Some Ways To Speed Your WordPress Website
WordPress is a great platform. One fault that it suffers from, however, is it can be quite slow.
Without taking the right protections, you could end up with a sluggish site.
That’s not only a bother for repeat visitors but will cause you to lose subscribers and customers.
In this quick post, I’ll cover all of the best ways that I’ve found to regularly speed up WordPress.
Why WordPress Site Speed Matters
When somebody lands on your site for the first time, you only have a few seconds to capture their attention to convince them to hang around.
Get ready to lose sleep at night: permitting to a report by the Microsoft Bing search team, a 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and a reduced clicks by 4.3%.
If your site takes too lengthy to load, most people are gone, lost before you even had a chance.
Not only that, but Google now includes site speed in it’s ranking algorithm. That means that your site’s speed effects SEO, so if your site is slow, you’re now losing visitors from irritation and reduced rankings in search engines. Yikes.
Let’s fix that.
How To Speed Up WordPress
As a side note, these are not ordered by position or any criteria, I’ve just collected everything I’ve learned around how to speed up WordPress page loads and listed them all here.
I promise that using even a few will help speed up your site.
1. Choose a good host
When opening out, a shared host might seem like a bargain (“Unlimited page views!”). It comes at another cost: incredibly relaxed site speed and regular down time during high traffic periods.
If you plan on publishing popular stuff, you’re killing yourself by running your WordPress site on shared hosting.
The strain of your site going down after getting a big feature is enough to create a few early gray hairs: don’t be a victim, invest in correct hosting.
The only WordPress host I continually recommend is:
✓ WP Engine managed WordPress hosting
Note: Above is my personal referral link which provides a small discount (and a small commission to me) if you use it. I only recommend products I personally use and companies I support.
My sites are permanently amazingly fast, never have downtime when I get huge mentions (like when I was included on the Discovery Channel website), and the back-end is very easy to use.
Last but not least, their client support is top notch, which is a must when it comes to hosting. Take it from someone who’s educated that the hard way. The control is friendly, patient, and well-versed on the ins and outs of WordPress. They’ll be your safety net for any problem that may arise.
Head on over to their homepage for WordPress users and check out their offerings. You’ll be glad you did.
2. Start with a solid framework/theme
You strength be shocked to here this, but the Twenty Fifteen “framework” (aka the default WP theme) is lightweight and quite speedy.
That’s because they save the “guts” simple; compare that to distended frameworks which have tons of features that you will never use, slowing your site to a crawl.
From my knowledge, the fastest loading premium framework is definitely the Thesis Theme Framework. It betters the basic WordPress themes by being far easier to customize.
It’s an extremely solid framework that won’t slow you down with additional plugins or custom edits. Make the changes correct from the theme and avoid bloat, hoorah!
3. Use an effective caching plugin
WordPress plugins are clearly quite useful, but some of the best fall under the caching category, as they drastically recover page loads time, and best of all, all of them on WordPress.org are free and easy to use.
By far my favored, bar none, is W3 Total Cache, I wouldn’t recommend or use any additional caching plugin, it has all of the features you need and is really easy to install and use.
Simply install and activate, and what your page load quicker as elements are cached.
4. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
All of your chosen big blogs are making use of this, and if you are into online promoting using WordPress (as I’m sure many of my readers are) you won’t be shocked to here that some of your favorite blogs like Copyblogger are building use of CDN’s.
Basically, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all your static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as likely by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.
I personally use the Max CDN Content Delivery Network on my WordPress sites, as I’ve set up that they have the most reasonable prices and their dashboard is very simple to use (and comes with video tutorials for setting it up, takes only a few minutes).
There is a plugin called Free-CDN that talents to do the same, although I haven’t tested it.
5. Optimize images (automatically)
Yahoo! takes an image optimizer called Smush.it that will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing excellence.
However, if you are like me, responsibility this to every image would be beyond a pain, and incredibly time overriding.
Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this development to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. No cause not to install this one.
6. Optimize your homepage to load quickly
This isn’t one thing but actually a few easy things that you can do to ensure that your homepage loads fast, which probably is the most important part of your site because people will be landing there the greatest often.
Things that you can do include:
· Show extracts instead of full posts
· Decrease the number of posts on the page (I like showing between 5-7)
· Remove excessive sharing widgets from the home page (include them only in posts)
· Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need
· Keep in minimal! Readers are here for content, not 8,000 widgets on the homepage
Overall, a fresh and focused homepage design will help your page not only look good, but load faster as well.
7. Optimize your WordPress database
I’m surely getting a lot of use out of the word “optimize” in this post!
This can be done the very tedious, extremly boring manual style, or…
You can just use the WP-Optimize plugin, which I run on all of my sites.
This plugin lets you do objective one simple task: optimize the your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead.
I would similarly recommend the WP-DB Manager plugin, which can schedule dates for database optimization.
8. Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content
Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft.” It occurs when additional sites direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your server load progressively high.
This can add up as additional and additional people “scrape” your posts or your site (and especially images) become more popular, as must do if you create tradition images for your site on a regular basis.
Place this code in your root .htaccess file:
disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?sparringmind.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/sparringmind [NC] RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
You’ll notice I comprised my feed (from FeedBurner), you’ll need to change it with your feed’s name, otherwise your images won’t appear correctly there.
9. Add an expires header to static resources
An Finishes header is a way to specify a time far enough in the future so that the clients (browsers) don’t have to re-fetch any static content (such as css file, javascript, images etc).
This way can cut your load time suggestively for your regular users.
You essential to copy and paste the following code in your root .htaccess file:
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
The above numbers are set for a month (in seconds), you can change them as you request.
10. Adjust Gravatar images
You’ll warning on this site that the default Gravatar image is set to… well, nothing.
This is not an aesthetic choice, I did it because it improves page loads by simply having nothing where there would generally be a goofy looking Gravatar logo or some other nonsense.
Some blogs go as far to disable them throughout the site, and for everybody.
You can do either, just recognize that it will at least profit your site speed if you set the default image (found in “Discussion”, under the settings tab in the WordPress dashboard) to a blank space rather than a default image.
11. Add LazyLoad to your images
LazyLoad is the method of having only only the images above the fold load (i.e. only the images noticeable in the visitor’s browser window), then, when person who reads scrolls down, the other images begin to load, just before they come into view.
This will not only speed you page loads, it can too save bandwidth by loading less data for users who don’t scroll all the way down on your pages.
To do this automatically, install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin.
12. Control the amount of post revisions stored
I protected this post to draft about 8 times.
WordPress, left to its own devices, would store each single one of these drafts, indefinitely.
Now, when this post is done and published, why would I want all of those drafts stored?
That’s why I use the Revision Control plugin to make sure I keep post reviews to a minimum, set it to 2 or 3 so you have something to fall back on in case you make a mistake, but not too high that you disorder your backend with unnecessary amounts of drafted posts.
13. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks
By default, WordPress interacts by other blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.
Every time another blog references you, it notifies your site, which in turn updates data on the post. Turning this off will not terminate the backlinks to your site, just the situation that makes a lot of work for your site.
For additional detail, read this explanation of WordPress Pingbacks, Trackbacks and Linkbacks.
14. Replace PHP with static HTML, when necessary
This one is a little bit progressive, but can drastically cut down your load time if you are desperate to include page load speeds, so I included it.
I’d be doing this great post injustice if I didn’t link to it for this subject, as it taught me how to easily do this me, in a few minutes.
So go there and checkered it out, it wrote it out in plainer terms than I ever could!
15. Use CloudFlare
This is like to the section above on using CDN’s, but I’ve become so fond of CloudFlare since I discussed it in my best web analytics post that I’ve definite to include it separately here.
To put it bluntly, CloudFlare, along with the W3 Total Cache plugin debated above, are a really potent blend (they integrate with each other) that will greatly progress not only the speed, but the safety of your site.
Both are free!
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