Speed

WordPress is a great platform. One weakness that it suffers from, however, is it can be quite slow. Without taking the right precautions, you could end up with a sluggish site. That’s not only a hassle for repeat visitors but will cause you to lose subscribers and customers. In this quick guide, I’ll cover all of the best ways that I’ve found to consistently speed up WordPress. Why WordPress Site Speed Matters When a person 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: according 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 reduced clicks by 4.3%. If your site takes too long 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 impatience 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 importance or any criteria, I’ve just gathered everything I’ve learned about how to speed up WordPress page loads and listed them all here. I guarantee that using even a few will help speed up your site. 1. Choose a good host Turn up the speed with the fastest web hosting. With fall in the air and the new year just around the corner, it’s a great time to start thinking about new hosting for a new website you’re building. High-speed hosting services not only improve user experience but they also: Have a positive impact on search engine ranking (Google admitted it) Increase the amount of time on site because users are comfortable browsing more Is a huge factor in your overall website speed Helps with resource delivery. With Ovation Hall, you are assured of high-speed SSD servers. 2. Start with a solid framework/theme You might be surprised to hear this, but the Twenty Nineteen theme (aka the default WP theme) is lightweight and quite speedy. That’s because they keep the “guts” simple; compare that to bloated frameworks which have tons of features that you will never use, slowing your site to a crawl. From my experience, the fastest loading premium framework is definitely the Focus Theme Framework, especially the new Focus skin (I’m using a completely bare-bones version on this site, but I personally love simplicity!). It surpasses the basic WordPress themes by being far easier to customize. It’s an incredibly solid framework that won’t slow you down with excess plugins or custom edits. Make the changes right from the theme and avoid bloat, hoorah! 3. Use an effective caching plugin WordPress plugins are obviously quite useful, but some of the best falls under the caching category, as they drastically improve page loads time, and best of all, all of them on WordPress.org are free and easy to use. By far my favorite, bar none, is W3 Total Cache, I wouldn’t recommend or use any other caching plugin, it has all of the features you need and is extremely easy to install and use. Simply install and activate, and what your page load faster as elements are cached. 4. Use a content delivery network (CDN) All of your favorite big blogs are making use of this, and if you are into online marketing using WordPress (as I’m sure many of my readers are) you won’t be surprised to hear that some of your favorite blogs like Copyblogger are making use of CDN’s. Essentially, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all the static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript, and images, etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible. I personally use the StackPath Content Delivery Network on my WordPress sites, as I’ve found 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 promises to do the same, although I haven’t tested it. 5. Optimize images (automatically) Yahoo! has an image optimizer called Smush.it that will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality. However, if you are like me, doing this to every image would be beyond a pain, and incredibly time-consuming. Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. No reason not to install this one. If you prefer to manage this on your desktop, I really like Squash for Mac users. 6. Optimize your homepage to load quickly This isn’t one thing but really a few easy things that you can do to ensure that your homepage loads quickly, which probably is the most important part of your site because people will be landing there the most often. Things that you can do include: Show excerpts instead of full posts Reduce the number of posts on the page (I like showing between 5-7) Remove unnecessary 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 clean and focused homepage design will help your page not only look good but load quicker as well. 7. Optimize your WordPress database I’m certainly getting a lot of use out of the word “optimize” in this post! This can be done the very tedious, extremely boring manual fashion, or… You can simply use the WP-Optimize plugin, which I run on all of my sites. This plugin lets you do just one simple task: optimize your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead. I would also recommend the WP-DB Manager plugin, which can schedule dates for database optimization.