Make your Wordpress blog load faster

Cristian Level X³

1

September 4, 2016, 5:39 pm

5

Make your Wordpress blog load faster

I'm going to share 5 tips and tricks on how to make your Wordpress Blog or Website to load faster and therefore get a better score from Google increasing its ranking potential. As we all already know, website's speed is a ranking factor for Google Search.



My solution is pretty simple and direct, I won't hide between the lines:

1. The Host - cheap hosting is cheap for a reason. Search for hosts that offer a built-in Wordpress caching as well as a CDN.
   
2. The Theme - If you don't have the money for a specially built theme, just for you, go with what Wordpress already offers for free. “Thesis" is incredibly fast and light, you can build around it. Don't waste money on a 60 dollars theme that's bigger than an elephant.
   
3. The images - optimize them, don't upload full resolution ones. This one is very important, don't ignore it.
   
4. The homepage - this is where most of your users will end up, make it clean and fast, you don't want them to bounce just because it takes a few second to load every crappy feature in your homepage. So don't show too many posts here, don't include widgets and have "read more" buttons.
   
5. Keep Wordpress up to date. Don't ignore CMS updates
   

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TommyCarey

TommyCarey

Some bigger themes will load pretty slow if not paired up with a decent hosting plan. I've done tests in the past with the same exact theme but on 2 different hosting plans. One of the plans was a shared hosting and the other was on a dedicated server. Each loaded properly and worked just fine, but the shared hosting setup loaded a lot slower since you aren't getting the full potential of the server. I think the dedicated server was at least twice as fast with it's load time than the shared hosting.

Now if you can't afford a dedicated server at $75+ a month then don't worry too much about putting your website on a shared hosting plan. Don't use Godaddy for your shared hosting because it feels like they have 500 websites on each server. Go with namecheap or t35hosting and you'll notice that your shared hosting setup will load much quicker than a crumby setup on Godaddy lol But to see your themes full potential you'll need a bigger and beefier server that can load a page up in milliseconds.

About the images. I've actually had clients make their designers create huge images for everything, like 5000x5000 and it would compress slightly for where it was showing, but it would still slow down the page load timing. After I reduced the image size to fit without compression the page was a bit speedier

Also, the CMS updates. You can set it to auto update and I would highly recommend that since Wordpress will only update if something needs to be optimized or fixed. So it's a good thing to have these updates go through automaticaly

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Cristian

Cristian

I always backed up everything before each CMS update, if you have a custom theme this is essential. I would get a lot of bugs when a major CMS update wad available.
I'm planning to create my own basic theme from 0, I'll learn programming but I will also have a base for any theme functionality I want.

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Lynne

Lynne

Thanks Cristian, I really appreciate these tips as I am going to be building my next website soon, I will check out that thesis theme too since I will be looking for something that is simple and fast for my next venture

My one website is so slow because I have to do loads of work to do on it. I have to remove so many things that are now redundant since I changed me website from being an online store to just being a blog in February.

I am just waiting for my sister to have a little bit of spare time to assist me because she made some changes to my theme and I am not sure what all she did there.. we are going to remove everything that is no longer needed and go for a simple and fast theme.

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vinaya

vinaya

These are great tips. I have half a dozen wordpress site and my readers say that my websites are terribly slow. One of the reasons of slow loading is disk space and bandwith. If you have limited diskspace for a website with too many contents having too many graphics and visual media, yourt website will be slow. If your bandwith is low but you get good traffic your website will also load slow.

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