Improve your Site Speed Score

Give your visitors the best experience possible by ensuring that your site loads quickly and reliably.

Jetpack tools such as Site Accelerator and Jetpack Boost can help. In some cases, you may want to make additional improvements. This guide offers some suggestions on how to improve your site’s speed and performance.

Measure your site speed

With Jetpack Boost, see a numeric score and letter grade that indicates your website speed score as measured by Google.

An example screenshot shows an overall letter grade score, with a mobile and desktop score out of 100.

Screenshot showing Site Speed Score in Jetpack Boost

See historical performance scores when you upgrade Jetpack Boost or subscribe to the Jetpack Complete plan. These are shown as a graph in the Jetpack Boost Settings page:

Screenshot of a graph showing performance speed in Jetpack Boost. — Historical Performance Site Speed Score

In WordPress.com Dashboard, the Jetpack Activity Log keeps a history of your site’s speed scores. Here you can monitor speed fluctuations and correlate them with specific site changes, such as enabling plugins or anything else, for informed optimization decisions.

Next steps

In some cases, you may find that you want to continue to optimize the speed of your site or that Jetpack Boost doesn’t make the improvement you are looking for. What follows are some additional suggestions.

Note: Optimizing your site’s speed and performance isn’t something we can assist with per our Scope of Support. The suggestions here are provided as-is.

While the numbers in Jetpack Boost give you some guidance, you can get more information using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. This is the same tool used by Jetpack Boost to measure your site, but by running it directly on your site, you get more insight into why your site has been given a specific score. Additionally, Google provides recommendations for how to address the issues it encounters.

Common improvements

Depending on the site’s goal, some recommendations may suit certain situations better. As you work through the recommendations, you can test periodically to see if the site speed improves.

Additionally, as you update your site and add plugins and content, you may find that your site speed changes. Over time, strategies that worked in the past may not have the same effect they once did. We recommend testing your site’s speed regularly and making adjustments as needed.

Optimize CSS loading

Your website’s appearance is controlled by CSS, which tells the web browser how to display your site’s content. Because of the amount of content on modern websites, CSS files tend to be quite large. Additionally, plugins may add their own CSS. This means that a large amount of information has to be parsed before your content is displayed.

This can be sped up by optimizing your CSS loading so that the code needed to display the immediately visible content is given to the browser first. This helps speed up the initial page load. This is referred to as Critical CSS. While this is difficult to do manually, Jetpack Boost does this for you.

You can also do this automatically with a a paid Jetpack Boost plan.

Enable Jetpack Site Accelerator

Jetpack Site Accelerator is a content delivery network (CDN) that can help speed up your site by serving optimized images and cached static assets (CSS and JavaScript) from high-speed and dedicated data centers. It will automatically resize images and serve them in the best format for your site, which can reduce your site’s load time. Additionally, it will load certain core WordPress files from these data centers.

Optimize images

Images can be a major source of slow site speeds. Large and unoptimized images are a frequent cause of this.

In addition to techniques mentioned elsewhere in this guide (using a CDN), you might consider optimizing images before adding them to your site. For starters, it helps to choose the proper image format for your situation. For example, a PNG is good if you need transparency, but if you are uploading a photo, it isn’t a good choice. Google has an excellent guide for choosing the right image format.

You should also size images appropriately for your content area. For example, if your theme serves images at a maximum width of 1,000 pixels wide, you can resize your images to be 1,000 pixels wide before uploading them. Additionally, you can optimize your images using your image editing program or a tool like TinyPNG or JPEGmini. There are also many third-party plugins for image optimization.

Jetpack Boost includes an Image Performance Guide that can help identify images that may need additional optimization.

Add a caching system to your site

When someone visits your website, each page they want to see is built on the spot by your website’s server. This process involves asking your website’s database for the information needed to put the page together. Normally, this isn’t a problem, but if a lot of people are visiting your site at the same time, it can slow things down because the server has to do a lot of work all at once.

Caching is like remembering the finished page so that the next time someone wants to see it, the website can show it right away without having to build it again from scratch. This means your website can handle more visitors without slowing down, making everyone’s experience smoother and faster.

If you’re using Jetpack Boost, you can easily speed up your site by turning on a feature called Page Cache. It does the remembering for you, so pages load faster for people who visit your site again. If you’re using the regular Jetpack plugin, you can get a similar speed boost either by adding Jetpack Boost for more features, including caching, or by using a separate plugin designed just for caching, like WP Super Cache. WP Super Cache is made by Automattic, the same company behind Jetpack, and it’s a great way to make your site quick. If you go this route, there’s a guide on how to set it up in our documentation.

And if your website is on WordPress.com, you don’t need to worry about this at all—caching is built in, so your site is fast without any extra work from you.

Reduce unnecessary JavaScript

When you test your site with Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you may see mention of reducing JavaScript. Some common suggestions are “Reduce JavaScript execution time” and “Reduce unused JavaScript”. To help with this, you can try turning on the “Defer Non-Essential JavaScript” setting in Jetpack Boost.

If you are still having this issue, you may want to remove JavaScript that you aren’t using. For example, if your site has Google Analytics and you are never using the Analytics data, it may not make sense to collect it, and removing the script from your page may increase your site speed.

Unused third-party scripts can also increase your site’s load time. It is worth checking to see if there are unused scripts that can be removed. If you use Google Tag Manager, you should ensure you need all the scripts added to your site.

Turn off unneeded Jetpack features

If you have the Jetpack plugin installed, you can review the Modules page to make sure that you’re only using the Jetpack services that the site needs.

Remove unused plugins

The more plugins you have installed on your site, the more resources your server needs to respond to requests. You can potentially improve your site speed score by removing plugins that you are no longer using. Depending on the plugins installed, this will remove unused JavaScript and CSS assets that may be loading on your site.

Consider a theme change

Your site’s theme may be contributing to slow load times. The quality of WordPress themes varies widely, and some are more performant than others. It can be worth testing your page speed with different themes. You might find that your theme is the bottleneck, so changing the theme would be an excellent next step, or contact the theme author for ideas on how to optimize its performance.

Add a content delivery network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help increase your site’s speed by caching requests and serving pages from data centers close to your visitors. The shorter distance data has to travel, the faster the page load time. You can enable CDN in Jetpack as shown here. Also, a popular solution with a generous free plan is Cloudflare. You can read about how to configure it with Jetpack here. Cloudflare also helps to block malicious requests, which can further reduce server load.

If your site hosts video content, you might want to consider loading this content from a cloud-based server. Jetpack VideoPress can automatically load optimized videos from data centers close to your site’s visitors, enhancing your site’s speed.

Offload resource-intensive tasks to cloud servers

At the core of any WordPress installation is a database. Each time a page loads, WordPress queries the database and then displays the page. All of your site’s content is in this database, and depending on the plugins and functionality used on your site, large numbers of queries can slow down your site. Some tasks in WordPress, such as search and plugins that generate related content, are particularly intensive. Jetpack’s Search and Related Posts allow you to offload this work to WordPress.com’s servers.

Reduce server response time

The actual performance of your web server can also affect site speed. If this is the case, you may see an indicator in Google PageSpeed identifying an issue with the Time to First Byte (TTFB) on your web server. If Google PageSpeed indicates that your server is slow, you will want to reach out to your hosting provider. They may be able to offer additional advice or upgrade your account.

If they cannot assist, you may wish to move to a different host. Jetpack has partnerships with a number of trusted hosting providers, and they can help you get your site up and running on their service.

Enhance Visual Stability

Visual stability refers to how consistently and smoothly content appears on your site without unexpected shifts. This is crucial not only for a good user experience but also impacts your site’s performance scores. Stable visuals make your site more enjoyable and accessible, reducing frustration from content moving as users try to interact with it.

To enhance visual stability:

Opt for simple layouts: Complex designs can increase content shifting. A simpler layout is easier to load and more likely to stay in place as the page fully loads.
Use reliable themes: Choose themes known for their solid coding and responsive design. These themes are less likely to cause content shifts when your site is viewed on different devices or screen sizes.
Be mindful with multimedia: When adding images or videos, ensure they’re properly sized for their space. Overly large media files can slow down loading times, contributing to layout shifts. This is where the Image Size Analyzer feature from Jetpack might help.

By focusing on these elements, you can significantly improve the stability of your site, making it a smoother experience for your visitors and potentially boosting your performance scores.