We all know that Wordpress is one of the best platforms that is out there today, utilised by thousands of Businesses and Bloggers alike. Unfortunately, nothing in this world is perfect – one of the weaknesses WordPress suffers from is that it can at times, be quite slow and sluggish. Without taking the right precautions to prevent this, you may cause hassle for repeat visitors or even lose out on subscribers and customers. In this quick post, we will cover 8 Easy Ways To Speed Up Your WordPress Site. Grab a cuppa and read on!
1. Choose A Good Host
When you first start out with your website, a shared hosting may seem like an absolute bargain. However, a shared hosting also comes at another cost: incredibly slow site speed and frequent down time during high traffic periods. If you plan on having an engaging website that attracts a high volume of traffic, you definitely do not want your WordPress site to run on shared hosting.
The stress of your site going down can sometimes be overwhelming, so always choose to invest in proper hosting that has a top notch support team that can assist you should any problems crop up on your site.
2. Start Off With A Solid Theme/Framework
You may be surprised to hear this, but the default WordPress theme is actually quite lightweight and quite speedy. This is because they keep the “guts” simple; compared that to bloated frameworks which have tons of features that you will never use, slowing your site to a crawl. We suggest sticking with WordPress’ core, and getting bespoke tweaks done by your Web Developer for the fastest and smoothest running site.
3. Use An Effective Caching Plugin
WordPress cache plugins are built to drastically improve page loads time and best of all, all of the ones on WordPress.org are free and easy to use. The most popular plugin is definitely W3 Total Cache and we highly recommend using this caching plugin as it has all of the features you need and is extremely easy to install and use. All you have to do is simply install, activate, and watch your page magically load faster as your elements are cached.
[tweetthis]Using an effective #caching #plugin is key when trying to speed up your #WordPress site[/tweetthis]
4. Optimise Imagery
One thing that can seriously slow your site down is huge image files (that can sometimes be up to 2mb in size – imagine that, multiplied over 100 images on your site – it is insanity!). You may be thinking, but optimising all my images is going to take me hours and hours of my precious time. Well, thankfully, you can download a great (and free) plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. You have to install this one!
5. Add LazyLoad To Imagery
Since we’re on the topic of Imagery, let’s talk about LazyLoad. LazyLoad is the process of having only images above the fold load, followed by other images loading as the viewer scrolls down on your website. This will not only speed up your page loading time, but can also save bandwidth by loading less data for users who don’t scroll all the way down your page. Keen? Then install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin!
[tweetthis]The only time it is acceptable to be lazy is when you are using #lazyload for your #images [/tweetthis]
6. Optimise Your Homepage
Since the homepage is the page most people will be landing on, it is advised to optimise it to its fullest potential. Things you can to to achieve this is to reduce the number of posts that show on the page, choose to show excerpts of posts instead of full length posts, and to keep widgets to a minimal. Always remember to remove inactive plugins and widgets as well, as they slow down your site even when inactive.
7. Optimise Your WordPress Database
To optimise your WordPress database, all you have to do is use the WP-Optimize plugin. This plugin lets you do just one simple task: optimise the your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead. We also recommend WP-DB Manager plugin, a great tool which can schedule dates for your database optimisation. Simple!
8. Use a CDN
Finally, you can always make use of a CDN – Content Delivery Network. Most big websites and bloggers use this, as it takes all the static files you have on your website (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers that are as close to them as possible. A surefire way of speeding your website up for customers and readers.