Are you looking for ways to speed up your WordPress site? NitroPack may be the answer you’re looking for.
The speed of your website is extremely important, especially in 2021 and beyond, now that Google has made website speed one of the ranking factors in their search engine result algorithms. If you care at all about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), then you MUST care about the speed of your website.
You’re probably aware that images and (too many) web fonts can slow down your site.
There are tons of free/paid plugins that will help you optimize your images (in the hopes to reduce their file size and speed up the time it takes to load them), but none of them are perfect. I already discussed how to save images for the Web here if you need more information.
But your site loading speed can only improve so much by optimizing your images.
Many other factors contribute to the speed of a website.
At the end of the day, WordPress is a powerful Content Management System (CMS), but along with its power comes LOTS of lines of code, and that code will slow down your site. (The previous statement is particularly true if you’re running tons of plugins and/or a bloated theme.)
How can you help speed up a WordPress website?
It always helps to only load small images, limit yourself to one or two web font families, and only install the minimum number of plugins you absolutely need. But doing those things will NOT guarantee that you get “green lights” on Google’s new speed criteria.
Then comes a myriad of extra plugins you can install that will help you do one or more of the following tasks:
- Strip data from images and compress them (reducing their file size)
- Unload specific scripts from certain pages/posts (preventing data from loading, therefore speeding things up)
- Preload fonts (when using web fonts that are loaded by default on people’s devices)
- Minify code (strip away all unnecessary characters that make the code readable by humans so the file size is smaller)
- Cache pages (speeds uploading time by loading a previously compiled page of code)
- Connect to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) so people can access your website data from a server closer to them, therefore speeding up the load time
- And lots more
But there are thousands of those plugins.
Most of them claim they are “easy to use” and promise “instant results” but I’ve tested them and can tell you otherwise. (Plus they can increase your server overhead, which slows down your site, ironically.)
I spent a fair chunk of 2020/2021 optimizing websites for speed, so I got to play with many of those “easy” plugins. Their complexity increases exponentially each time you add another plugin because each optimization plugin settings may then cause issues with your existing optimization plugins.
So, I’ll just say that most optimization plugins out there are promising miracles that they don’t deliver on. Those optimization plugins are NOT that easy to use unless you understand code.
I believe writers are better off writing instead of messing around with websites, so I’d love to save you weeks’ worth of work and research and point you to a new way of optimizing your site for speed (if that’s something you want to do). If you’re a non-fiction writer who blogs, you should care about your website speed as your ability to get organic traffic from Google IS impacted if your site is slow.
The plugin I recommend is truly EASY to set up.
There are no settings to mess around with (unless you decide to tweak with advanced settings).
I recommend you use NitroPack to speed up your WordPress site.
You can test it out for yourself using my affiliate link: https://nitropack.io/#WRMBWD
They have a free plan and several paid plans. Which one you need will depend on your traffic.
How NitroPack works:
1- Sign up for an account (you can start with their free plan): My affiliate link: https://nitropack.io/#WRMBWD
2- Download the free NitroPack plugin and add it to your website. (Go to “plugins->Add new” then type NitroPack and you’ll see it there.)
3- On your website, sign in to your Nitro account (created during Step 1) and then “turn it on” by enabling some of the settings. You’ll find step-by-step instructions with a video and screenshots on NitroPack’s official tutorial page.
4- That’s pretty much it. If you’d like to tweak things some more, they have advanced settings you can mess around with, but I find that the default settings are pretty amazing right out of the box.
Why NitroPack is different
NitroPack is the all-in-one speed optimization solution that I recommend for WordPress sites. No need for more optimization plugins. With just one plugin, you can greatly reduce load times, improve PageSpeed scores, and boost real-user metrics like the Core Web Vitals.
Unlike other plugins, NitroPack is a cloud-based service, which stands between your host server and your website’s visitors. As a result, only minimal overhead is added to your server, since all heavy optimizations are performed by NitroPack’s infrastructure.
Still not sure why you should give NitroPack a try?
I really think taking them up on their free trial is the way to go, but here are a few technical reasons why. NitroPack doesn’t work like the other optimization plugins. They offer the following features:
- Advanced caching mechanism
- Fast and easy setup (less than 5 minutes, NO technical skills required)
- Complete image optimization stack
- Built-in global CDN
- Code minification and compression
- Critical CSS, DNS prefetching, preloading, etc.
- Expert support team
- Free trial (no credit card required) and a 30-day money-back guarantee
Test out NitroPack for yourself: https://nitropack.io/#WRMBWD
This article includes affiliate links.
