Speed Up WordPress Using 17 Easy Ways technozam.com/speed-up-wordpress/ Vivekanand Arumanda
January 6, 2018
Speed Up WordPress using these 17 ways, here in this article, I am going to discuss speeding up a WordPress site. No doubt WordPress is a popular platform, and it is assumed that 25% of the blogs and websites are hosted on WordPress. But the only thing to be concerned is site loading time. If you don’t take proper measures to load fastly then, the site becomes sluggish. Every millisecond is gold. If your site takes more than 2 seconds to load then, you will be going to lose your readers for every second that extends to load. Losing a reader is losing your business, and it directly impacts your online presence and income. So, in this very post, I shall be covering all the possible things that affect WordPress site loading time. Why Is Site Speed Important? As I said already, waiting makes your visitor or reader irritated. Let’s assume if someone visit’s your blog for the very first time and if takes 20 seconds to load will he come back again to visit your site? The answer would be a big “No.” Matt Cuts in a conversation said that loading is a critical factor as off now anything beyond 2 seconds is considered as a slow loading site. As of now, site speed is regarded as a ranking factor in Google algorithm. Giants like Facebook and Google trying every possible method to reduce site loading time. Google already launched Google accelerated pages, and Facebook is going to start a plugin called Facebook instant articles. So, please don’t neglect site loading time and try to speed up your WordPress site by following these simple and easy steps.
Handy And Easy Ways To Speed Up WordPress Site 1. Choose A Good Host Most of the vital factors regarding site speed dependent upon the host you use. Choosing a good web host plays an essential and crucial role when it comes to site speed factor. Most of the newbie bloggers don’t like to invest money in a web host and opts for 1/5
shared hosting. Never go for shared hosting, I will discuss pros and cons of shared hosting in my upcoming articles. But for now, please don’t use shared hosting. When I was a newbie, the resources were no less. But as of now, if you research you can find a good web host within your limitations. If you don’t have a good web host, none of these tweaks work efficiently. When choosing a web host remember broadly remember these things. Server response time should be less, it should be secured, it should have enough tech support, and finally, it should be affordable. I am using Cloudways, and I should say it works like a charm. 2. Use A Premium Theme Always buy a theme based on its coding and framework. Premium themes start from $20-$5000 based on your design and customization. The theme should be well coded and lightweight, this helps in loading your site fast. Nerve use nulled themes. If your theme has a lot of bloated code, then it makes your site crawl at a slow pace. I prefer Themeforest and Mythemeshop to purchase premium themes. If you have a real budget, you can go for Genesis framework or Thesis themes. 3. Use a Good Cache Plugin A caching plugin is a must for every WordPress blog. These cache plugins help in reducing site loading time drastically. There are lots of cache plugins available in WordPress respiratory most importantly all these plugins are free. Now, W3TC cache plugin is a very popular cache plugin but if you are on shared hosting never use this particular cache plugin it consumes a lot of resources. No doubt, it has got all the ideal options for efficient caching but not at all recommended for shared hosting. This plugin slows down the site instead of improving site speed. Instead of W3TC use Zen Cache now known as Comet cache. It’s simple, lightweight and efficient. If you have a real budget, you can go for WP Rocket. P.S: If using W3TC, please do configure it correctly. If not, it may show adverse effects on loading factor. 4. Use A Content Delivery Network ( CDN) A content delivery network helps in serving your blog static files like CSS, Javascript, and images from a resource which is near to your visitors and helps in downloading them as fast as they could. Therefore, speeding up your WordPress blog. Most of the reputed blogs in the industry use CDN. CloudFlare, MaxCDN, and KeyCDN are two leading CDN’s in the industry. You can get CloudFlare for free and easy to install. Whereas, MAXCDN needs a subscription. 5. Delete All Unwanted And Unused Themes And Plugins After installing WordPress, you will get some themes along with it. Always remove the themes and plugins which are not in use. Even if you deactivate some plugins, they still render code while loading. So, do remove all the themes except the one you are using. Deleting all unused plugins and themes makes your site secure and fast loading. 6. Optimise Images 2/5
Optimizing image is a vital factor. Most of the newbie bloggers don’t know that images are the real culprits when it comes to site speed. Always use ALT tags for your images, Upload with perfect dimensions with the help of Photoshop or Gimp software. Never resize them with the assistance of CSS. Serving scaled pictures and optimised images give you the best results. Install WP Smush It plugin to reduce the size of image future. If possible, serve images from Sub-domain. Compress images with the help of Tinyjpg. 7. Keep Your Plugins To Minimum Minimising plugins reduce the stress on the server, and it’s resources. One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is the availability of many plugins. But, having many plugins results in slow loading times. Install a plugin only if it essential. Some plugins can serve the purpose instantaneously, I mean some plugins need not be installed all the time for such plugins just install them, use them and uninstall. These are the best practices with plugins. Use P3 Profiler to analyze which plugin is slowing down your site. 8. Optimise Your Homepage Optimize your blog’s homepage to load fast. Never use a lot of widgets and sharing widgets. Be careful with pop up plugins. Keep your homepage simple. Use only necessary widgets and tools. Display only 4-5 posts on the homepage. Use excerpts instead of full post. Always remember, your homepage should be clean your readers are on your blog to read your content but not to see your blog beauty. 9. Optimise Database An optimizing database is a major factor in speeding up your WordPress blog. A bloated database may slow down your site. There are lots of plugins available for this purpose. I use Wp-sweep plugin. Wp-optimise and Db manager plugins come handy to maintain robust WordPress database. 10. Use Autoptimise Plugin Autoptimize is an awesome plugin, best in its category. I have tested few more plugins, but none of them reached Autoptimize quality. This plugin helps in combining CSS and JS files, If you don’t need it can remove Google Fonts etc., this reduces the number of requests, and DNS look up’s. If you want to use this plugin in combination with W3TC, then don’t enable minify option in W3TC. The most attractive feature of Autoptimize plugin is you can exclude CSS and JS files if there is any conflict. For me, it’s an essential plugin. 11. Use Google Font Optimizer Some themes use many Google fonts. Each one of them makes a different request which in turn degrades the site speed. To avoid this use Google Font Optimizer plugin which combines all the fonts into a single request. This particular plugin helps if your theme has many Google fonts. You can analyze your fonts on Google Page Insights. 12. Disable Leeching or Hotlinking Of Images
3/5
Hotlinking is a kind of theft. I have a beautiful image in my post, and that very particular image attracted some other blogger. Now he will directly use my image link on his blog to display the picture. Enabling hotlinking of images will create a lot of stress on the server and bandwidth. Add this simple snippet to your ht access file to disable leeching of hotlinking of your images. 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]
13. Add Expiry Headers To Static Content Static content like pictures, CSS and Js files doesn’t change much. So, if you add expiry headers it will get cached in your browser and when a visitor comes back subsequently the sites loads faster. If you are using W3TC, then there is no need to add this code shown below. ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 30 days" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 30 days" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 30 days" ExpiresByType text/CSS "access plus 1 week" ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 week"
14. Turn Of Post Revisions I have revised this post around 15 times now; WordPress saves all these revisions. When I finally publish my post, there is no need for this revised version of my post. So, turn them off by adding this piece of code to your wp-config file. define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);
15. Flush The Buffer If a visitor lands on your blog, it will take 200 milliseconds to 500 milliseconds for the backend server to fetch the HTML together. In this meantime, your browser remains idle. This flush function helps in carrying the partially read HTML while the backend server is busy in doing its job. Add this flush function in between </head> and <body> in header.php file. </head> <?php flush(); ?> <body>
16. Turn Off Pingbacks And Trackbacks
4/5
WordPress by default communicates with the other blogs which are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks. If some blogs mention about your blog, it notifies your site. Pinging and tracking may take a toll on your server end. So, do turn off pingbacks and trackbacks. This act wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t affect your site backlinks in any way. This post helps you to learn more about pingbacks and trackbacks. 17. Replace Php With HTML When Necessary This particular step is not meant for every user. If you are good at coding and WordPress, move forward if not stay calm and take experts help. Want to read for details about this topic? This article helps you to do so replace PHP with HTML when necessary. Hope this article helps you to speed up your WordPress blog. Happy blogging!!!!
5/5