Here are the 5 Tools to Speed Up Your WordPress Website that I personally use here. WordPress is great, but not always that fast. The good news is that you can easily improve the speed and performance of a WordPress website by utilizing tools such as those below.
Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting
A fast WordPress website definitely starts with the right web hosting. If you want the best speed and performance, I recommend you choose a Managed Wordpress Hosting plan. You can find some great ones that we rate very highly in our reviews and comparisons. Currently, we’re using Nexcess for our website here—and we’re very impressed with the results.
Nexcess Managed WordPress Hosting includes their optimized servers and network, content Delivery Network powered by Cloudflare, premium image compression, Nginx, and Redis. That combination makes Nexcess one of the fastest WordPress hosts that I’ve used.
Along with great website speed, I also appreciate all of the premium features and the helpful expert customer support that I get with Nexcess. And, Nexcess is also my top recommendation for WooCommerce websites.
WP Astra Theme
Over the years, we’ve used a number of themes for WebHostingCat.com. While they all performed well, the speed and performance we’ve had since we switched to the Astra Pro theme has been noticeably improved. I also like all of the customization options you get with Astra Pro. And, those few times I had questions, the support team there has been very helpful.
Although I would recommend spending the money for Astra Pro, you can start off by using the free version of the Astra theme. You don’t get the same functionality, but it’s a good opportunity to see how it works out for your own WordPress site.
WP Rocket Plugin
There are many WordPress caching plugins available in the WordPress.org repository, and we’ve tried almost all of them. While I would say that most of them did slightly improve the speed and performance of our website, the difference wasn’t that great or noticeable. However, that definitely isn’t the case with WP Rocket!
Immediately after installing and activating the WP Rocket plugin, our page loading times and core web vitals were clearly better. And, after making just a couple of minor adjustments to the settings, our website speed and performance has been the best it ever has. I recently wrote an article comparing the Best WordPress Caching Plugins that you can check out to see the improvement and difference between WP Rocket and the others.
While you do have to pay for WP Rocket, you can try it out first to see if it works as well for your websites as it does for us.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network or CDN is critical for speeding up your website—especially if you have a lot of images and static content, and you have website visitors around the world. With a CDN your site content can be located on remote servers, so your uses don’t have to retrieve your web pages from one particular web server.
Most Managed WordPress Hosting plans now include a content delivery network (CDN) with your hosting plan. For example, Nexcess (which I use) includes their CDN powered by Cloudflare. If your particular web host doesn’t include a content delivery network, you can sign up for one directly on the Cloudflare website.
Image Compression
Along with a CDN, image compression is vital for reducing page loading times and speeding up your website—especially if your WordPress site has a lot of photos. There are some WordPress hosts that include image compression with your hosting plan. Again, Nexcess does include TinyPNG for image compression with their WordPress Hosting.
I also use the EWWW Image Optimization plugin. And, there are also others in the WordPress.org repository that you can use for free.
Conclusion
Using the right tools, you can definitely speed up and improve the performance of your WordPress website. It starts with quality web hosting (preferably Managed WordPress Hosting), along with an efficiently constructed WordPress theme, the right caching plugin, a content delivery network, and compressing your images. It’s worked out great for us and I’m confident it will for your website as well.
Recommended Tools for Better WordPress Speed
| WP Tool | Function | |
|---|---|---|
| Nexcess | Web Hosting | |
| Astra Pro | WP Theme | |
| WP Rocket | Caching Plugin | |
| Cloudflare CDN | Content Delivery Network | |
| EWWW Plugin | Image Compression |
