INTRODUCTION

Let’s Speed Things Up

People like their websites fast. You know this. You experience this
yourself. If a web page takes more than a second or two to load, you’re
annoyed, or worse, you’re leaving. It’s the same for visitors to your site
and potential customers.

A fast website is crucial to helping your business grow.

WordPress sites are cost-effective, versatile, and powerful.

But sometimes they’re a bit slow.

We Can Help, By Sharing

Our Experience
At Kinsta we run a pretty big WordPress site, it serves millions of visits
a month, with helpful posts being published just about every day of
the week. And, we host more than 100,000 websites for more than
25,500 happy customers. We’ve been living and breathing WordPress
for more than 10 years.

In this ebook, we share our top 10 tips and actions for site speed.

After you’ve learned these, you’ll be on your way significantly improving

your site speed. After that, we can continue to help with more than
40 free tips and actions you can do on top of these with our white paper
(more on that later).

Introduction 02
 CONTENTS

06 Chapter 01
Cache Anything You Can

11 Chapter 02
CDNs Are Essential for Speed

14 Chapter 03
Use a Fast Theme

19 Chapter 04
Use Reliable and Reputable Plugins

23 Chapter 05
Use a Data Center Close To Your Visitors

25 Chapter 06
Optimize Your Images

29 Chapter 07
Reduce HTTP Requests

34 Chapter 08
Minify and Optimize Static Files

37 Chapter 09
Use Premium DNS

40 Chapter 10
Enable GZIP Compression

42 Conclusion
Wrapping Up and Going Deeper

Contents 03
 LET’S GET STARTED

First, do a speed test

If you haven’t already, it’s important to run a speed test and see
how your site measures up now. You need a baseline. Do one now,
and don’t worry if the score is good or bad.

• C heck out our article on how to run a speed test. It has detailed
information about the best ways to prepare and links to more than
a dozen test providers (free and paid).
• If you’re in more of a hurry we recommend Pingdom or Google
PageSpeed Insights. You can run a test in just a few minutes.

Make some screenshots of the results. Also, copy the data into
a document.

Now you have your starting point.

Let’s get started 04

Your Overarching Goal: Reduce
There are four technical terms you may or may not be familiar with when
it comes to site speed. We will help you reduce all four of these:

 atency - The amount of time it takes for data to move from

L
1. one place to another (for example a web server to your browser).

 TTP Requests - Any time a web browser asks a

H
2. server for data (text, images, CSS/Javascript for page styling).
We have a dedicated section (7) below.

 etwork Hops - The data you request from a server has to

N
3. travel across the internet (a computer network) and move
across multiple devices (like routers), each device the data
passes through is a hop.

 TFP - Time to first byte, a measure of the time it takes for

T
4. the first HTTP Request to go to the server and for the first byte
to arrive back at the browser.

We have more in-depth articles about network latency and TTFB

if you’d like to understand more about this. The main thing you need
to know is you want these numbers as low as possible.

Ok. Let’s get to those 10 tips and actions.

Skip Ahead With a Performance Audit

Get some help speeding up your site, before you start!
Get a free performance audit from our team of experts to find
which bottlenecks are slowing down your site.

Request a Free Performance Audit

Let’s get started 05
CHAPTER 01

Cache
Anything
You Can

Cache Anything You Can 06

Caching is one of the most important and easiest ways to speed up
WordPress! Here’s how it works.

What / Why / How Caching?

Every web page visited on your WordPress site has to be rendered
dynamically on the fly. Requests have to be sent to the server, it has
to process them (including database queries), and then send the data
to your web browser. All that for one page.

This can take a long time if you have a long or complicated web page.
Then if you have lots of users doing these on-the-fly page renders all
at once, your server can really get bogged down.

That’s where caching comes in to save the day! Caching instructs

the server to store some files to disk or RAM. Especially the stuff that
doesn’t change often. This reduces the number of HTTP requests
(more on that later). Now your server is doing less work and can render
pages faster, for more visitors.

Learn how Kinsta helped

development agency MOOBON
speed up their TTFB from 4.89
seconds to 0.043 seconds.

Cache Anything You Can 07

Types of Caching
1. Caching at the Server-Level
2. Caching With a WordPress Plugin
3. Edge Caching

1. Caching at the Server-Level

Caching at the server-level is the best method. This can either be super
hard or super easy.

Super hard is if you have to do it yourself. It requires you to have full

access to your web server and the knowledge to operate and configure
your server. If you are reading this ebook you likely don’t have these
server skills. And that’s fine! You should either use a WordPress Plugin
(#2) or rely on your web host.

Super easy, if you have a good web host and they handle caching for you.

2. Caching With a WordPress Plugin

If your hosting provider doesn’t provide cache, we suggest one of these
WordPress plugins:

• W
 P Rocket (premium)
• C
 ache Enabler (free)
• W
 3 Total Cache (free)

You can also check out some additional options in our in-depth post
on WordPress caching plugins.

Cache Anything You Can 08

3. Edge Caching
Edge Caching is a newer caching technology. It stores your
often-updated HTML text content as close as possible to your visitors
“on the edge”, or on a global network of servers. This requires
advanced functionality that dynamically updates the HTML content
and replicates it all over the world anytime it’s changed.

You’re not going to build something like this yourself. Instead, you
should use a service like Cloudflare with their extensive network of
Edge Servers. Ideally, your web host will provide this service
integrated into their servers due to the difficulty in setting it up.

Twitter/Simon Harper. (View on Twitter.)

Cache Anything You Can 09

Take Action
• A sk your web host what caching options they offer, or log into your
control panel or dashboard to learn about and configure caching.
The tools and interfaces vary widely.
• Install and configure a WordPress caching plugin: WP Rocket
(premium), Cache Enabler (free), or W3 Total Cache (free).
• A sk or select a web host that also provides Edge Caching.
• G o more in-depth with caching with our Site Speed White Paper:
sections 1.1 and 2.10.

Cache Anything You Can 10

CHAPTER 02

CDNs
Are Essential
for Speed

CDNs Are Essential for Speed 11

CDN is short for Content Delivery Network. A CDN is a global network
of servers designed to quickly deliver files that don’t require database
queries such as images, CSS, Javascript, and videos. Each server on
the CDN is called a PoP (point of presence). The more PoPs a CDN has,
the better. It can serve more people in more places, faster.

A CDN doesn’t serve as or replace your main WordPress web host.

Instead, it complements it by loading larger static files faster than your
web host is able to. The CDN is faster because the PoP is located closer
to the visitor, and it’s not running database queries.

Kinsta includes a CDN powered by Cloudflare

with all of their plans as a bonus. You don’t
have to do anything or set anything up. Just hit
“yes” and watch the speed times improve.

Joseph Heather,
Owner Cyntergi | Read Case Study

CDNs Are Essential for Speed 12

In most cases your website resides in one data center. Let’s pretend it’s
in London, UK. Imagine how long it takes a JPEG to load for someone
visiting your site in Tokyo, Japan. That’s a long way to travel! But with
a CDN your WordPress site detects the location of the visitor and loads
that JPEG image from a PoP right inside Japan. Way faster.

Setting Up A CDN
We recommend using either Cloudflare or Sucuri. These are typically
billed on a monthly basis or by data usage. Most providers will have
a calculator to estimate your costs. Cloudflare has a free plan as well.

Many web hosts include CDN or offer it as an add-on, which is easier

than configuring it yourself. Be sure to check with your web host.

• L
 earn how to set up a Cloudflare CDN
• L
 earn how to set up a Sucuri CDN

Take Action
• A sk your web host if they provide a CDN and/or how to enable it.
• Install and configure a Cloudflare or Sucuri CDN yourself.
• L earn more details about CDNs, including speed test results, proxy vs.
reverse proxy, and more in our Site Speed White Paper: Section 1.2.

CDNs Are Essential for Speed 13

CHAPTER 03

Use a Fast
Theme

Use a Fast Theme 14

Everybody loves a brand new WordPress theme, but be careful before
you go out and grab the one with all the new shiny features. There are
a lot of differences when it comes to free vs. paid themes.

Each element or feature you see in a theme has some impact on the
overall speed of your website. And unfortunately, with thousands of
themes out in the wild, there are both good ones and bad ones.

Your WordPress has a big impact on site speed and performance.

Choose the right one from the start.

So how are you supposed to know which one to choose?

We recommend going with one of the following two options:

• A
 fast lightweight WordPress theme that is built with only the features
you need, nothing more.
• A
 more feature-rich WordPress theme, that allows disabling features
that aren’t in use.

Things like fonts, icons, sliders, galleries, video, and parallax scripts,
etc. can make your site beautiful, and slow. You probably aren’t going
to use everything. With a good theme, you should be able to turn off
and on each feature. A good theme will also optimize or preload its
CSS and fonts, learn more about how this works here.

Search for should start or switch to a WordPress theme that is either

lightweight from the beginning or gives you these options. We have
plenty of recommendations below in the “Take Action” section.

Use a Fast Theme 15

Warning About Page Builders
Page builders are very popular in the WordPress community. They run
on top of your theme and allow you to design your pages with a visual
editor, without needing to know how to code at all!

Here are a few things to keep in mind when using a page builder plugin:

• S
 ome page builders might increase load time on your site. This is
because they have to load additional CSS and JS to make things work
for you without code. That is how the magic happens! We always
recommend speed testing your WordPress site before and after
installing a page builder.
• Y
 ou’re making a big commitment. Each page you build locks you
with that page builder for a long time. Make sure you pick one that
is reputable, regularly updated, and has everything you need for the
long haul (like a support team).
• S
 ome page builders don’t work with some themes. Be sure to
research or test on a staging environment.
• R
 emember, WordPress comes with the Block Editor (also known by
its beta name “Gutenberg”). In the last few years, it’s become very
powerful and easy to use. It won’t slow your site down and in many
cases, you can use it instead of a paid page builder. Compatible
themes can even be edited with the Block Editor using the Full Site
Editing feature.

We recommend GeneratePress with GenerateBlocks installed,

Elementor, or Beaver Builder page builders. For the most part, they
are developed with performance in mind and only add a little bit of
overhead. There are also others that are very well made, here is our full
list of recommendations.

Use a Fast Theme 16

Take Action
• C
 onsider our top recommended themes; GeneratePress, Astra,
or OceanWP. They are more like theme frameworks allowing lots
of visual styles. Each theme has free and premium options.
• C
 heck out our extensive list of theme recommendations.
• L
 earn more about the theme’s impact on site speed in our Site
Speed White Paper section 2.4.
• S
 kip to the Conclusion section below to learn about using Application
Performance Monitoring Tool to figure out if your current WordPress
theme is slowing down your site.

Use a Fast Theme 17

CHAPTER 04

Use Reliable
and Reputable
Plugins

Use Reliable and Reputable Plugins 18

You may have heard that having lots of plugins on your WordPress site
slows it down. This is only partially true, or it’s an oversimplification.

You could have 30 or 40 plugins running on your site with no problem…

if those plugins are high quality plugins. The more you have on your site,
the higher the risk of slowing down your site if those plugins are not
written with site speed in mind.

It’s not too hard to write your own plugin. And you’ve probably heard
that people are using generative AI, like ChatGPT, to write entire
plugins, and they work!

There are many risks with writing your own plugins or using sketchy
plugins:

• Y
 ou have to maintain the code yourself and keep it updated as
standards change. These change often. If you are busy, it’s better to
leave maintaining plugins to the huge community of expert developers
who focus on this within the WordPress community.
• A
 poorly written plugin can introduce a lot of HTTP requests or non-
optimized static assets that slow down your site (more on that later).
• T
 he barrier to making a WordPress plugin is fairly low, so many
non-expert developers try building them. A plugin may work,
at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s fast, secure, or reliable
for long-term use.

We recommend only using plugins that are reputable and reliable.

There are more than 60,000 free plugins listed on the WordPress.org
plugin directory, plus unknown thousands of premium-only plugins
made by large and small plugin developer shops. How do you figure
out which ones are good? We’ll show you in the section below.

Use Reliable and Reputable Plugins 19

Take Action
• A void nulled plugins. A nulled plugin is an illegal copy of a paid/
premium plugin that you don’t have to pay for. Whoever made this
is not being honest with you, and this is not a good starting point.
Often a plugin is nulled so it can sneak in malicious code.
Always avoid them. Learn more about nulled plugins here.
• R ead the reviews on the WordPress Plugin Directory before installing
the plugin. Look at how many stars, how many positive reviews,
and how often they answer people asking for support
(see screenshot below).
• R ead reviews sites like G2, or just search around the web
and compare multiple reviews. There will be plenty of reviews for
any reputable plugin because millions of people use them. If you
can’t find reviews, that could be a sign the plugin you’re considering
isn’t reputable.
• Strongly consider avoiding the plugins we ban from our Kinsta
hosting platform. We do this reluctantly and with good reason. Unless
you are confident or have an overwhelming need to use these,
we’d recommend avoiding them. Most WordPress hosts have a list
of banned plugins.
• C heck out our huge list of recommended plugins.

Use Reliable and Reputable Plugins 20

 Ratings and support stats on WordPress Plugin Directory

WordPress Plugins and Your Database

One big issue with WordPress plugins is the uninstall process. Whenever
you install a WordPress plugin or theme, it stores the data in the
database. The problem is that when you delete a plugin using one of
the standard methods, it typically leaves behind tables and rows in your
database. Over time this can add up to a lot of data and even begin to
slow your site down.

Use Reliable and Reputable Plugins 21

Why do plugin developers do this?

They want to retain settings for the user. If you delete a

1. WordPress plugin and decide to try it again later, all your
settings and data will still be there. While this is super
convenient, it’s not the most efficient way.

They don’t care about performance. Some developers might

2. argue that leaving tables behind doesn’t impact performance.
But imagine a site over the course of ten years, having used
dozens or hundreds of plugins, that have generated possibly
thousands of rows or tables.

They made a mistake. The WordPress plugin handbook even

3. says that “less experienced developers sometimes make
the mistake of using the deactivation hook for this purpose.”

The good news? There are ways to clean up and get rid of
a plugin properly.

Take Action
• L
 earn how to uninstall a WordPress plugin (the proper way).
• L
 earn how to manually clean up database tables left behind.
• T
 here is more information about database clean up in our
White Paper, see sections 1.4 and 1.4.4.

Use Reliable and Reputable Plugins 22

CHAPTER 05

Use a Data
Center
Close To
Your Visitors

Use a Data Center Close To Your Visitors 23

Locating your website in a data center close to your visitors has a huge
impact on making your site faster. It will lower latency, TTFB (time to
first byte), and network hops.

Use one of the methods listed below to find out where the majority of
your visits or customers are coming from, geographically speaking.

If your site is new and you don’t have any data on users, place the site
in a data center closest to where the majority of your hoped-for target
market is located.

Learn how Kinsta helped consultancy Enventys Partners

speed up client sites by 50% by locating them closer to
their audiences.

Take Action
• D o a ping test to quickly evaluate which region you are closest to.
This is useful if you are in the region where the majority of your
customers are. Try GCPPing.com to measure Google Cloud Platform,
CloudPing for Amazon Web Services, or AzureSpeed Test for
Microsoft Azure.
• If you run an ecommerce site, analyze the geographic location of
your customers, likely via street address.
• A nalyze the geographic location of your site visitors in
Google Analytics.
• A sk your web host where your website is located, geographically,
and see if migrating to another data center is possible, if that would
speed your site up.

Use a Data Center Close To Your Visitors 24

CHAPTER 06

Optimize
Your
Images

Optimize Your Images 25

According to the HTTP Archive more than 30% of a web page’s size
is made up of images. This means, if you can optimize your images,
you can make your site pages much faster.

Don’t think of this as optional; every site should be doing this! Especially
when there are many free and easy ways to do it.

Large images slow down your web pages, and in many cases the
visitor can’t see, visually, the difference between a large and properly
optimized image.

Image optimization is the process of making images as small as possible

while keeping the visual quality high.

One of the most basic ways to optimize images is to compress images

before uploading them to WordPress. Usually, this can be done using
the ‘Save for web’ or ‘Export’ tools in apps like Adobe Photoshop or
Affinity Photo. Or you can use an online tool like TinyPNG or Smoosh.
The downside here is this is a manual process. There are ways to
automate it with WordPress plugin (see the “Take Action” section below).

Optimize Your Images 26

File Formats
It’s important to choose the right combination of file format and
compression type. This allows you to reduce your image size by as
much as 5 times while keeping the quality high. You’ll have to
experiment with each image or file format to see what works best.
File formats and compression are complicated topics. Read our in-depth
article to learn more, or here is a quick overview of image formats
you’ll want to use (or not use).

 NG – Use these for screenshots, product shots, simple images,

P
1. and illustrations. A PNG of a photograph will be larger than a JPEG.

 PEG – Use these for photographs and images with

J
2. lots of colors.

 IF - These are now considered outdated, use PNG instead

G
3. for higher quality and lower file size.

 nimated-GIF - Even though we use them for fun memes,

A
4. this is not the best format anymore. If you are doing animated
screenshots or any sort of animation loop, convert your
animated-GIF to MP4 video. There are several sites that make
this easy like Convertio or the Adobe Express free online
GIF to MP4 converter.

In our testing, we’ve seen page load

times decrease by 73% with automatic image
optimization.

Jenna Recktenwald,
DevOps Team Lead at Kinsta

Optimize Your Images 27

It’s important to choose the right combination of file
format and learn how our Automatic Image Optimization
speeds your site up with just a click.

Take Action
• Install a WordPress image compression plugin to automate the image
optimization process. These plugins optimized the images externally
(not on your server) to keep your site running fast. Be sure to use
a service like this that offers this external/off-server option.
• Imagify
• W P Smush
• O ptimole
• EWWW Image Optimizer
• S hortPixel
• While you’re developing a long-term automatic solution, be sure
any images uploaded in the meantime are optimized by using
TinyPNG or Smoosh.

Optimize Your Images 28

CHAPTER 07

Reduce
HTTP
Requests

Reduce HTTP Requests 29

Any time a web browser has to load HTML text, an image, CSS,
Javascript, or another file or bit of data it makes an HTTP Request to
your server (WordPress site). You want to have as few of these as
possible for a fast site.

HTTP requests can be reduced, combined, eliminated, or only loaded

if needed. Below are the easiest steps you can take to get started.

Run A HTTP Requests Test

First go to gtmextrix.com and run a free test. Click on the Waterfall tab.
Here you’ll be able to see when and how fast each item loaded on your
page. You can sort by HTML, CSS, Fonts, images, and more.

Now you can start to see what is slowing your site down and work
to improve your site.

A GTmetrix test showing HTTP requests

Reduce HTTP Requests 30

Limit Font HTTP Requests
Custom fonts are great for making your site look cool and modern.
However, you need to be careful with how you use them because each
custom font type that you use adds another HTTP request.

If you’re going to use custom fonts, make sure to use as few as possible.
Do you really need a different font for your post title and your post
body? Do you really need all five font weights? Just call for the two you
use. Or see if you can use a system font stack.

The same holds true for icon fonts such as Font Awesome and IcoMoon.
Icon fonts can be useful, but you probably don’t need to load multiple
icon font libraries. It’s better to pick just one icon font library and stick
with that. And don’t forget WordPress has a library called Dash Icons
that might suffice.

Eliminate Third Party HTTP Requests

Visitors to your site are also making requests to third party sites.
Consider ways to reduce these. For example you could have a clickable
thumbnail to a YouTube video instead of loading the video player
on your page.

Some common examples of third-party HTTP requests are:

• E
 mbedded YouTube videos – the playable video player embedded on
your page makes plenty of HTTP requests to YouTube’s servers.
• G
 oogle Analytics – the tracking script is hosted on Google’s servers,
but visitors’ browsers still need to download the tracking code.
• T
 hird-party ad services – you’ll see tons of third-party requests
related to ads if you run them on your site.

Reduce HTTP Requests 31

Conditionally Load Script HTTP
Requests
Some themes and plugins load scripts on every page that are only
needed on specific pages.

For example, Contact Form 7 plugin, you probably only need this plugin
on a couple of pages (e.g. your “Contact Us” page). However, Contact
Form 7 loads its scripts on every single page on your site.

It is possible to conditionally load plugins only where they’re needed.

If you’re not a developer, you can use plugins like Asset CleanUp
or Perfmatters. Or, depending on your needs, you can hire a developer
to do this type of optimization.

Be Mindful of Plugins HTTP Request Impact

We talked about how plugins can
slow down your site in section 6
above. We wanted to make sure When switching to Kinsta,
that you understand that adding we immediately noticed
unnecessary HTTP requests can faster time to first byte
be one of the biggest causes of a times and much faster
slow page. load times in general. We
estimate that our average
On the gtmextrix.com test you did TTFB times were reduced
at the beginning of this chapter, by 30-40% after making
look again at the Waterfall tab. the switch to Kinsta, which
Search the page (Ctrl + F on
had a similarly positive
Windows, CMD + F on a Mac) for
effect on all of our other
the word “plugins”. You can find
performance metrics.
every HTTP Request on the page
from a plugin and evaluate if there Devesh Sharma,
is an issue. Founder | designbombs.com
Reduce HTTP Requests 32
One type of plugin known for being bad for HTTP
requests are social media sharing plugins. Read this article
to see more than a dozen of these plugins compared

Take Action
• L
 earn even more about HTTP requests and ways to eliminate them
in our in-depth article.
• Ask your web developer or team how they can reduce HTTP requests
in your site’s theme and/or plugins.

Reduce HTTP Requests 33

CHAPTER 08

Minify and
Optimize
Static
Assets

Minify and Optimize Static Assets 34

A WordPress site is loading a lot of files. Not only images and HTML,
but also JavaScript and CSS. If you can reduce the size and optimize
these files you’ll have less latency and fewer HTTP requests.

Use Minification on HTML, CSS,

and JavaScript
Reduce the amount of data the browser has to download by minifying
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources. Minification is the process of
removing unnecessary characters like comments and whitespace from
the source code. It sounds nit-picky and odd, but it works.

These unnecessary characters are useful during development, but

they’re useless for the browser to render on the live page. You can use
a WordPress plugin to do this.

Here is an example of non-minified HTML code.

Here is an example of minified HTML code.

Minify and Optimize Static Assets 35

Just eliminating all the white space and line breaks really adds up,
and removing them can increase your site speed.

We recommend the free Autoptimize plugin or WP Rocket to easily

minify your files.

Use Early Hints

If you’ve already read our Site Speed Cheat Sheet, you may remember
we suggested using Early Hints. Early Hints is a newer web standard.
You can use it to provide the user’s web browser instructions (hints) on
files to preload in order to speed up the page load time.
Learn more about Early Hints in this article.

Take Action
• T
 here are several more optimizations you can make with how your
site loads assets. They are quite a bit more involved than minification.
We recommend doing the minification step (above) and then
configuring the other nine settings from this ebook first. Then once
those are set up, refer to our White Paper sections 3.1, 3.2, 3.3,
and 3.4 to go more in depth.

Minify and Optimize Static Assets 36

CHAPTER 09

Use
Premium
DNS

Use Premium DNS 37

Premium DNS
DNS, short for Domain Name System, is very important and often
overlooked. DNS is the main traffic controller on the internet, connecting
domain names to actual web servers or websites.

Most people use the free In our tests, we found Amazon

DNS provided by their domain Route 53 to be 33% faster
registrar, and never think about than Namecheap.
it. These free DNS services can
be slow or have lots of downtime. View Tests
Premium DNS can also offer
better security and availability,
especially when you’re under
a DDoS (Distributed Denial of
Service) attack.

• F
 ree DNS is included with domain registrars like GoDaddy,
Namecheap, or Hover.
• P
 remium DNS providers you can optionally use include Amazon
Route 53, Cloudflare, or DNS Made Easy.

Use Premium DNS 38

Does Downtime Matter That Much
with DNS Providers?
The answer to this is really yes and no. DNS is typically cached with
ISPs using the time to live value (TTL) on the DNS record. Therefore
if a DNS provider goes down for 10 minutes, you’re most likely not going
to notice anything. Downtime does matter a lot though if the provider
consistently has longer and frequent outages, or if your ISP and DNS
records both are using really low TTL values.

Take Action
• R
 un a DNS speed test.
• C
 ompare premium DNS providers to see which one is right for you.
• R
 ead this detailed article on DNS to determine your
organization’s needs.

Use Premium DNS 39

CHAPTER 10

Enable
GZIP
Compression

Enable GZIP Compression 40

GZIP is a file format and software application used for file compression
and decompression. GZIP compression can be enabled server-side to
reduce the size of your HTML, stylesheets, and JavaScript files.

Enabling GZIP can significantly reduce the amount of time to download

the page, reduce data used by the visitor, and improve the time to first
render your pages. This is pretty standard now across most hosting
providers. So much so, you may see warnings and errors in speed testing
tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix without it.

Take Action
• R
 un a website speed test (see Introduction section above),
or look at the test you already ran and see what it says about
GZIP Compression.
• A
 sk your web host if you have GZIP Compression enabled,
or ask them to set it up
• L
 earn more about GZIP Compression in our detailed article.
• G
 o more in depth with GZIP Compression and see sample code
snippets in our Site Speed White Paper section 1.3.

Enable GZIP Compression 41

CONCLUSION

Keep
Striving
for Speed

Conclusion 42
You can further explore what’s slowing your site down with Application
Performance Monitoring (APM). An APM tool captures time-stamped
information about your site’s PHP performance. You can find
bottlenecks and fix them.

Here are two APM services we recommend:

• New Relic
• App Dynamics

Learn more about APM and how it works in our detailed article.

Note: Kinsta-hosted sites include a free powerful APM that you can
easily access from your MyKinsta dashboard. MyKinsta also features
simple New Relic integration.

With Kinsta we can now review and analyze each

site’s metrics at a glance across the board.
We’re really glad to have gained this functionality.

Mr. Shinji Mochizuki,

Director of the Infrastructure Division | Yappli | Inc |
Read Full Case Study

Conclusion 43
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Conclusion 44
 Explore more resources
on enhancing WordPress site
speed and performance:
kinsta.com/topic/website-speed

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Conclusion 45