Everyone knows that the internet is all about speed. Nobody wants to wait 30 seconds for a website to load. A slow website will lead to less users coming to your site and will also increase your bounce rate. Additionally page load speed is part of Google’s algorithm. A faster website is one way that you can rank higher on Google organic search. There are quite few easy ways to speed up your WordPress site. With some easy steps a few simple (and lightweight) plugins you can have your site loading faster in just a few minutes.
The first step is to run Google’s page speed test tool to gather some data. This tool will give your site a score out of 100 regarding your website’s page speed. Once you have run this test take note of some recommendations that the results offer. Your next step to a faster website taking the following steps:
- Delete all of your pending comments that are not legitimate and your all of your spam comments. While having just a few comments pending will not hurt your site significantly, a few thousand pending and spam comments can slow down your site immensely.
- Optimize your images. Avoid resizing images within WordPress. Before uploading your images to WordPress make sure they are already the proper size that you want them to appear as. Some programs such as Photoshop also allow you to images as web ready. This formats the image at a lower quality and web friendly format resulting in a smaller file size and decrease in loading time
- Install WP Super Cache. This simple and lightweight plugin is easy to install and implement. It will cache pages on your website so they are able to render quicker when loading. Simply install the plugin, activate it, and turn caching on within the plugin settings. There are some even more advanced settings that can further decrease page load speed but do not work on all websites. I recommend testing new settings one by one in case something does not work correctly.
By Jeffrey Pucko