Fruitfulujah

8 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

Sefa Tsegha

Site Speed

I have compiled in this post, 8 ways to speed up your WordPress site that you can use. Why? Everyone is talking about , speed, speed, speed.

How can I speed up my WordPress site?

That is a good question. By the time you?might have finished reading my 8 ways to speed up your WordPress site, you will start?doing all it takes to get the speed your site needs.

I’ve gathered these tricks through personal application on my sites and those of my clients. Here is my site’s speed test at time of writing this post.

 

Everyone is telling you that your site need to load fast or that would affect you negatively.

Reasons?

  1. Search engines will rank you very low.
  2. You might lose customers who can’t wait for your sluggish site to load fast.
  3. Lastly, you might end up with a bill from your hosting company for unnecessary resources that your site might have consumed.

The list of side effects can go on endlessly.

You can be smart enough to learn these few tricks and apply them to your site for best performance.

I have not listed these tips in order of importance.

 

Here are 8 ways to speed up your WordPress site:

 

Are you ready?

 

1. Get good hosting for WordPress

It’s a futile effort if you are trying to make your car run faster by simply streamlining the body and coating it with fresh paint, when the engine that powers it is bad. That is how good hosting is to WordPress. Your host is the engine of your WordPress site.

You might add all the plugins you can, and use fast loading themes, but if the saver is a drag, then you are wasting your time. You should get a WordPress optimized hosting, that is within your budget, for your site.

If you want good speed for your site, start with a good hosting.

Investigate this, and ask questions in forums about a good WordPress hosting company that meets your need. Some would say “to know a good hosting company, you must try it out for yourself”.

To do that, try buying their monthly plan for a test. If you feel satisfy with their service, then you may go for a longer duration plan. I use and recommend SiteGround (afflink).

2.?Install a WordPress Cache Plugin

Plug-ins like W3 Total Cache, Quick Cache, WP Super Cache, etc. are good and recommended plug-ins that can help give your WordPress site the necessary speed it needs.

W3 Total Cache is recommended by Page.ly, Synthesis, DreamHost, MediaTemple, Go Daddy, Host Gator, etc. When this plugin is properly configured, it can give your site a big boost. It also has provision to add or move your site content to Content Delivery Networks (CDN) like Amazon S3.

If you are a super admin, then you will love this plugin because it supports multisite installation.

3. Optimize your site images

Heavy images can slow down your site load time. It is always good to reduce the weight of the images you use on your site. You can optimize your images with software like Photoshop.

If you like using PNG images like I do, then you might like to try out this online tool TinyPNG. TinyPNG?uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files.

Another plugin that is good for image size reduction is Smush.it . It reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API within WordPress. You can “smush” image files in your media library with this tool.

4.?Activate Jetpack’s Photon

Photon comes with jetpack plugin. Download the plugin at wordpress.org and activate the photon module at the plugin’s setting page. That’s all. It will to the rest.

It takes image load off your host ?and guarantees fast image load time for your readers. Every image on your post or pages are served dynamically from the global WordPress.com cloud.

5.?Install?CloudFlare CDN

CloudFlare combines security and content delivery network (CDN) for every site served through their global network. You can sign up for a free account. It is so easy to set up that you might underestimate the work it does to keep your site safe and load fast.

6.Optimize your WordPress Database

Revision history, drafts, spam comments etc, saved in your database can contribute to site slow speed. It is a good habit to regularly do database housekeeping by deleting these data.

You can use a plugin like WP Clean Up to clean up your database and give your site room to run. With this plugin or something like it, you can optimize your database without getting your hands ‘dirty’ with cPanel.

But if you know what you are doing, you can optimize your database directly using phpMyAdmin software on your host’s cPanel.

7.?Remove unused plugins and themes

If you are not using a particular plugin or theme on your site, you might consider removing it. This can also improve your site performance. There is no need wasting your saver resources on idly plugins or themes.

8. Regular Check your site load time

Regular check up is also a useful tip. If you don’t know that something is wrong with you, you will not seek medical help. So, if you don’t know that something is wrong with your site’s load time, you will not do something about it.

Use Pingdom’s free tool, to check your site’s performance index to know if there is something wrong with your WordPress site load time. Not every customer would tell you that the reason he/she left your site was because it did not load on time.

By the time you find out the reason they leave it will be too late to bring them back.

A stitch in time save nine.

Do you have any useful tips that I can add to?my bag of tricks? What method works for you? Tell me in the comments below.

 

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