The speed of my website is slow. How to improve it(wordpress website)?

[egbert]

My website's speed is slow. After test it with Gtmetrix,the result is bad. How to improve it? Is there any plugin to solve this issue. This Website is built with Wordpress. Can anyone help?

This is the domain address: https://www.aisledlight.com/

[MrVapor · Accepted solution]

Hey there @egbert 

If you're on cPanel, I would suggest the caching plugin WP Rocket (3rd Party website.) I've tested every caching plugin on the market and that one is the best in my opinion. It covers most of the bases. 

Here are some other tweaks:

Add a CAPTCHA: CAPTCHAs help protect your site from spamming by bots and other malicious actors. They force people to identify themselves as humans by performing simple tests. Protecting yourself is as simple as installing the Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) plugin and doing the setup. This will mitigate a lot of security concerns and keep random bots from infiltrating your website.

Use your own cronjob: The wp-cron.php file that installs with every WordPress installation can sometimes be problematic. Far too often it runs unnecessarily and causes resource issues that can slow your site down considerably, especially on sites that receive a lot of traffic. For a site that doesn’t receive a lot of traffic, it can be a significant amount of time before a visitor loads a page and trigger the cron task. This can cause missed schedules for publishing posts and other unintended effects.

To resolve these issues, you can disable the default wp-cron.php and configure a real cron job. To do this, take the following steps:

1. Log in to your account using cPanel or SSH.
2. Using the cPanel File Manager or the command line, open the wp-config.php file in a text editor.
3. Add the following line to the wp-config.php file:

   define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

4. Save the changes to the wp-config.php file and then exit the text editor. The virtual WordPress cron job is now disabled.

After disabling the default cron job, you are ready to set up a real cron job that runs at fixed intervals regardless of the site traffic.

1. Log in to cPanel.
2. In the Advanced section of the cPanel home screen, click Cron jobs.
3. Under Cron Email, type the e-mail address that you want to receive notifications, and then click Update Email. Every time the cron job runs, the e-mail account will receive a message.
   If you do not want to receive e-mail notifications for the cron job, you can append >/dev/null 2>&1 to the command, which redirects all output to /dev/null.
4. Under Add New Cron Job, in the Common Settings list box, select Twice an hour.
5. In the Command text box, type the following line. Replace username with your own cPanel account username:

   cd /home/username/public_html; /usr/local/bin/php -q wp-cron.php

   NOTE: This line assumes that you installed WordPress in the document root (public_html) directory. If you installed WordPress in another directory, modify the cd command to change to that directory instead.
6. Click Add New Cron Job. The new cron job settings take effect immediately.

Disable the Heartbeat: (Note that WP Rocket has this feature built in) The “heartbeat” feature enables WordPress to monitor user actions and sends periodic updates to the web server. The heartbeat is used to save drafts automatically, lock post edits, log out administrators after an idle period, and more.

However, in some scenarios, the heartbeat may send an excessive amount of requests to the server. When this occurs, site performance can suffer. For example, CPU loads may increase, or you may receive “The Connection Has Been Reset” messages in your browser.

By default, WordPress does not provide a way to disable or change the heartbeat settings. However, you can install the Heartbeat Control plugin to do this. If you’re the only one that works on your site, disable everything. If you have multiple authors, disable it on the frontend only.

Disable XML-RPC:  XML-RPC is a remote procedure call which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism. In human language, this means that you can post to your blog directly from email or any number of other services that are NOT your WordPress dashboard. If you want to access and publish to your blog remotely, then you need XML-RPC enabled.

In order to turn this off, you have a couple of options:

All you have to do is paste the following code in a site-specific plugin:

add_filter('xmlrpc_enabled', '__return_false');

Alternatively, you can just install the plugin called Disable XML-RPC. All you have to do is activate it. It does the exact same thing as the code above.

Also, you can disable this by going to the Select PHP Options feature in cPanel as well.

How to Disable WordPress XML-RPC with .htaccess

While the above solution is sufficient for many, it can still be resource intensive for sites that are getting attacked.

In those cases, you may want to disable all xmlrpc.php requests from the .htaccess file before the request is even passed onto WordPress.

Simply paste the following code in your .htaccess file:

# Block WordPress xmlrpc.php requests

<Files xmlrpc.php>

order deny,allow

deny from all

allow from 123.123.123.123

</Files>

Ultimately, it may cost a little bit of money and time, but you can get those scores up with this method. I've done it hundreds of times and it works.

Hope that helps!

[GunnyRet]

@MrVapor Joe, 

Thank you for a very informative post. I have Autoptimize and WP Fastest Cache installed.

In your opinion, should only one cache tool be deployed on a site?

Second, do the other plugins seem to do the trick without purchasing upgrades?

Thank you again. Your work helps novices like myself continue to learn and grow.

Bryan "Gunny"

[MrVapor]

Hey @GunnyRet 

Thank you for your service, sir. Former USAF myself.

You should absolutely only use one caching plugin. Multiple caching options can actually slow your site down more due to the nature of the caching features that are baked into the plugins. Conflicts will arise very quickly.

I've used both Autoptimize and WP Fastest Cache (and W3TC, which is a garbage plugin.)

The reason I suggest WP Rocket is that it's not overly expensive (I think it's $49 per yer) and it does literally everything that every other plugin out there does and then some. They also have a really good support function if there are issues. As soon as I plugged it into my sites, which have almost 40 plugins by the way (on each of them), I immediately got load times between 1.5 - 2.5 seconds, my PageSpeed/YSlow scores both went up to A's, and pretty much everything that GTMetrix recommends be done to speed up your WordPress site was done at the click of a button. It does take some time to set up the plugin to work correctly, and you may see some minor tweaks that need to be made, but it is well worth the money and I don't say that often about plugins.

You're more than welcome for the help, sir. 

[MrVapor]

Oh, one more thing:

I would avoid multipurpose themes like Divi or Avada. They're full of bloated, unoptimized code.

I suggest using a theme like GeneratePress (which has free and paid options) along with a website builder plugin like Beaver Builder or Elementor.