content and pages that are continuously changing. Things such as the login page for community members which could be getting hit constantly depending on the size of the site , checkout pages for digital goods or courses, and discussion boards are common culprits and pain points, as these cannot typically be cached.

This is fine when you have just a few authors and admins, but when you suddenly have thousands of members using the dashboard, this immediately causes performance issues as none of it can serve from the cache on the server.

This means you need the power and architecture behind the scenes to back it up. Shared hosting providers will usually cripple under these circumstances. This is where object caching comes into play. Object cache stores the results of database queries so that the next time that particular bit of data is needed it can be delivered from cache without querying the database.

This speeds up PHP execution times and reduces the load on your database. This becomes extremely important with membership sites! With WordPress, you can implement object caching in a couple of different ways:. We offer Redis as an add-on at Kinsta so you can take full advantage of persistent object caching for your membership sites.

Remember that x-kinsta-cache header we mentioned above? Depending on your hosting provider or caching solution the header might be named something slightly different. This allows you to see how your cache is performing. You can filter the data by the past 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.

The cache component chart gives you a glance at your caching ratio. The more requests you serve from cache the better. As you can see in the example below, this WordPress site is at a Which is good!

The top cache bypasses section lets you see which requests are not being served from cache. Image optimization is another straightforward thing you can do which has a significant impact on your overall page load times. Large images slow down your web pages which creates a less than optimal user experience.

Optimizing images is the process of decreasing their file size, using either a plugin or script, which in turn speeds up the load time of the page. Lossy and lossless compression are two methods commonly used. So after videos, which are much harder to optimize, images by far are the first place you should start! And ironically, a good image optimization workflow is one of the easiest things to implement, yet a lot of website owners overlook this. So it appears the web as a whole is getting better at image optimization!

The primary goal of formatting your images is to find the balance between the lowest file size and acceptable quality. There is more than one way to perform almost all of these optimizations.

One of the most basic ways is to compress them before uploading to WordPress. Usually, this can be done in a tool like Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Or using the new online Squoosh app from Google. However, these tasks can also be performed automatically using plugins, which we will go into more below. The two primary things to consider are the file format and the type of compression you use.

By choosing the right combination of file format and compression type you can reduce your image size by as much as 5 times. There are several types of files you can use:.

You should also consider using WEBP images on your website. What about GIFs? Animated GIFs are always fun, but they kill web performance.

We recommend keeping these for social media and Slack. Here is an example of what can happen you compress an image too much.

The first is using a very low compression rate, which results in the highest quality but larger file size. The second is using a very high compression rate, which results in a very low-quality image but smaller file size. Note: The original image untouched is 2. As you can see the first image above is KB. That is pretty large for one photo!

The second image looks horrible, but then it is only 68 KB. What you want to do is find a happy medium between your compression rate quality and the file size. So we took the image again at a medium compression rate, and as you can see below, the quality looks good now, and the file size is KB, which is acceptable for a high-resolution photo.

This is almost 4x smaller than the original photo with low compression. We try to keep most of our images under the KB mark for the best performance. Lossy compression involves eliminating some of the data in your image. Because of this, it means you might see degradation reduction in quality or what some refer to as pixelated. How is this possible? In other words, it will take up a lot of disk space over time.

You will want to experiment with what works best for you. The great news is that there are some amazing WordPress image compression plugins you can use to automate the entire process. Here are some plugins we recommend:. The most important thing when choosing an image optimization plugin is to use one that it compresses and optimizes images externally on their servers. This, in turn, reduces the load on your site.

All of the ones above do this. It automatically compresses images when we upload them to the WordPress media library. So we never have to worry about a thing. Over time you can get a feel for what image compression level you want to use.

It offers Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra. How much faster will your WordPress site be if you use image compression? It all depends on the sizes of your original images and what they are after compression.

If you have a lot of images, you might consider lazy loading them. This is an optimization technique that loads visible content but delays the downloading and rendering of content that appears below the fold.

Check out our guide on how to implement lazy loading in WordPress. This can be especially important on blog posts with lots of gravatar icons from comments.

Google also just released their recommendations for lazy loading. Next up are some tips on how to fine-tune your WordPress database. Just like a car your database needs upkeep as over time it can become bloated. Membership sites especially make it tricky, as they usually generate more complex queries , which in turn adds additional latency in retrieving the information from the MySQL database.

A lot of this is due to all the additional moving parts and large amounts of data sites like these have. Not to mention, you also have large amounts of concurrent users continuously querying the database.

Over recent years, InnoDB has shown to perform better and be more reliable. But with older WordPress sites you might want to do a quick check.

We always recommend reaching out to your host and asking if they can do this for you. Whenever you save a page or post in WordPress, it creates what is called a revision.

This occurs in both drafts and already published posts that are updated. WordPress revisions can be helpful in case you need to revert to a previous version of your content. However, revisions can also hurt the performance of your WordPress site.

On large sites, this can add up very quickly to thousands of rows in your database which are not necessarily needed. And the more rows you have, the larger your database in size, which takes up storage space. There are a couple of things you can do. If you have an older WordPress site with a lot of pages and posts, it might be time to do a quick cleanup and delete those old revisions.

You can do this with MySQL, but with all the bad snippets of code floating around the web, we recommend doing a backup of your site and using a free plugin like WP-Sweep. Another one of our favorite plugins, WP Rocket , also has a database optimization feature to clear out revisions. Login to your server via SSH and run the following command to get and see the number of revisions currently in the database. If you get an error, you might need to first install the wp-revisions-cli package with the following command:.

Another good strategy and one that we use at Kinsta is to limit the number of revisions that can be stored per post or page. Even setting it to something like ten will keep revisions from getting out of hand, especially if you do a lot of updating.

To limit revisions, you can add the following code to your wp-config. You can change the number to however many revisions you want to keep stored in your database. Or you can utilize a plugin like Perfmatters to limit revisions. And last but not least, you can also disable revisions on your site altogether. This way your database is completely free from all old revisions and no new ones will be added going forward. To disable revisions, you can add the following code to your wp-config.

Or you can utilize a plugin like Perfmatters to disable revisions. Especially on older and large sites, this can easily be the culprit for slow query times on your site due to autoloaded data that is left behind from third-party plugins and themes. Trust us; we see this every single day!

This contains a yes or a no value flag. Autoloaded data is data that is loaded on every page of your WordPress site. Just like we showed you how to disable certain scripts from loading sitewide, the same idea applies here. This is typically a result of the following:. How much is too much-autoloaded data? This can vary of course, but ideally, you want this to be between KB to 1MB. Once you start approaching the MB range or more, there are most likely things that can be optimized or removed from being autoloaded.

And anything above 10 MB should be addressed right away. Typically these are given an expiration time and should disappear over time. However, that is not always the case. We have seen some databases where there are thousands of old transient records.

You could use a query like the below to see if there are any autoloaded transient data. However, it appears there is now a function in WordPress , added in 4. So hopefully that is happening automatically on your site now. And the table had grown to over MB in size. In most cases you can then safely delete these as a cron job should have with the following command:. This essentially can help it to be searched more efficiently.

Redis is an open-source, in-memory data structure store. Using a persistent object cache such as Redis allows for the reuse of cached objects rather than requiring the MySQL database to be queried a second time for the same object. Highly dynamic websites WooCommerce, membership sites, forums, discussion boards, blogs with extremely active comment systems that cannot make good use of page caching are potential candidates for a persistent object caching option such as Redis. Check out how to add Redis to your hosting plan.

Elasticsearch is an open-source full-text search engine. It is used to index data and search that data incredibly quickly. In the context of WordPress, Elasticsearch can be used to speed up querying of the WordPress database.

If you have the time and ability, Elasticsearch can be integrated with a WordPress site by a highly knowledgeable WordPress and Elasticsearch developer. Examples of sites that can benefit from Elasticsearch:.

This might seem a little obvious, but it can make a world of difference if you disable non-critical plugins and theme features that are database-intensive. These are selected by us manually and assigned to the post. Does it take more work? Yes, but it can be even better as you can choose what you want readers to see. So how did we accomplish this?

We used the amazing Advanced Custom Fields plugin and then assigned these fields to our blog post type. This allows us to search and assign whatever related content we want to each of our blog posts as seen below. When you have a long discussion, these counters will take a huge toll on your database. In general, minimize the use of counters and only use them if necessary. This also goes for a lot of social counters. For example, on this site below you can see the response time from the popular Social Warfare plugin is 30x more than the next plugin below it.

Caching is enabled, but obviously, this plugin has a considerable performance toll. After disabling the plugin on the site, load times instantly improved and the responsiveness of the WordPress admin dashboard improved.

CDN is short for content delivery network. These are a network of servers also known as POPs located around the globe. These are entirely separate services. While our hosting here at Kinsta is blazing fast, a CDN can make your site even faster. How does a CDN work exactly? When people over in Europe visit your website it is going to take longer for it to load versus someone visiting it from say Dallas, TX. Because the data has to travel a further distance.

This is what is known as latency. Latency refers to the time and or delay that is involved in the transmission of data over a network. The further the distance the greater the latency. Traditional pull CDNs cache a copy of all of your content and media, but a request from the client is still made directly to your hosting provider. A reverse proxy CDN is slightly different. While it still acts likes a CDN, it intercepts all incoming requests and acts as an intermediary server between the client and your host.

Cloudflare and Sucuri are examples of reverse proxy CDNs. This is one reason why you have to point your DNS directly to these providers instead of your host. The benefit of these is because they act as an intermediary server, they can provide strong web application firewalls which can help block the bad traffic from ever hitting your WordPress site and or hosting provider. One downfall to this is that they do come with a little additional overhead in terms of performance compared to a traditional pull CDN.

But with additional performance and security features, this could be argued as negligible. As you can see it had a dramatic impact on the amount of bad traffic that was coming through.