Monday, 19 August 2013

Simple Tips On How To Speed Up A Wordpress Website

By Nil Zymus


Is your WordPress blog loading slowly? If so then you may be losing customers each day. Right now website speed is more important than before. Slow sites are not just annoying for the site visitors but also rank poorly in search engines like Google. In extreme cases slow websites get penalized and removed from SERPs completely. Therefore you should take the time to increase the speed of your WordPress website. Listed here are some ideas on how to increase the speed of a WordPress website.

Optimize your database - This is probably the most underestimated way to accelerate a WordPress site. Keeping a large number of spam comments in your website's database slows down its loading speed. However, this doesn't mean that you should remove all the comments. Only delete the ones you do not need. To achieve this, simply click the 'empty spam' button in your WordPress dashboard. Make sure you do this routinely to avoid the build-up of junk comments on your WordPress site.

Compress the graphics - Using too many unoptimized images on a webpage can have a negative impact on performance. Before uploading an image file you should compress it with the help of Photoshop or any other similar application. Almost all popular photo editing programs are capable of compressing a picture without decreasing its quality. Alternatively you can install WP Smush It! on your site. This nifty plugin automatically compresses each image added to a post or page. You can also go to the media library and optimize all the existing images.

Get rid of unnecessary plug-ins - One common mistake that numerous inexperienced WordPress users make is setting up too many needless extensions. Plugins are an easy way to add additional features to WordPress but they could also reduce loading speed. You should just keep the plugins which are necessary for the proper functioning of your website. All others must be un-installed completely. Furthermore, you should not use anything but plug-ins developed by well-known web developers mainly because code written by unskilled individuals is often inefficient.

Install a caching plugin - Usually when someone accesses a webpage, the requested content is obtained from the database and delivered dynamically to the user's browser. As you can imagine, this process takes a lot of time and puts unnecessary load on the database server. A cache plugin stores the frequently accessed webpages on your website locally so that they can be shown to visitors without accessing the database. There are various cache plugins that you can install to improve the performance of your site but W3 Total Cache is the best one.

Choose your theme wisely - Complex and large templates can slow your WordPress site. It is for this reason that you need to choose your template carefully, especially if you'd like to make your blog load faster. Additionally, a simple theme can provide other advantages such as built-in security enhancements and beautiful designs. Also, be sure that the WordPress theme you select must come with Search Engine Optimization features to help you get through to the first page of Google.




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