These are some super effective ways that you can reduce the loading time of your site. It is important now a day that your site should load fast as website speed is now a parameter for Google while deciding the search engine rankings. Somehow, most bloggers and webmaster make silly mistakes on their site that affect the loading time of their site adversely. Here are some ways to reduce your site’s loading time and make it super fast:
1. WP Super Cache Plugin
The first thing to do whenever you feel that your site is taking too long to load is download the WP-Super Cache Plugin. Simply download and activate it. It is a great plugin that will generate static html files. It basically caches your blog so it can load faster. This is especially good if your site gets a lot of traffic from Digg or StumbleUpon etc.
2. Use Minimal Images
Although it is always encouraged that you use images on your blog posts to enhance reading quality try not to overdo it. It is quite easy for us to get carried away and post 2-3 images in a single post of about 400 words. Reduce the use of images to 1; of course you need to use more images when your article length is really long. But always be a minimalist and you will enjoy good site speed.
3. Image Hosting
You use images on your blog posts right? Always host them on your server rather than using a third party server (you do it to save bandwidth, I know). But at the same time you should know that local files will always load faster than the files that you have stored on an external server. For a few really heavy images you can go for flickr, Imgur and other image hosting websites.
4. Minimize the Usage of Plugins
Plugins have made blogging on WordPress so much easier and fun that most of us don’t even worry about codes. But in hind-sight the usage of too many plugins will definitely kill your loading speed. Always delete the plugins which you feel are unnecessary or can be replaced with simple coding.
5. Avoid Use of Flash
Just don’t use it on your blog. You may make a minimalist use of Flash on company websites and such but avoid them on blogs much as you can. Of course unless you are big websites like Nike which is popular and don’t care about Google calculating your page load time for SEO – you should be worried about using Flash. The reason is because Flash takes an awful lot of time to load and generally visitors don’t even prefer flash in blogs.
6. Get Rid of Dumb Gadgets
I believe that all gadgets are dumb. Especially, the gadgets which are used to show the time date etc. Just get rid of these as they are very heavy scripts and affect your sites loading speed. Get rid of the entire shout box and polls etc. They destroy a professional look of your site and site loading speed is the first thing they target. I have never understood why a blogger would want a Shoutbox on their site!
7. Control Your Ads
Advertisements are a big bully on site loading time. Most PPC ads and CPM ads are wrought with HTML coding error. So use them in a minimal manner. When it comes to in-text ads avoid them as much as you can because they really slow down your site. Of course, it is perfectly okay to use simple text link ads and image ads.
8. Your Theme
The theme that you use on your blog is an important factor of the sites loading time. As it is the major portion which needs to be downloaded. So always try and use themes that have a clean and simple code structure and are not too heavy.
9. Choose a Good web host
The selection of a good web host matters a lot. Ensure that you get your hosting from a reputable and reliable web host company. Avoid cheap web hosts and prefer paid ones.
10. Stay Simple
This is my final advice to you guys out there. It is the most important one as well. Always keep your site simple as this will not only help you in search engine optimization but it reduces the load time a lot. Don’t clutter your blog with unnecessary widgets, links etc.
So if you follow these tweaks on your blog your site’s loading speed will quickly come down and you can enjoy a much faster and comfortable browsing. A good site speed is also an indication of a quality blog and your readers won’t get frustrated while going through your pages.
Hope you enjoyed and learned from this post about speeding up your WordPress blog. Please leave your comments below.
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
well written . readers prefer faster loading sites and hence increases page views .
Hi,
Your post is full of accurate advice.
The web hosting provider is most important for load speed. The cheaper services like BlueHost just use slower servers than Hostgator.
There are tools to help you monitor your loading speed. WewbSiteGrader is a good choice and so is YSlow, but YSlow conflicts with SEOBook if you use the two together.
I use a compresser file Wordpress plugin called jbcompresser it is another useful tool that speeds up your blogs load time. Thanks for the tips!
Thanks a lot for sharing this tool to speed up our wordpress blog
I agree with your points page loading speed is very main factor in SEO, but as per my experience WP Super Cache Plugin is causing problems in site map updation and causing robots to crawl new updates on our blog.
Hey Anil great list if tips for speeding up our wordpress blogs. Yours seems to be loading pretty fast so I’ll believe you know what your talking about.
I’m always trying to improve my blogs loading time but to be honest ever since I went to the dedicated server I don’t really have issues anymore.
Hosting your own images is a very important one,. relying on a third party load times is not acceptable. That tip was great advice.
With the image hosting – I kinda agree and disagree at the same time.
If you have a good server, and there is not a high load – then host your own images.
If your on a shared server, or if your using some kind of heavy script to host the images, then use something like photobucket to host your images.
Hosting your own images not only eats up hard drive space, it eats up CPU and memory rendering the image when someone visits your site.
W3 Total Cache has been working wonders on my site. The CDN function brings so much more to the table than other cache plug-ins
. I even wrote a tutorial on it recently.
It is now a known fact that load time is a factor as part of an overall ranking factor with Google. So, the sooner you clean up your website and include some of the suggestions above, the better off you will be. Most people will not wait very long for websites to load. If it takes too long, you will likely just move onto to another site.
Yes, I also recommend W3 Total Cache as it works really well for me. And it will work even better if I use CDN function in the near future.
I am using W3 Total cache and it is best. I host all the images and WP files on CloudFront and it speeds up blog even more.
Additionally, I use Thesis Theme Framework which itself is quite speedy.
absolutely this is very supporting site for us
i think it is one of the best site.
thanks
Wp super cache is terrible it makes all my blogs on all servers really slow and some just crash awful
I just tried the w3 and it works quite weel on of my sites from 15 seconds to 3…no too shabbby!
Hi Louis
Recently I find a good alternate to Wp Super Cache. It will not slow down your server and will help you speed up your wordpress blog. I himself started using it on this blog. You can get it at http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/
There is a very simple trick to significantly speed up the loading of your wordpress blog. Thanks for Sharing…
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