Speed Up Your WordPress Website Load Time…When a person visits your site for the first time, you have only a few seconds to capture his attention but if your site takes too long to load, most people are gone before reading your articles
WordPress occasionally suffers from slow speed. But the speed of your site is very important as it makes the difference between people reading your content or leaving your site altogether. Here we discuss the a few tips to improve the load times for your site.
- Framework/theme
The theme you have installed in WordPress affects the speed of your site. Twenty Fifteen “framework” which is the default WP theme is very lightweight and quite speedy. However, bloated frameworks, which have tons of features that you will never use, not only slow your site but also produce a crawling error.
- Caching Plugins
Plugins provide most useful add-on features to your WordPress and they are quite useful. In the category of WordPress plugins, there is a category of cache plugins which drastically improve page loads time and the best thing is they are free and easy to use. I would recommend you W3 Total Cache, it has all of the features you need and is easy to install and use.
- CDN (Content delivery network)
CDN is a group of multiple servers on different locations that takes all your static files (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors visit your site by loading them in the browser as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible. You can use the CloudFlare type of free CDN to increase the performance.
- Optimize images automatically
The images on your site are one the most time taking and heavy to load. Especially, if you have some photo intensive website. Try to use the images which are small in size. Fortunately, there is a free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will automatically reduce the size of your images without reducing the quality of the images.
- Optimize your homepage to load quickly
The first page of your site that is your homepage should load quickly. Show excerpts instead of full posts; no. of posts on home page should be between 5-7. Remove unnecessary widgets, inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need. Your homepage should be clean and focused.
- Optimize your database
You can simply use the WP-Optimize plugin or WP-DB Manager plugin, which will simply optimize your database that contains spam, post, revisions, drafts, tables, etc to reduce their overhead. You can also schedule dates for database optimization in these plugins.
- Install the Lazy Load plugin.
The Lazy Load plugin offers a smart solution to image rendering and management. In essence, it only loads images when they are visible to the user to decrease server bandwidth.
9.Check for viruses or exploits in your website.
Malicious scripts are known for messing with site loading speed. Theses scripts can be downloaded in your website when you use any un-official source of plugins and themes. Get rid of them with the Anti-Malware plugin in order to eliminate threats to your server.
- Remove post drafts and revisions.
Please delete unwanted old draft posts as soon as possible using Bulk Delete, a plugin that enables you to delete post batches by status or user.
- Delete and stop spam comments.
If you see your WordPress comment section, you would notice spam comments. Please clear them because they are slowing down your site’s loading capabilities. Delete your comments manually in WordPress, and defend against spam by using Anti-Spam plugin.
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