One of the first questions to address when starting a new WordPress website is what kind of server you need and how to pick a hosting provider based on server features. One of the many great things about WordPress is that it can work in almost any sort of environment. It’s not resource-heavy by itself, it’s easy to install even manually, and if you don’t expect much traffic right from the beginning, it doesn’t require a lot of hosting bandwidth. However, if you really want things to run smoothly and not have to upgrade your plan every once in a while, there are some WordPress server requirements to keep in mind.

All websites need a server to run on. A server is where all the files are stored, which includes media files, databases, content, and everything else. Some users have their own servers and host their own websites, while others (which is actually a majority of WordPress users) buy a hosting plan with a provider that has a number of shared or managed servers.

The sort of plan you will pick depends to a great extent on server performance. Servers that run on outdated software, have limited hardware specifications or don’t support HTTPS will still allow you to run a website, but it definitely won’t run smoothly. So, to help you avoid these situations, we’ve compiled a list of the basic WordPress server requirements that should help you pick the right specifications for your next WordPress website:

Recommended Disk Space for WordPress

Just like a computer, a server has a hard disk that has a certain amount of space on it. The WordPress installation itself is very lightweight (1GB, which is way less than what an average smartphone has) but disk space is required for additional resources, most notably for themes, plugins, media files, and especially videos. This storage affects the processing speed, which is one of the most important requirements in a web server. So in addition to looking for high processing performance, you should also look for a server that has considerable disk space, especially if your website is going to be media-heavy.

You should also consider the type of hardware used: HDD or hard disk drive is an older solution used for lower speed requirements and for data that’s not frequently used, while SSD or solid-state drive is a modern high-speed solution that’s less susceptible to physical damage.

Some providers use a combination of the two – SSD for databases and HDD for other, less sensitive resources. You will find some cheap providers that use HDD only, and it will work okay for WordPress, but for fast processing and reliable data delivery it’s probably a better idea to opt for ones that use SSD, or at least the combination of the two.

As for the size, you will find hosting anywhere from 10GB to 250GB. The lower end will work just fine for small to medium websites, online shops and personal blogs. Larger hard disks are more suitable for big websites with a lot of heavy media and a lot of traffic, massive portals or forums, as well as enterprise websites.

Recommended RAM for WordPress

RAM (Random Access Memory) plays an important role in server performance for WordPress websites. As WordPress sites handle dynamic content and user interactions, sufficient RAM ensures smooth operation and faster response times.

The WordPress software itself requires at least 512MB. However, typically, servers for WordPress require a minimum of 1GB RAM for basic functionality, and for optimal performance, 2GB or more is recommended.

RAM speed and type also impact performance, with DDR4 being a common choice for its efficiency. Higher RAM capacity allows for handling multiple concurrent requests and caching, enhancing user experience and site reliability. Ultimately, adequate RAM ensures that WordPress sites can handle traffic spikes and complex tasks efficiently.

Processing Power (CPU)

The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is something like the brain of a server, crucial for handling WordPress websites efficiently. It processes instructions, executes code, and manages tasks. A powerful CPU enhances performance, especially during high-traffic periods or when running resource-intensive plugins.

Fortunately, WordPress doesn’t demand excessive CPU power by default. Still, factors like website complexity, the amount of users accessing the site at the same time, and plugin usage impact CPU requirements. Common server CPUs include Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC series, offering varying core counts and clock speeds.

When it comes to actual values, WordPress will function on just 1.0 GHz. However, these days, instead of the GHz values, hosts focus more on the number of processing cores. Two cores perform the tasks twice as quickly as just one, and servers with five or six cores will be that much more efficient. For small WordPress sites, a server with at least a dual-core CPU suffices, but larger sites benefit from quad-core or higher CPUs to ensure smooth operation and responsiveness.

PHP Version

When you are about to install WordPress, the application itself will tell you which version of PHP is required. Right now, it’s version 8.0, or higher. Each version receives updates for up to two years. It’s always recommended to use hosting that includes the latest PHP version – but, fortunately, most of them do. If you already have WordPress installed, you should regularly check for the latest versions and update.

PHP is an open-source programming language used for dynamic interactive websites. WordPress itself is written using PHP. Using the latest version assures proper performance, faster running of processes and reduction of memory usage. In addition, it protects the website from bugs and malware.

Server Location and CDN

These days, with cloud hosting and virtual private servers, one would think that server location doesn’t matter. However, the server is still physically located somewhere, and the closer it is to your visitors, the better the website will perform for them. If your website is focused on users from a specific country or region, then you’ll obviously choose a server located in that country or region. But most WordPress websites count on international visitors, from all over the world, which is why you should opt for a hosting service with access to a global server network. Then, if the majority of your visitors is, say, from US, you will find a US-based server. Of course, your website will work fine even for visitors outside of that area, but it will perhaps be slower.

If you want to ensure the best possible performance of your WordPress website regardless of where it’s accessed from, we strongly suggest you find a host that offers access to CDN.

CDN or Content Delivery Network is a network of servers located all across the globe, storing static versions of your website. When a visitor accesses the website, it is served from the nearest possible server, assuring optimal performance and speed.

Database Management

Database management systems (DBMS) play a crucial role in WordPress websites by storing and organizing site data, including posts, pages, user information, and settings. WordPress relies heavily on its underlying database for content retrieval and management. Efficient database management can significantly impact website performance, influencing factors like page load times and overall responsiveness.

When choosing a server to host your WordPress website, the performance and compatibility of the server’s database management system are essential considerations. WordPress uses MySQL and MariaDB to store and retrieve data. You don’t need both – just one of these systems. When considering a hosting service’s server requirements, make sure that either MySQL or MariaDB are stored on the server, ideally on SSD.

Also ideally, the service should offer automatic database optimization and a multi-user environment.

Recommended Web Server Software for WordPress

When selecting a web server for your WordPress website, looking into available web server software applications is an important consideration. For WordPress, Apache and Nginx are two popular choices. In fact, WordPress itself recommends using one of the two. The website will function without them, as you can technically use any server to run WordPress, but Apache and Nginx have certain significant advantages.

Apache is known for its flexibility, rich documentation, and compatibility with various modules. It is a good choice both for seasoned WordPress users and for beginners. On the other hand, Nginx is newer and faster and excels in handling concurrent connections efficiently, making it ideal for high-traffic sites.

The choice between them depends on factors like site traffic, server resources, and configuration preferences. Apache’s .htaccess file provides easy per-directory configuration, while Nginx’s configuration syntax is somewhat more straightforward and excellent under heavy loads.

To learn more, check out our article on how to choose between Nginx and Apache.

HTTPS Support

HTTPS or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data exchanged between users and websites. It is an extension of HTTP and uses encryption to secure the data transmission.

HTTPS uses SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) protocols to encrypt data. This ensures that even in the case of unauthorized data interceptions, the data cannot be deciphered easily.

When choosing a server for WordPress, it’s important to look for HTTPS and SSL among the server features. These days most renowned hosting providers include HTTPS and SSL in their plans, especially the more advanced ones, but it doesn’t hurt to check.

If you already use a server that doesn’t include these security features, check out our article on how to add HTTPS and SSL to your WordPress website and also our list of the best SSL plugins for WordPress.

Wrapping It Up

Summing it up, there are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a server for your WordPress website. As we said, WordPress is not resource-heavy and most basic servers will probably do the job. However, if you want to ensure speed, reliability and performance, we recommend you follow the guidelines we laid out in this article and check for the requirements we mentioned – from disk space, RAM and CPU to PHP and web server software, as well as CDN, HTTPS and SSL availability.

Most hosting companies list the features clearly in their plans, so picking one that meets these requirements shouldn’t be hard, and shouldn’t put too much strain on your website budget. Good luck with your new website, and let us know how it goes!

If only someone could guarantee that your WordPress website would run for its life without any issues and errors. Unfortunately, running a website means you’ll have an occasional problem. It might be a slow admin dashboard, failure to update or publish posts, or a broken image link or two – sooner or later, something bad will happen, something will break, or stop working as intended. Enabling WordPress’ debug mode can sometimes be a part of the process of fixing the issues.

In this article, we’ll be talking about debugging and WordPress. Usually the purview of developers, debugging is something regular WordPress users, with little to no experience with coding, typically don’t come across. And it’s a shame because it’s a handy tool.

So, sit back and get ready to learn:

What Is Debugging?

Debugging, as its name suggests, is finding and removing bugs from software. Typically, it’s something people who create or are familiar with the software’s code perform. It’s a standard part of software development and use – no code is perfect and debugging helps find errors and fix them.

WordPress, a CMS written in PHP, is software with handy debugging tools. These tools won’t solve your website’s problems, which will likely require human intervention, but they will alert you to specific errors and warnings.

How to Enable WordPress Debug Mode Manually

While WordPress has built-in debugging tools, they’re not turned on by default – you have to do it on your own. You can do it manually, with the help of a plugin, or through your web hosting dashboard if that’s an option your host offers.

To do it manually, you need access to the wp-config.php file. We have a thorough guide on editing the wp-config.php, so please give it a look to find out the ins and outs of accessing and editing the file using FTP.

Once you locate and open the file, locate the following line of code:

/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */

Any changes you make to the file should go above that line. The code you could add might look something like this:

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );
@ini_set( 'display_errors', 0 );
define( 'SCRIPT_DEBUG', true );

You enable the debug mode in the first line by setting WP_DEBUG to ‘true.’ This means WordPress will start showing you debug messages.

In the second line, by setting WP_DEBUG_LOG to ‘true,’ you’re making sure those messages are stored in a debug log. You must enable the log if you want permanent debug message storage.

In the third and fourth lines, you’re disabling the display of messages by setting WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY to ‘false.’ If you skip this step, the messages will show on your website, presenting a security risk and potentially preventing the pages from loading correctly.

Setting SCRIPT_DEBUG to ‘true’ will ensure WordPress uses the full, non-minified versions of core CSS and PHP.

How to Enable WordPress Debug Mode Using a Plugin

If you’re uncomfortable editing the wp-config.php file manually, or if you don’t have FTP access to the website, you can always turn to plugins for help. There are a couple of plugins you could use for debugging.

We’ll start with the one that lets you directly enable debug mode. Called WP Debugging, the plugin allows you to enable debug mode and enable many of the tools you can also enable manually.

To get started, navigate to Plugins > Add New, search for the plugin, and install and activate it. From there, move to Tools > WP Debugging, where you’ll see all the constants the plugin is enabling/disabling.

Installing the plugin enables debug mode, message logging, full CSS and PHP file usage, and saving database queries to an array for later display using SAVEQUERIES.

Optionally, the plugin lets you disable the display of debug messages, which might be recommended, and it also enables you to disable the fatal error handler introduced with WordPress 5.2. When you uninstall the plugin, it will try to revert all the settings to default.

What’s Next?

After you’ve set up the debug mode and enabled the log, the troubleshooting can begin. After replicating the condition that led to the error, you can access the log and see what notifications and warnings the debug mode issued. Armed with that knowledge, you – or any other person skilled with debugging – can proceed with any necessary steps. These steps could involve fixing your website’s code and letting theme or plugin developers know of the issues their products have caused you.

You can also use additional plugins when debugging your website to make the process easier or to expand its scope. Query Monitor is a plugin we’ve covered in an article. It’s a tremendously helpful plugin that lets you see database queries, PHP errors, enqueued scripts and stylesheets, HTTP API requests, and a whole host of other information on every page load. It’s a necessary plugin for troubleshooting WordPress.

Debug Bar is another commonly recommended plugin to help you out when debugging your website. The plugin gives you access to a debug menu right from the admin bar, where you can see queries and cache. It also lets you keep track of PHP warnings and notices if you have the debug mode on.

You should note that some other plugins might have features that could help you when debugging your website. Jetpack, for example, has an activity log that keeps track of all the changes made to the website, complete with the data on the users who created them. This information can be invaluable when identifying the cause of some issues.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Debugging is a normal part of ensuring that your website works well. It’s a part of the process when building things like themes and plugins – or at least it should be – just like it’s a part of ensuring that your website, as a whole, works well. Because when it doesn’t, and that’s bound to happen, it’s the debug mode you’ll turn to to find out what went wrong.

Among all the different performance indicators you can use to describe your website, speed is one of the most important ones. So important, in fact, that you can take a perfectly good website, with great content, great visuals, great audience targeting, and watch as the visitor numbers start declining as you throttle back its loading speed. This is the reason web admins and optimizers have developed so many different methods to improve websites’ performance. Using PHP accelerators is one of them, even though it’s all too easy to build and run a website without ever having to deal with them.

Still, something made you search for PHP accelerators and come here for an explanation. We’ll provide a couple of those, both regarding what PHP accelerators are and why they’re important, but also why these useful PHP extensions shouldn’t take up too much of your time. Get ready to read:

What Are PHP Accelerators?

PHP accelerators are little pieces of code – extensions, kind of like plugins but for PHP – that help your website perform better by providing caching functionalities for PHP. To better understand what this means and why it’s important, you need to know a thing or two about PHP and caching.

PHP is an open-source programming and scripting language that’s commonly used for all sorts of things, including building the world’s most prominent content management system – WordPress. PHP underpins a whole lot of what’s going on with your website, especially the parts of the website your users don’t get to see – the backend, or the server side.

Still, the fact that the users don’t see it doesn’t mean nothing is going on there. A WordPress website’s server side is a busy place, as it’s in constant communication with the client side, and code and scripts are getting executed all over the place.

To make sure all of that PHP is getting executed in the most efficient way possible, some really smart people decided to implement the concept of caching to PHP. Caching is the practice of storing certain information in a way or a place that makes it easily retrievable on future requests. WordPress has its own cache you can clean periodically, and you also have the option to use caching plugins to speed up your website.

For PHP, the caching performed by PHP accelerators means storing compiled chunks of PHP in memory so that they don’t have to be loaded and compiled again upon further requests. In essence, PHP accelerators allow your servers to improve the loading speeds by substituting processing for loading space – an arrangement that works beautifully.

Where Can You Get PHP Accelerators?

The whole concept of PHP accelerators is brilliant, especially seeing how they aim to speed up the part of your website that’s so often the culprit for slowdowns. And if you were wondering how someone didn’t come along and integrate PHP accelerators with proper PHP – something like adding a feature previously available only as a plugin to core WordPress – you’d be happy to know that someone did that.

Starting with PHP 5.5, PHP had its very own caching engine built into it. It’s called OPcache, and its becoming a part of PHP spelled doom for many other accelerators. The Alternative PHP Cache extension – known as APC – shed its caching functionality when it became obvious it was incompatible with the built-in competitor. Now, it serves as an in-memory store for key values.

You can still get XCache, but you should make sure that it’s compatible with the version of PHP you’re using. It wouldn’t hurt to be sure that you really need it, since the accelerator that comes with PHP serves its purpose well. Windows has its own version of a PHP accelerator for Windows servers, the Windows Cache Extension.

Mostly, however, you can rest assured that, as long as you’re running PHP 5.5 or newer – and you should really be running a newer version – you already have a PHP accelerator built into the very version of PHP your server is using. Whether or not it’s enabled is a whole different issue, but you can easily solve it by contacting your hosting provider and asking them to point you towards the place where you can enable it.

Your Website Is Still Slow? Try This!

If the solution to your query left you feeling a bit underwhelmed and, even worse, still in need of a solution for your website’s slow loading speeds, don’t worry. There’s always something you could be doing to make sure that your website runs smoothly, and the bigger the website, the more options problems will be there for you to solve.

Our website contains tons of resources that can point you in the right direction for ensuring your website is as quick as it should be. Some of the things you could consider doing, and articles you might read, include:

There are many other things you could be doing to speed up your WordPress website, too. Any sudden slowdown is a cause for alarm and should be investigated. If you’re not sure you can do it on your own, you can ask your web host for help, or, if they are not willing, contract a third-party WordPress maintenance service to troubleshoot any issues and fix them.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Even though information travels almost at the speed of light online, traffic jams can still happen along the information highway, resulting in poor website performance and loss of website visitors. If your search for possible remedies led you here, rest assured that your server probably already has all the PHP acceleration it can possibly get. To make sure that your server is running a version of PHP that has a built-in PHP accelerator, and that said accelerator is enabled, get in touch with your web host. And if everything is working as intended and your website is still slow, you’ll need to look for other remedies.

If you were tasked with compiling a list of the best uses for a WordPress website, starting a store would have to be on it – likely somewhere near the top. WordPress users have it particularly easy because they don’t have to waste their time thinking about the best platform for their store. WooCommerce, the go-to choice for powering WordPress online stores, offers great core functionalities and an even greater extendibility, the two features that define WordPress, too. Just like WordPress, however, WooCommerce isn’t perfect, which brings us to the topic of WooCommerce vulnerabilities.

Every piece of software you can use can have its fair share of glitches, errors, or weak points. When that piece of software is as critical to your business as WooCommerce tends to be, and when you use it to process sensitive data from your customers, any defect that can be exploited by third parties becomes a vulnerability that needs to be dealt with.

In this article, we’ll talk about security vulnerabilities in WooCommerce and how to deal with them. A full list of topics we’ll cover includes:

What Are WooCommerce Vulnerabilities?

A WooCommerce vulnerability, or a software vulnerability in general, is a flaw in the software that leaves it open to various kinds of attacks. Software vulnerabilities can come about as a result of faulty coding, or when mistakes are made during the design of the software procedures and functionalities. Either way, they leave a window open for a bad actor to exploit them and act against your system or its users.

As a WooCommerce user, you’re not expected to be in charge of finding WooCommerce vulnerabilities, let alone finding a way to fix them. The best-case scenario is that a security researcher finds the vulnerability while poking WooCommerce for weak spots, and then notifies the public and WooCommerce, after which the company releases a patch or directions for fixing the issue. The worst-case scenario is that the vulnerability is found after it has already been exploited by bad actors.

What makes staying on top of WooCommerce vulnerabilities especially daunting is that, often enough, they have nothing to do with WooCommerce at all. WooCommerce users routinely use third-party plugins for WooCommerce analytics, shipping management, or creating product bundles, to name just a few popular uses of WooCommerce extensions and plugins. The more plugins you have, the more potential weak spots you introduce into your system, especially if those plugins come from unreputable developers or are no longer supported.

What Types of Vulnerabilities Occur in WooCommerce?

Your WooCommerce store can be vulnerable to all kinds of attacks. Knowing what they are is not mandatory for a regular WooCommerce user, but the more you know the better you’ll understand why it’s important to take these vulnerabilities seriously and take care of them as soon as you become aware of them.

A glance at WooCommerce-related vulnerabilities – those that affect both WooCommerce and third-party extensions and plugins – identifies these as the most likely issues:

SQL Injections

Your website’s database is one of its most important parts. Located on the server, it’s subject to constant requests for information from the front-facing part of the website. An SQL injection is a type of attack that uses that process to get access to restricted data.

With an SQL injection, a bad actor will find a way to have an SQL command run on your database. Usually, it’s the part of your website that provides user input, such as a login page or form, which acts as the entry point.

After a successful attack, a hacker can get away with the user data you store in the database, information about the database you don’t want to have public or data from multiple tables in the database. SQL injections can also be used to mess with the workings of applications.

Cross-Site Scripting

Another type of injection attack, cross-site scripting, or XSS, relies on using vulnerabilities in your website to serve up malicious scripts that will then run on your website visitors’ browsers. Seeing how users share sensitive information with your website because it’s a store, XSS attacks can cause a lot of problems.

An XSS attack uses your store’s status as a trusted source to masquerade the script that, when executed, gets access to cookies and other session information stored in the browser. From there, the hacker can use that information to impersonate the target, use their login information, and access their data.

Directory Traversal

One of the security features implemented in website structure is confining website users within the root directory on the server. Any type of information they might access is stored there, and anything they should be able to access – and there’s a whole lot you don’t want them to access – is stored outside of the root directory.

A directory traversal attack aims to access the files stored outside of the root directory. This type of attack can be as simple as trying to request a URL the attacker sort of knows is usually located in a specific location on a specific type of server. With a little guesswork and some typing, they can eventually retrieve files from outside the root directory, giving them the knowledge they can use to further exploit the website.

How to Deal with WooCommerce Vulnerabilities

While it might not be up to you to make sure that WooCommerce stays on top of any new vulnerabilities in its code that are found, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have an important role to play in the safety of your website. So, if you want to make sure that you’re giving attackers the least room possible to attack your website using WooCommerce vulnerabilities, here’s what you want to do.

Make Sure You Run the Latest Version of WooCommerce

Even though updating plugins is something you can set to happen automatically on your website, many admins often opt to do it manually. Big online stores that run lots of third-party plugins and have lots of customers buying lots of products might require testing the update on a clone of the website.

The problem with this practice, however, is that the most common fixes to WooCommerce vulnerabilities come in the form of plugin updates. Keeping your plugin up to date is always one of the best ways to ensure that your WooCommerce store has the best – and least vulnerable – version of WooCommerce available at the time.

Keep Other Plugins Up-to-Date, Too

Everything we said about WooCommerce can usually be prescribed to other plugins – it’s a good idea to keep them up to date. You should, of course, also make sure that you only use the plugins that you have to, and that you remove unnecessary plugins sooner rather than later. Use plugins from developers you trust, too.

Stay on Top of the Latest Developments

In some cases, WooCommerce might alert you about a vulnerability if you’ve opted to receive email communications from them – that’s as strong a reason as you’ll ever find to agree to get emails from a company.

Even if it doesn’t, however, you should keep an eye on their blog, as WooCommerce might use it to alert the public of possible issues. If you want to cast a wider net, maybe even keep a tab on third-party plugins you use with WooCommerce, use a website like CVE Details to look for possible vulnerabilities.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

The digital landscape is full of people who are searching, day and night, for various vulnerabilities they can use to access people’s websites. Platforms like WooCommerce will often have hidden vulnerabilities that are just waiting to be found. While there’s nothing you can do about that, you sure can make sure that you react as soon as the news of a new WooCommerce vulnerability breaks.

There’s a whole list of steps to take to make sure your WooCommerce store is secure. It includes things like updating your plugins, sure, but also things like enabling two-factor authentication, for example. Every step you can take can help protect your store, as well as its visitors, from WooCommerce vulnerabilities and people who want to exploit them.

Loading speed is one of the key traits that will determine how well your website performs whatever purpose you put before it. Amazing visuals, top-notch copy, awesome design, and easy navigation can only do their magic if the visitor sticks around until the website loads, and few things are as effective at chasing visitors away as slow loading speeds are. This is one of the main reasons you should always be on the lookout for new and better ways to speed up your WordPress website.

It’s not only the visitors who dislike slow websites. Google’s Core Web Vitals, which affect your website’s rankings with the search engine, include speed-related metrics. Speed issues can also be a signal there’s a problem with your website. So even if you don’t subscribe to the kaizen-like approach to web development that would have you consistently work on improving your website, loading speed will eventually cross your radar.

When that happens, knowing all the different things you can tinker with to speed up your website can save you lots of time and trouble. In this article, we’ll try to give you a comprehensive list of things you can do to speed up WordPress, or more precisely, your WordPress website.

To zero down on the issue that troubles your website, we’d recommend that you run some diagnostics first – tools such as PageSpeed Insights or the Pingdom Website Speed Test might be just what you need for the job. Also, you should keep in mind that we won’t offer some of the more complex or drastic solutions to speed issues with your website. But if you’re wondering how to create a static website and what are the best tools to do it, you’ll be able to read up on it on our website. You might also want to check out our website maintenance guide – you just might find that regular maintenance saves you from having to troubleshoot website speed issues.

The things you can end up doing to rectify the speed issues with your website include:

Check Your Host and the Hosting Plan

Your pick of hosting for your website is one of the most impactful decisions about it you can make. It’s serious business, choosing your website’s host, and you should approach it with proper respect. That means you should, in general, avoid free hosting even though it has its pros, find out what’s the difference between shared and managed hosting, for example, or between VPS and dedicated servers, and make the best choice you can afford.

If you don’t manage to do it from the first go, don’t worry – you can usually upgrade your hosting package, switch to a better one, or altogether swap for a better hosting provider later. If you’re upgrading, make sure your website is hosted on solid-state drives, with plenty of RAM at their disposal and solid bandwidth allocation. Also, try to move up from shared hosting – virtual private servers or cloud hosting are usually a better choice.

Mind the Plugins

Plugins – where would we be without them? WordPress users rely on plugins for everything from running their online store to managing comments and even doing technical stuff with databases. There are plenty of things we’d never be able to do with WordPress without plugins.

Plugins can also easily turn into a source of trouble. Some are vulnerable to outside attacks. Others will conflict with each other. And of course, some will simply slow down your website. Because plugins are useful, however, you can’t just remove them all. Some of the things you can do, however, are:

Remember that plugins are useful but can weigh your website down. Use only the ones you really need and try to choose the most lightweight choice there is.

Opt for a Different WordPress Theme

Themes are just as big of a reason for WordPress’ awesomeness as plugins. They are what lets you easily change the look and feel of your website, maybe add some features that will specifically match the type of website you’re creating.

Besides being great, themes can also be very resource-intensive. So, if you note that your website’s theme is at fault for its slow loading speed, maybe opt for a lightweight and well-optimized theme. Our Qi Theme is a solid choice, but you should feel free to browse our full list of themes and see if anything is popping out.

Update Out-of-Date Stuff

There are lots of things on your WordPress website you can update. You can update plugins, and you can update themes, too – but be careful to update them right, or else you might use any customizations you’ve made. Of course, you can update WordPress itself. It might not be an update, but you could also switch to a newer version of PHP if one is available or check with your host if it isn’t.

Besides being crucial to your website’s security, updates can also come with improvements that might affect the speed of your website. Making sure everything is up to date is just a practice you should adopt sooner than later. Just be sure you update things the right way, and maybe test the update on your website’s clone or a staging site.

Fine-Tune WordPress Settings

Another remarkable thing about WordPress is that its settings aren’t too difficult to understand and navigate, which makes configuring a WordPress website a straightforward task. While you’re at it, however, you should know that some choices you make can influence the speed of your website, or some of its pages.

Some of the WordPress settings you should set to reduce loading speeds include:

You might also want to experiment with other settings to find what works best for your website. You’ll find some ideas about other settings you might try to tweak a bit later in this article, too.

Use a CDN

Content delivery networks, or CDNs, are great services that can drastically improve your website’s performance. A good CDN service can reduce the load to your server, improve your content availability, help fend off some types of hacker attacks, and – boost your site loading speeds.

CDNs do all of this by sharing the load of hosting your content, making sure that it’s delivered from a point that’s as close as possible to your website visitors. You can set up a CDN such as Cloudflare on your own, or you can choose a hosting provider that offers CDN services as part of the package. Either way, CDNs are something you should investigate if you need to speed up your website.

Optimize Images

When a visitor comes to a page on your website, how quickly it loads will depend, logically, on the size of the things that need to be loaded. Among the many elements that could add some bulk to the page and make it slow to load are images.

Because they are very valuable and useful from the standpoint of web design, you should only scrap images if there’s no other choice for lessening their impact on the loading speed. Most likely you’ll want to optimize images and resize or compress them.

While you’re at it, it might be worth your while to optimize images for search engines, too. It might not help you speed up your website if you’ve already optimized the images for the web, but it can still boost your website’s search engine rankings.

Use a Caching Plugin

A great way to speed up your website is to make sure that some of the elements that are most difficult to load or are loaded most often are kept in a place that’s created for fast and easy retrieval. That’s pretty much the thing that happens with WordPress caching, and it’s why caching plugins are such useful tools for speeding up your website.

You might also want to check in with your hosting provider to see whether they’re using Memcached on your server. Also, keep in mind that you might not be allowed to use a caching plugin if the host already has a local caching solution in place, due to the possibility of conflicts. That’s okay, however – a single caching service is all you really need.

Consider Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a speed-boosting feature that postpones the loading of certain elements on a web page until a visitor scrolls down to it. The feature was so popular that it was eventually included in core WordPress with the 5.5 update, so you don’t have to worry about adding lazy loading to WordPress if you have WordPress 5.5 or newer.

The lazy loading that’s part of core WordPress only refers to images, however. If you want to lazy-load comments, for example, you’ll have to rely on plugins to do it. Note that, if you’re using comment plugins to change out native WordPress comments, they might already have lazy loading included.

Embrace Pagination – for Content and Comments Alike

Pagination is the practice of splitting larger chunks of page contents into smaller parts that are displayed on several pages. It can be applied to your blog posts, comment sections, pages with lots of copy, and even search results. It’s a common practice, which is why some type of pagination is often included in WordPress themes.

In case yours doesn’t have it, or you’re not happy with it, don’t worry. There are options for adding pagination to your website, including using plugins and writing your code. Those same options might allow you to disable the default pagination set by your WordPress theme and replace it with something else.

Don’t Host Large Media Files

If you thought images came in large files, wait until you see how huge videos can be. Granted, they’re not loaded in full as soon as a visitor scrolls down to them, but they can still be difficult and resource-intensive to store and retrieve. If you try to do it on your own, you’ll soon find yourself wanting more space on the server and bandwidth.

To prevent videos and other large media files from hogging your website’s resources, you should host them somewhere else. Popular choices include YouTube and Vimeo. They are, however, only a couple of the many great video hosting solutions, and some of the others might fit your needs better. Make sure to do some research before you choose.

Do Host Google Fonts Locally

Speaking of hosting things on your website, it’s better that you host Google fonts on your website instead of having them loaded from wherever Google stores them. The savings in speed, as small as they are, when you host Google Fonts locally has a bigger impact on your website than the minuscule savings in space you achieve when leaving the fonts where they are.

Keep in mind that, if you’re concerned about GDPR compliance, hosting Google Fonts locally is a great way to stay on the right side of the European legislature. As long as your website is available for visitors from Europe, this is something you should keep in mind.

Optimize and Maintain Your Database

The database is the brain of your website, which means that it’s directly responsible for your website’s performance. The bigger and more crowded the database is, the more difficult it is to retrieve the information needed to render the website. Eventually, the website will start loading more slowly.

To prevent it from happening, you need to clean up and optimize your website’s database. You can do it manually or use one of the great database plugins to help you out. While you’re at it, you might want to at least learn the basics of database management.

Optimize CSS and JavaScript

JavaScript and CSS have their place in building a website people would actually love to use, but sometimes their contribution to user experience might be overshadowed by the problems they cause. You can’t blade programming languages for it, of course, but CSS and JS files can sometimes be bigger than they have to be. Any file that’s big and slow to load reduces your website’s speed, so it has to be dealt with.

The way to reduce the size of CSS and JavaScript files for your website is called minification. You can minify CSS and JavaScript automatically, or you can use a tool to minify them manually. Either way, you’ll make the file smaller by removing superfluous code, without having to sift through thousands of lines of code.

Limit the Number of Revisions

When you’re writing a post for your website, it’s great to know that you have the fallback of post revisions to turn to if you want to bring up an earlier version of your post. However, the problem with this feature is that, while it might make it easy to undo changes in posts, it can also burden your database tremendously.

The problem is that WordPress is set to save unlimited revisions. The most practical way to deal with it would be to put a limit to the number of revisions that can be saved for any post. To do that, open up your wp-config.php file, and add the following line of code to it:

define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 5 );

This would set the number of revisions stored to five. You can change it to whatever number you like, or you can use the same line of code to turn off revisions by setting their number to zero.

Enable GZIP Compression

In your search to make your website ever so smaller and leaner, you may have come across GZIP compression. This type of compression can quickly pack the files from your website so that they take up less space during transmission, quickly unpack them when they get to their destination and do so without loss of data.

GZIP compression is especially suited for your website because it works best with the types of files your website is made of. You can install it easily, via a plugin, but you can also enable it on your server, if you know how to, or have your host enable it for you if you don’t.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

A successful website is a website that can attract and keep visitors. A website that loads slowly can’t do either – it might attract visitors for a while until the search engines notice people aren’t sticking around to see what the website is about and start dropping its rankings.

If your website isn’t successful at the moment, though, don’t despair – the speed department is one where you can make a lot of progress with just a couple of changes. When you want to speed up your WordPress website, something as simple as relegating video file hosting to YouTube or removing a couple of unused plugins can make a world of difference. And if that doesn’t help, don’t worry – there are plenty of other things that might.

Whatever kind of website you are running, we’ll bank on it containing… content. And creating, hosting and presenting content has a cost: in time, money, personnel hours, hosting space, bandwidth, electricity, and even environmental impact: you name it. But you already know this, don’t you? You have to invest something to build anything. So what are we on about? Well, there are ways bad actors make unscrupulous use of other people’s resources, and hotlinking is one of them. In this article, we will be talking about how you can prevent hotlinking and safeguard your resources.

But what is hotlinking? Is hotlinking all that bad? How does it affect your website’s resources? We will attempt to answer these questions, and others, in the subsequent section of this article. If you feel you know enough about hotlinking already and just want to learn how to prevent hotlinking to your website, feel free to select the tutorial section from the table of contents below right away.

Here’s what we’d like to talk to you about:

What Is Hotlinking

Hotlinking is known by various other names, including piggybacking, leaching, inline linking, direct linking, and offsite image grabs. Take a good look at some of those terms, such as piggybacking and leaching: they are very evocative, coming close to being self-explanatory.

What it means is the use of an object belonging to one website on a web page of another web site. For instance, a website could be hotlinking to another website’s image.

This is built into the architecture of the internet – specifically, hotlinking is a feature of HTTP. All links are functionally the same, and all resources can be located on any server. HTTP has little regard for copyright, though. It was created to make information sharing easier, not more difficult. This means that, in case you want to prevent hotlinking, you need to take some steps yourself.

How Does Hotlinking Affect Your Website

Some go so far as to compare hotlinking with theft. That hotlinking is illegal is not always correct, though: it may be that the hotlinked content is in the public domain, for instance. However, it may constitute copyright infringement.

Say you are hosting an image on your website. And say that you have created said image, and want to keep it exclusive for your website. In that case, a website hotlinking to it likely violates your copyright. Worse still, say you have paid to use the image on your website, and another hotlinks to it. You have then effectively made exclusive content available to people who did not pay for it, effectively costing you money.

But it’s not just about exclusive content. Hotlinking is a drain on server resources as well. If your content is hotlinked by a high-volume website, your regular visitors might find it unavailable, as if targeted by a DDoS attack. Worse still, your own host might suspend your website in order to deal with unexpected traffic, or insist on charging you more for it. And all the while whatever monetization scheme you have going on isn’t bringing you anything extra, in spite of more people viewing your content.

So, at the very worst, hotlinking hurts your bottom line. At the very best, your host gets more traffic while your website gets no new visitors.

How to Prevent Hotlinking

There are several steps you can take to prevent hotlinking, should you want to prevent other people from piggybacking off your content. We will discuss them in turn.

Choose a CDN Carefully

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. There is a lot we could say about how CDNs work and what good they are, but the principle is simple enough: a network of servers whose primary purpose is to reduce latency, or server response time by serving different users the same content from a variety of servers.

If you are using a CDN – and there is no reason not to, if you can afford it – choose your CDN provider carefully. Specifically, choose a CDN with a hotlinking prevention mechanism in place.

Disable Hotlinking on Apache

If your website is running on Apache, you can make some changes to your .htaccess file in order to prevent hotlinking while allowing crawling. Simply locate your .htaccess file and add the following code to it:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yahoo.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?bing.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|svg)$ http://myimage.jpg [NC,R,L]

This code will allow your website to be crawled by bots from whitelisted domains: Google, Yahoo, and Bing, in our case. This allows them to store thumbnail versions of images from your website in order to include them in rich results. You can use the same code to allow other search engines to do the same.

Of course, you need to replace yourwebsite.com with your website URL. The final line of the code given here can be omitted, but the URL in it can be used to point to a placeholder image given instead of the content the hotlinker wants to hotlink to.

Check Your Settings

Your hosting account may provide settings which disallow hotlinking for your website. You may need to consult your hosting provider if that is the case. If your website is running on Apache and you are confident in your ability to edit the htaccess file, you can consult the section above, but other hosting providers may have other options available.

Disable Right Click

While this is not fully effective, you can disable right clicking on your WordPress website. This will not prevent most people who are really bent on stealing your content, but it will make it difficult for them. They will not be able to copy an image or its URL with ease and link it on their website, for instance.

Rename Files

A quick fix which you can use at a pinch is simply to rename your media files. The file name is an important part of the URL. Change the file names and links on your website, and the hotlinking websites will not be able to use your content, throwing up 404 errors. To be fair, this is a pedestrian method: it is time-consuming to change a large number of file names and their links on other pages of your website. Not to mention that file name changes can affect your SEO: you want a media file to have a logical name.

In Conclusion

As you can see, hotlinking is not something you should be cavalier about tolerating. There are some easy steps you can take to prevent hotlinking, and most of them require a quick change to your settings. So, safeguard your resources and protect your bottom line: now you know how.

When are you done updating your website? Hopefully, never: using the latest version of all your themes and plugins is not just common sense, it is best practice in online safety. Similarly, you should always be looking into ways of making your website run smoother and faster, for reasons of both user experience and SEO, though this should take the back seat: safety is the priority. However, if you can spare your staff’s time and effort on it, you should really see if there is a way to make your website load and run faster. And the more HTTP requests the website makes, the slower it is. In this article, we will be talking about ways to make fewer HTTP requests from your website. But that is not all.

Apart from reducing the number of HTTP requests, we would also like to get into what these requests are, what they do, and when you really do need them. Apart from that, we will provide you with several methods of reducing HTTP requests both in number and in the volume of slow-downs they cause. We will not be providing you with a checklist of absolute musts, though: think of this instead as an optimization toolkit.

Here’s what we’d like to talk about, and also what you can do to reduce the number of HTTP requests:

What Are HTTP Requests

Whenever a visitor visits a website, their browser downloads all the files needed to display it for them. Each bit of the website needed to run it, commonly referred to as a resource or an asset, requires a request to your server. Resources can be anything from image files, to fonts, to CSS, to JavaScript files. These requests are served by the server (hence its name) using the hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP. That is why they are called HTTP requests.

Why Make Fewer HTTP Requests

Each individual resource needs its own request – that is just an in-built characteristic of the internet. This means, for instance, that the speed of the website is determined not just by the size of the files required, but by their number as well. Each image you use, each JS effect, each plugin that uses its own CSS stylesheet means one more HTTP request.

The fewer the HTTP requests made, the faster the website, in other words. There is a flip side, though: reducing the number of HTTP requests can come at the expense of aesthetics.

Now, not all HTTP requests are created equal. Smaller ones are less of a strain on server resources. Still, the principle remains: if you can achieve the same effect without even a single HTTP request, you will have made your website that much faster.

How to Analyze HTTP Requests

There are several online tools you can use to detect and analyze the HTTP requests your website makes. We will be using GTmetrix for this demonstration.

To check for speed issues on your website, enter a website’s URL into the URL field and click the Test your site button.

You will be taken to a report screen outlining speed issues that may occur on your website. To see the individual HTTP requests, click on the Waterfall tab.

Once there, you will see a list of resources requested and the amount of time it takes for them to be rendered by the visitor’s browser. Here, you can easily isolate individual requests that take a long time to serve. Hovering over any single one you can assess it in detail. You can also filter them by choosing a filter from the menu above the table or using the search field.

Now that you have identified your problem or problems, though, what can you do about them? Possibly nothing, but, equally possibly, loads.

Use HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is an improved version of the old HTTP protocol. HTTP/2 allows for asynchronous loading of files, making HTTP requests easier to serve, if not fewer in number. This is done by loading multiple resources at the same time using a single connection. How can you do that, though? Unless you are your own hosting provider, you can’t switch to HTTP/2 – that is part of your service package.

You can use a tool such as Geekflare’s HTTP/2 Test to check whether your website uses HTTP/2. If not, consult your hosting provider and learn whether it is possible to remedy that. If it isn’t, take a look at our list of WordPress migration plugins – and consider changing your hosting provider. You should not settle for obsolete technology, if not for reasons of loading speed, then for reasons of security.

Trim the Dead Weight: Get Rid of Useless Plugins

As we’ve mentioned before, if you are using a lot of plugins, chances are they are slowing up your website. If you are using a speed testing tool, you can find all your plugin-related requests by filtering for the word plugin, as WordPress stores all your plugin resources in the folder wp-content/plugin.

You may have installed a plugin that you don’t use, or you may have used a plugin at some point, but are not using it anymore. If you haven’t deactivated and uninstalled such a plugin, it may still be loading, completely unnecessarily.

If there are multiple plugins that provide you with the functionality you need, and if you can afford all of them, try picking the ones which make fewer HTTP requests. You can typically find the details in the plugins’ documentation if you are an advanced user. If not, test the free ones: you can use the speed testing tools yourself.

Optimize Your Images

Now, there is a lot to be said about optimizing images – enough to merit its own article. This is exactly the reason why we have a whole article about how to optimize images for your WordPress website. We will go over the basics here, though.

For the purposes of making fewer HTTP requests, we will repeat what we have said for the plugins: remove anything you don’t really need. Some websites rely heavily on visuals, though, and that can’t be helped. There are ways to compress image files or change to a different file format, for instance, and you should make use of them. And, while you’re at it, do not neglect to optimize your images’ alt text as well.

Lazy Load Images And Video

Lazy loading is the practice of postponing loading an element until it’s needed. Say an important video is at the bottom of a page (below the fold), and therefore not immediately visible to a visitor who loads said page. Do you need to load it before the visitor starts interacting with your website? Of course not.

Implementing lazy loading in WordPress is easy: it doesn’t require you to do anything in particular. Simply update your WordPress to version 5.5 or newer, which you should have done anyway. Lazy loading is a core feature from version 5.5. If, for whatever reason, you are deferring updating to version 5.5 of WordPress, many image compression plugins offer a lazy loading feature, too.

Optimize Your Database

Your images and video files are likely the slowest to load, but they are not the only thing you should be looking at. For best results in terms of both speed and storage space, consult our in-depth guide on database optimization in WordPress.

Optimize Your Fonts

Fonts are graphics that are mostly used to render text, and are generally the easiest way to customize the appearance of your text. Certain fonts, called icon fonts, have a different purpose: they provide easily scalable icons for your website. Each font, though, means a new HTTP request. If you can make do with fewer, get rid of the excess. Even hosting Google fonts locally will improve your website’s loading speed.

Disable Emojis

There are plenty of reasons not to use emojis, their being in poor taste not the least important. However, there is no denying that, like cockroaches, they are widespread. For that very reason, WordPress uses scripts that support the rendering of emojis for older browsers. This change to WordPress’s core mechanics dates from 2015, and most browsers have no difficulty rendering emojis. WordPress’s scripts? They still load. Unless you are catering specifically to visitors who use older browsers, disable the emoji scripts.

Use a CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It is a tool that ensures that a request is served from a server that is geographically the closest to the computer making the request. If you use a CDN, parts of your website are cached – stored – across different servers and requests are served more quickly. We even have a list of our favorite CDN services, but they come at a premium. Not only that: they are not efficient when dealing with CSS files.

Minify CSS and JavaScript Files

Best practices in coding dictate that it should be written in such a way as to be understood by humans. Not just any humans, though: primarily this refers to coders. However, this makes code slower to execute, as the computer generally doesn’t care whether the version of code it is using is easily legible to humans as well. This is what code minification is, in a nutshell: it makes code smaller and quicker to execute, at the expense of legibility to humans.

Combine CSS Files

Having a lot of CSS files means needing a lot of HTTP requests for the website to load. This, in turn, takes a lot of time to process. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to combine CSS files in WordPress – in case you need to. You won’t need to if you are using the HTTP/2 protocol.

Eliminate or Defer Render-Blocking JavaScript and CSS

Render-blocking means that a CSS stylesheet or a JavaScript script is loaded, but isn’t needed to run the portion of the web page visible to the user. Plugins and themes add CSS stylesheets and JavaScript scripts to your website, and if they don’t work together very well, they may be loading when they are not needed. Fortunately, there are ways to resolve render-blocking using a specialized plugin.

In Conclusion

As you can see, there is a lot you can do to reduce the number of HTTP requests in WordPress. Some of these things are better suited for advanced users, while others involve little more than installing a plugin and letting it run. With fewer HTTP requests comes greater speed and a better user experience overall.

Your website could likely always be running a little better. If you can spare the time and effort, optimize it to the best of your abilities.

Nowadays, ensuring that your website and all its pages look good on mobile is extremely important. The number of users who browse websites from mobile devices grows bigger each day, which is also why mobile-friendly design falls among some of the top-ranking factors for Google. Therefore, to make the most out of your SEO strategy, you should see that the mobile version of your WordPress site looks nothing short of perfect. But to make all this possible, you need to find a way to view the mobile version of your website on desktop first.

Luckily, there are many different ways in which you can check out what your site looks like when viewed from a mobile device, and this time around, we will list them all. Some of these methods will be universal for any website platform, but we will also include ways to do this if you own a WordPress-powered site and wish to test out your pages while working on the website itself. Make sure to read on as we show you the following methods to view the mobile version of your website:

View the Mobile Version of Your Website Using Your Browser’s Inspect Element Tool

To view the mobile version of your site, you can simply use the developer tools that come with your browser. The majority of well-known browsers (like Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and others) provide you with the ability to see what your site looks like on mobile and other devices. Of course, this also includes tablets, laptops, etc.

We are going to use Chrome and its Inspect Element tool for our example. However, you should note that aside from a slight difference in the interface, the options for viewing the mobile version of your site will be similar.

To access your browser’s Inspect tool, you simply need to right-click your page and hit Inspect.

This will open a new screen, showing you different page elements. Now, what you need to do is find the Toggle Device Toolbar button (the icon in the shape of a phone/tablet) and click on it.

This will reveal the mobile view of your page, i.e. show your page in a way it would be displayed on mobile and/or other devices. Also, in the top corner of your screen, you will be able to change the dimensions according to the device whose view you want to check.

For example, if you choose iPhone 12 Pro, you will be able to see the accurate view from the iPhone 12 Pro phone, since it will be adjusted to simulate this device’s dimensions.

Similarly, you can view the mobile version of your website on Samsung Galaxy S8+ if you click on the option with the same name:

Make sure to try every available option in the dropdown to ensure your site looks good and responsive on every mobile device, regardless of its model or size.

View the Mobile Version of Your Website Using an Online Emulator Tool

There are many online emulators that can be used to test your website’s responsiveness. They usually work by allowing you to simply insert your page’s URL and then check what said page looks like on a specific mobile device.

We recommend using tools such as Bluetree’s Screenfly screen testing tool or responsivepx, for example. Of course, there are plenty of other similar tools online you can easily find by just searching for them on Google. But for the purposes of this article, we’ve decided to show you how to do this using the Screenfly responsive testing tool.

Once you access Screenfly’s homepage, you can simply type in the page URL in their search bar and then hit the Go button.

Right below, you will see different options you can pick to see what your page looks like on different mobile devices and tablets. This includes iPhone, iPad, Chromebook, some of the popular Samsung Galaxy models, and many more.

For example, here’s what our page looks like when we select Samsung Galaxy S7:

View the Mobile Version of Your Website Using the WordPress Page/Post Preview

If you own a WordPress site and wish to see what it looks like on mobile from the WordPress site itself, you’ll be happy to hear that this is quite easy to do. Namely, WordPress comes with some integrated options that will allow you to see the mobile version of your site as you edit your pages and posts.

First, you need to head to Pages >> All Pages (or Posts >> All Posts) screen and then hit the Edit button below the page/post in question.

Once you’re on your page (or post) edit screen, you will be able to see and use the Preview link (it will be available in the upper right corner of your page). Click on that link and you will see the new dropdown appear with the options to preview what the page will look like on Desktop, Laptop, and Mobile. The preview will show the Desktop page by default, so you should click on Mobile to see what your page will look like on mobile devices.

We recommend that you check out the mobile view of each page (and post) of your site individually. This includes your Homepage, About page, Blog page, and the list goes on. Then, you need to ensure that all page elements (such as menus, links, images, videos, etc.) are properly displayed and that they all look neat and clean. You should also check out whether all your links are working, whether all page text is easy to read, as well as whether all other page elements are still available and visible in general.

Finally, we also advise you to check out what different elements of your page look like on tablet by hitting the Tablet preview.

View the Mobile Version of Your Website Using the WordPress Customizer

Another great way in which you can check out what your pages look like on mobile is through the WordPress Customizer screen. Using this screen is quite practical as it allows you to have an instant live preview of every element during the entire editing process. And of course, you can perform page edits while previewing what it looks like on mobile as well.

To do this, simply access Appearance >> Customize.

You will see that the default Customizer shows you the Desktop preview.

You can easily change this by selecting the mobile icon located in the bottom left corner of the screen:

This will make the entire interface of your page appear narrower, simulating the mobile page size. You have to note, however, that this is just an approximate mobile page simulation, as there are many different phone mobiles with different screen sizes out there.

Once again, don’t forget to check what your mobile menu, images, links, and other elements look like when in mobile view.

Wrapping Things Up

Testing your website’s responsiveness across multiple devices is essential to ensure that it’s both user- and search engine- friendly, and checking out the mobile version of your site is no exception. As you could see from all the methods we presented above, there are many different ways in which you can view the mobile version of your site on desktop. The process itself is as easy as it can get, no matter if you want to check out what your site looks like using the browser’s inspect tool, use one of the available mobile simulator tools, or do this from your WordPress site directly.

Regardless of what method you end up using, just make sure not to rush. Remember to view each page of your site separately and scroll through carefully to check out whether different page elements such as menus and images are working. Above all, see that every element looks clear, presentable, and nothing short of perfect to ensure the best possible browsing experience for your mobile visitors.

Thanks to its user-friendliness, flexibility, and scalability, WordPress can easily power anything from blogs and company websites to eCommerce stores and huge corporation sites. And that’s precisely why many leading brands and companies are using WordPress to power their websites in the first place. That being said, even this powerful CMS can experience occasional problems, happening for one reason or another. One of these issues is the WordPress admin dashboard becoming too slow, making it difficult for users to manage their content and access important settings. Some of the reasons why this problem may occur include using an older PHP version, having an overloaded hosting server or an overwhelmed WordPress database, having too little WordPress memory, using plugins that consume too much processing power, and the list goes on.

Luckily for you, however, the issue of your dashboard loading too slowly can be easily fixed if you are willing to try out a few different strategies – which is exactly what we’ll show you how to do in this article.

Without further ado, here are some of the different methods you can implement in order to take care of your slow admin dashboard and to be able to manage your WordPress site quickly and effortlessly:

Make Sure That You’re Using the Latest PHP Version

While WordPress is built using the PHP programming language, PHP itself is constantly evolving. So, the PHP version used on your WordPress site may not necessarily be the latest one. Also, it’s needless to say that aside from providing more security and stability, the latest PHP version can also come with overall performance enhancements, allowing you to handle more requests per second than the older versions, among other things. So, if you’re using one of the older PHP versions, there is a chance that your admin dashboard may be working slower than you’d expect. Therefore, it might be best that you update to the most recent version to help speed it up.

Of course, before you go ahead and update your PHP version, you should see if there’s a need to do so in the first place by checking out which PHP version you’re using on your site. To do this, you should head to Tools >> Site Health. Once there, in the Status tab, you should see a list of things that you could improve in order to enhance the performance of your WordPress site. If there’s a need to update your PHP, you should see a message that says something like this:

Now, if it turns out that you need to update your version of PHP, then we highly suggest that you perform a backup of your WordPress site first. You can either back up your WordPress database manually or create a backup using a plugin like UpdraftPlus. This will help ensure that you have the option to switch back to the previous website version and prevent any potential data loss in case something goes wrong after the update.

Aside from performing a database backup, you should also make sure that you update your plugins and themes as well so as to avoid having any compatibility issues later.

Now, while most hosting providers will allow you to update your PHP version, you should know that different providers also offer different ways to do this. We recommend that you check out the page that contains links to hosting-specific tutorials and find the hosting you are using to learn how you can update your PHP version. Also, in case you can’t find your hosting service on the list, contact your specific provider for more info.

Increase the Limit of Your WordPress Memory

In some cases, if your PHP memory limit is too low, this can cause some of the key site processes to run slower than usual – and this can include the performance of your WordPress admin dashboard as well. This is especially the case with big-scale websites that have multiple processes running at once.

Therefore, to solve this issue, you can try increasing the standard PHP memory limit (of 32 MB) by accessing and editing your wp-config.php file. First, you need to access your file using the word processor software, like Microsoft Word or Notepad, for example). Then, add the following code into the file:

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘your memory limit number’);

The “your memory limit number” within the code stands for the memory limit you want to use to increase your PHP memory limit (like 128 or 256, for example).

Once you save your file, make sure to upload the edited wp-config.php file using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), like FileZilla. For more information on how to use FTP, we suggest that you check out our article on the same subject.

With all this being said, there are some hosting providers that may not allow you to increase the PHP memory limit on your own. If this is true for your hosting provider, make sure to contact them and ask them to do this in your stead.

Find the Plugins that May Be Slowing Your Site Down

While using too many plugins may cause your website to work slower than you’d like it to, the number of plugins itself is not necessarily the issue. However, if you have plugins that are resource-intensive and therefore put too much strain on your WordPress system and its processes, then you might want to consider weeding them out. But first, you need to figure out the plugins that may be the culprit. This can be easily done using the free plugin called Query Monitor. The plugin itself puts a very little impact on the page loading time as well as memory usage, and it will allow you to find out which plugins may cause your admin dashboard to be slow.

After installing the plugin, you simply need to click on the Query Monitor settings and find Queries >> Queries by Component. If there are any plugins that may be slowing your site down, you will be able to find them in this tab.

Then, if possible, you should consider disabling and/or deleting those plugins and find an alternative that will be less resource-intensive for your WordPress site.

Try Limiting the WordPress Heartbeat API

The WordPress Heartbeat API allows your server and browser to communicate (for example, helping with auto-saves while you’re creating posts or pages). If it sends too many requests at once, the CPU usage can increase, and in turn, this can significantly lower the speed of your WordPress admin. Therefore, we suggest that you try limiting the frequency of the Heartbeat API and its requests with the help of a plugin.

We suggest installing the Heartbeat Control plugin by WP Rocket for this task. Having over 100,000 active installations, this plugin is certainly a popular and great choice for quickly managing the frequency of your WordPress heartbeat API. You can limit or completely stop the Heartbeat API activity. Alternatively, you can add rules for certain locations only (like disabling the API on your admin dashboard or page/post editor only).

After installing and activating the Heartbeat Control plugin, you should access Settings >> Heartbeat Control and then use the “General settings” tab to either modify or disable the API from the specific area of your site.

If you choose the Modify Heartbeat option, you can simply move the slider and choose your preferred frequency at which the API will run requests (in seconds).

Keep in mind, however, that disabling this API altogether may result in some unintentional content losses (due to a lack of auto-save). So, we suggest that you try modifying the frequency of the API first, and disable it completely only if this doesn’t prove to be fruitful for you.

Optimize Your WordPress Database from Time to Time

Every website database stores all website information (including content, theme and plugin information, and plenty of other settings and data). Hence, over time, your database can accumulate some additional, but unnecessary data stored on your site that may negatively impact the speed of your WordPress admin panel. This includes spam comments (or trashed/unapproved comments), unwanted post revisions, pingbacks and drawbacks, expired transients, etc. Therefore, it’s recommended that you optimize your WordPress database from time to time in order to minimize this amount of data and help boost the speed of your admin dashboard.

You can either optimize your database manually or use a plugin (like WP-Optimize, for example). Either way, we suggest that you check out our article on how to optimize your WordPress database as we cover the use of both of these methods in full detail. Of course, just make sure to back up your database before making any changes first.

Limit the Amount of Content Displayed in the WordPress Admin

Another thing you can do to boost the speed of the slow-loading WordPress admin dashboard is to limit the amount of content displayed in your WordPress admin. To do this, you should click on the Screen Options (located in the top right corner of your admin area) and put a limit to how much content WordPress will load for every page.

This may require you to use the “Next page” link more frequently, but given that this can help speed up your WordPress admin dashboard, it may be well worth it in the end.

Upgrade Your Hosting

Last but not least, sometimes the issues of a slow-loading WordPress admin may come from having bad WordPress hosting. Or, it might not necessarily be a bad hosting service, but rather that your site has outgrown it and needs a change. So, we suggest that you consider upgrading to a hosting plan that fits your requirements better compared to the one you’re currently using. Also, make sure that the hosting provider you choose puts an accent on having solid website speed and optimal performance overall. Some of our recommendations when it comes to WordPress hosting services include Bluehost and SiteGround, to name a few.

Wrapping Things Up

Every now and then, the WordPress admin panel can load too slowly, making it difficult for you to effectively use and run your website. That being said, this issue can be easily solved if you opt for using some (if not all) of the above-suggested methods. So, consider updating your PHP version, boosting your PHP memory limit, and optimizing your WordPress database, among other strategies. And if all else fails, consider switching to a better and stronger hosting plan to ensure optimal site speed and performance. By doing so, you will certainly be able to manage your WordPress site in a much more efficient manner.

Caching is an incredibly common practice of storing information in a way that assures fast retrieval when needed. You can use caching plugins for WordPress to improve your website’s performance. When someone visits your website, their browser will cache your website’s contents. If you use a content delivery network, you’ll use caching without even knowing it. Your website, its pages, and its content get cached all the time and by many different entities.

That includes search engines, most notably – Google. If you’re not sure what Google cache is and how it works, or why you should care about it at all, don’t worry – we’ll try to tell you everything you need to know about Google cache in this article.

We’ll cover:

What Is Google Cache?

Google cache is the popular search engine’s practice to save a version of the pages on your website to memory. The process of caching is fairly simple – Google’s crawlers will visit your website to index it. That’s a usual part of the workings of search engines, and it’s something you should want to happen, as it enables the website to appear in search engine results.

While these crawlers are at work indexing your pages, they also take snapshots of whatever they see. It’s these copies that serve as the cached versions of your website’s pages. People can see them when your website comes up in search engine results. They only need to access the menu by pressing the three vertical dots that appear next to search results and clicking on the “cached” button in the lower righthand corner.

Doing so will bring up the cached page, along with the information about the date and time when the cache was created. Anyone viewing the page will have the option to view its full version, but also a text-only version and the source code for the page. The cached pages might differ from the live pages on your website for many reasons, including the most obvious – you’ll change your website over time. This is one of the reasons why cached pages aren’t always an accurate representation of a page.

How Is Google Cache Useful to Your Website?

The main utility of Google cache is that it provides a backup of your page in case something happens to it and users can’t reach it. Thanks to Google cache, when this happens visitors can find the cached version of the page and find whatever information it contained at the time it was cached.

There are a couple of added benefits to your website’s pages being cached by Google. Because Google tells when a page was last cached and we know that caching happens when your website is being indexed, you can see how often Google crawls your website. That could serve as a signal of how valuable a source Google thinks your website is. At the very least, it will tell you the last time Google crawled the page.

Google cache can also tell you a bit about what your competitors might be doing. By comparing older and existing versions of their pages, you might see specific steps in optimizations they took, and copy them if they were successful. So even though Google caching doesn’t directly improve your SEO, you can still use it for those purposes.

The great thing about Google cache is that there aren’t any significant downsides to it. Since you’re not in charge of caching the pages, it doesn’t take up any of your time or resources. There aren’t any additional security concerns arising from them, either. The only problem that might come about with Google cache is that the cached version of the website doesn’t match the live version, so if your page is unavailable people will see an inaccurate version of it.

How to View Google Cache?

There are two ways you can go about viewing Google’s cache of a page on your or any other website. The first method requires you to find the page on a Google search results page. When you do, you can click on the symbol next to the result. If the symbol in question is three vertical dots, clicking on it will bring up the “about this result” card.

At the time of writing, the “about this results” option is still in its beta testing phase. But if it is available for the site you’re interested in, all you have to do is look to the lower righthand corner for the “cached” button. Pressing it will bring up the cached version of the page.

As we mentioned, the “about this result” card isn’t available for all results. If you don’t see the three dots, you’ll likely see a small downward-pointing arrow next to the result. Clicking on it will bring up a button that says “cached.”

That’s the button you need to click to reach the cached version of the page.

If you already know the address of the page whose cached version you want to see, you can save yourself a Google search and take a shortcut. In your browser’s address bar, simply type “cache:” followed by the web address you want to see, and you’ll access the version of the website as cached by Google.

How to Clear Google Cached Pages

When Google’s crawler indexes your website and creates the versions of its pages for caching, those versions will stay up until Google’s crawler revisits your website. If you made changes to the pages and you want the cached version to reflect those changes, you can try telling Google to recrawl your website.

If you want to outright remove Google’s cache of any page, you can do so using Google’s Removals or Remove Outdated Content tool. You should make sure that you read up on the tools first, as they have different use cases. Also, don’t expect for the cache to be removed forever – the best you can hope for with this tool is a temporary removal of the cached page. When Google’s crawler revisits your website and indexes the page again, it will cache it again.

So is there a way to stop Google from caching a page altogether? There is. Just as you can use the “noindex” tag in your robots.txt file to prevent the crawler from indexing pages, you can use the “noarchive” tag, in the same way, to stop it from archiving – i.e. caching – any page.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Google cache is a useful way to access copies of your website’s pages without all the fuss of actually making them. It can also be useful for your website’s users, as they can always access the cached versions of your website, even if it’s temporarily unavailable.

Still, Google cache isn’t perfect. You have no control over the cached information – you can access it just like any other person on the web, and you can’t edit it. You can, however, remove out-of-date cached versions of pages, or prevent Google from caching any page altogether.