Author: Juanzo

If you want a faster, smoother WordPress site, here are the key strategies to improve performance and reduce load times.

Keep Everything Fully Updated

In our experience, updates are the first and most important step before optimizing any site. It’s common to find websites running outdated plugins or themes, which can not only slow things down but also create serious security risks. Our top priority for keeping any WordPress site fast and secure is ensuring that WordPress itself, all plugins, and the theme are fully up to date — always.

Fewer Plugins, Better Performance

With over 60,000 plugins available, WordPress offers incredible flexibility. However, using too many plugins can strain your site’s resources — not necessarily because of hosting limitations, but simply due to plugin overload.

Before digging into the performance impact of individual plugins, do a quick audit: make sure every active plugin serves a necessary, unique function. If two plugins overlap in functionality, deactivate or remove one.

Use WordPress Site Health Tool

WordPress includes a built-in Site Health tool (found under Tools > Site Health) that can alert you to potential issues, including recommended PHP settings for your hosting environment.

It’s an easy way to identify technical adjustments that could improve both speed and security.

Keep PHP Updated

We recommend using at least PHP version 8.0, and if possible, checking whether your plugins and theme are compatible with PHP 8.2. Our PHP configuration guide explains how to upgrade PHP versions and tweak settings if needed.

If any plugin or theme doesn’t support PHP 8.0, it’s worth considering an alternative — PHP 7.4 has been officially unsupported since November 28, 2022.

The Query Monitor plugin is a great tool for spotting PHP errors. If you see “deprecated” warnings, that means the plugin or theme is using outdated code that could stop working in future PHP versions.

In our experience:

• Most well-maintained sites are already compatible with PHP 8.1.
• The best-optimized sites support PHP 8.2 — which we recommend as the ideal version.
• Very few currently support PHP 8.3 or higher.

Remove PHP Settings from .htaccess

While .htaccess can be used to configure PHP settings, doing so forces PHP to read the file on every request — slightly slowing things down.

To streamline performance, we recommend using CloudLinux’s PHP Selector (available in cPanel) to manage PHP settings directly, without touching .htaccess.

We suggest cleaning up your .htaccess file by removing any custom PHP configurations. Leave only the default WordPress entries and, if applicable, LiteSpeed Cache settings — but no PHP directives.

WooCommerce is a plugin that enables us to convert our WordPress website into an online store. However, it’s common to encounter heavy, slow-loading sites that demand effort and investment to regain the agility and speed necessary for optimal performance.

In addition to general recommendations for improving WordPress loading speed, here are some specific tips to speed up your WooCommerce store.

Deactivate Geolocation

WooCommerce enables us to identify visitors’ countries to automatically display the correct country at checkout. However, if we only sell to a single country, this feature may be irrelevant. Even if we do sell to multiple countries, it’s often convenient to set the most common country as the default option and disable geolocation.

To achieve this, navigate to WooCommerce → Settings, and under the “General” tab, locate the “Default customer location” option. From there, select the country or region of your store.

Optimized databases

WooCommerce generates a significant number of MySQL queries, making it crucial to maintain a healthy database.

By utilizing the plugin we always recommend, LiteSpeed Cache, you can optimize your database through the following steps within the Database options:

• Erase all expired transient data.
• Optimize the tables.
• Convert all MyISAM tables to InnoDB from the “Database Table Engine Converter”.

These are the only three actions we recommend. The remaining options will depend on each specific case.

Enable WooCommerce HPOS

“WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS)” is a feature first introduced by WooCommerce in version 7.1 and now included by default in newer versions. HPOS enables the creation of dedicated tables optimized specifically for WooCommerce, as opposed to using the default table format that WordPress uses for articles and pages.

You can manually enable HPOS in WooCommerce by navigating to WooCommerce → Settings, then selecting the Advanced tab and locating the Features section.

It’s possible that some plugins installed may not be compatible with HPOS yet. In such cases, the incompatible plugins will be highlighted, allowing you to update them or choose replacements that are compatible with the new table format.

MySQL indexes

If you have a large number of products, articles, or users, having indexes for MySQL can significantly speed up navigation within your administrator dashboard.

Index WP MySQL for Speed is an excellent plugin that simplifies the task of indexing MySQL for improved performance. Don’t forget to create a backup before making any changes.

Thank you for reading. We invite you to share your thoughts and impressions in the comments section below.