6 Simple Tips On How To Make WordPress Faster

| August 3, 2010 | Comments (4)

It was just a week before I was going through all of my blogs and noticed considerable reduction in the loading speed. That kinda worried me as it not only increases my bounce rate it also affects my search rankings to an extent. So I decided to take the situation seriously and started to take some action. I must say it was a great move as it helped me to learn from the mistakes I have made on my blogs so far without my own knowledge. So here are some tips you might not want to miss if you are running a wordpress blog.

1. Check Your Plugins:

First thing I did when I wanted to speed up my blog was I checked all the plugins I have installed so far. I really found it strange because I have installed over 25 plugins on my blog and I barely use very few of them and in fact only around 6 of them were really proved to be helpful. So I just decided to deactivate every other plugins which I thought won’t be of any help to me and deleted them as well.

To my surprise I can already observe a great deal of difference with my blog loading speed. It happens often that when we come across a plugin and get carried away by its features and want to try it on our blog. One thing is certain that only a few of those plugins really prove to be useful.

Just make sure you are not too much obsessed about plugins and add ons with wordpress. Every plugin you install and activate ads a bit of extra code in to your site and that makes your server to spend a bit more time processing it and give out the desired page for the user. So more plugins means more loading time for your blog. Stick to the minimum!

2. Use A Simple Theme:

To be frank I have always loved blogs and sites which had the most simple layout. Reason is they are simple to use also loads way faster than sites which looks attractive with lots of stylish design, flash etc. You should know all that user looks for in a site is the information he needs and you should focus on how quickly and also effectively you can present the information to your user. Simple layout is easily understood by the majority. Also simple layouts rank high in search engines. I always make sure my layouts are as simple and as down to earth as possible.

3. Use GIF and Jpeg Image formats:

Whenever you are using any images in your post or pages make sure you are using gif and jpeg format images and eliminate the usage of png. As these formats normally tend to load faster, also has minimum file size over png.

4. Use excerpts:

I noticed you can save a lot of loading time when you make your home page to display excerpts. And of course you can do it through plugins and post excerpts is the one I use in this blog. Alternatively you can also use more tags and that’s entirely up to you.

5. W3 Total Cache:

Now at the beginning of this article I recommended not to use many plugins, but I am really suggesting some plugins in this post as they are the real essential ones in my opinion and one such plugin is W3 Total Cache. This dramatically improves your site loading speed and saves you a lot of bandwidth when optimized rightly. To know more about this plugin just visit the plugin page here

6. Get A Hosting Who Doesn’t Oversell:

Apart from the changes you can make with your blog files, you should also know that its essential to have your site on a sever that is fast and reliable. Just do check for reviews and comments from people who have already used the hosting company before hosting your site with any server. If you are on a shared server make sure your hoster is not overselling.

Category: webmaster tips

About admin: runs and maintains seoyourblog.com, he has written many articles concerning various topics including blogging, SEO and wordpress SEO. Feel free to subscribe to our RSS Feeds to receive the latest post updates. View author profile.

  • http://techishere.com/ Nick

    If I may add: Replace unnecessary php code with html. I mean stuff like: bloginfo(‘charset’); or bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’); . These are from the header.php file and they are run on every single impression. And there are many like them all around the theme. They could be replaced with html code.

    • seoguy

      That’s a really interesting tip, as you mentioned they should reduce the load on servers considerably.

      Thanks for the tip :)

  • http://www.webdirective.com texas internet marketing

    thanks for the great tip. Im gonna keep this in mind from now on. many thanks for sharing this helpful article, especially for newbies like me.

  • http://www.linkbuildingservices.com/ harly

    you have write some wonderful tips.Ensuring our WordPress blog is at its optimum speed is crucial as it will affect the very first impression of our blog visitors as site loading is the very first thing they will have to face before they can enjoy our blog post.If the loading time is terribly slow, it will definitely piss our readers off and most important thing if they are your ‘first-time’ site visitors. They will probably never come back or cannot find your blog whenever if they want to especially if they come from the search engines.Thanks for these tips.