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WordPress is a great CMS (Content Management System). Sometimes though, if the proper precautions are not taken into account or if not used in the most optimized way, you could ultimately end up with a slow loading site. For repeat visitors, that could be a major turn off – and by that fact alone, could cause you to lose subscribers and customers. Also slow loading sites, in Google’s eyes, do receive a negative ranking factor.
This article could go on for pages, but the point will be to cover the top dozen ways that have been discovered to visibly tune up and speed up WordPress.
Speed Is Important in several ways
When a visitor opens your site for the 1st time, there is really only a few seconds to capture their attention and convince them to continue navigating the site.
Microsoft’s Bing conducted a survey regarding this. The report found that a “two second” extra delay in page loading and response diminished visitor satisfaction by 4%, with as estimated lost revenue per visitor of 4.3%, and a inhibited page clicks by about 5%.
If your site just takes “too long” to load, most people will just click off or back to the rest of their search results; before your website even had a chance with them.
It is worth repeating that Google now includes site speed as a significant factor in its ranking algorithms. Therefore a websites’ speed has an effect on SEO. So a slow site is reducing your business in two major ways. If you have a WordPress site, how can we fix it?
How can you tune-up WordPress?
The following tips are not listed in order of speed or importance. I guarantee that using even a few will help speed up your site.
A. Choose 4GoodHosting to make sure you are on a fast underutilized server
When just getting your feet wet, a shared host with overloaded servers might seem like a bargain. It comes at another cost: painfully slow site speed and all too frequent down time..
Periodic stress of having your site frequently slowing or going down is enough to create a some more gray hairs. Don’t be a victim, rather invest in invest in proper, yet still economical, hosting.
B. Start with a solid framework/theme
The Twenty Fifteen theme { the default WordPress theme } is lightweight and quite speedy framework.. They keep the programming efficient & simple; compare that to some random bloated themes, which usually have lots of features that you will never use, but also slowing your site to a crawl.
C. Automatic image compression
Yahoo! Produced an image optimizer called “Smush”. It automatically and drastically reduces the file size of an image; without reducing quality.
Fortunately somebody coverted that into called WP-SmushIt which will process you images automatically – as you are upload them. This one should come standard with WordPress. There is no side-effect to installing this this plugin.
D. Install an effective caching plugin
WP-plugins, some of the best, fall under the caching category – as they drastically improve page loads times. All of them on WordPress.org are free & easy to use.
But our favorite, bar no others so far, is W3 Total Cache; it has all of the features you’ll need – and is extremely easy to install & use.
Simply install & activate, *and watch your page load faster*, as elements are cached.
E. Add LazyLoad to your images
LazyLoad is only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window are downloaded. Subsequently when reader scrolls down, the other images are then fetched; just before they scroll into view.
This will not only increase the speed of your page loads, it will also save bandwidth through loading less data for those who don’t scroll all the way down page.
To enable LazyLoad, install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin.
F. Optimize your homepage to load quickly
Your homepage is the most important part of your site, because people will be loading that page the most often.
Various things that you can do include:
· Reduce the number of posts on the page, such has showing between 5-7
· Showing excerpts instead of full posts
· Showing excerpts instead of full posts using the <p>read_more</p> tag.