WordPress is a great platform.
You’re seeing it in action right now: my site (which has tens of thousands of readers) is run entirely on this crazy-powerful platform.
One weakness that WordPress suffers from, however, is that it is usually very slow.
Without taking the right precautions, you could end up with a sluggish site that will not only be a hassle for repeat visitors, but will most certainly lose you subscribers and customers due to the impatient nature of web browsers.
First I want to go over why your WordPress site’s speed is important to your success, and next I want to go over ALL of the best ways that I’ve found to consistently.
If you want to get right to how you can speed up your site, scroll down.
If you want to learn why you should, read below.
Why Site Speed Is Important
You’ve probably heard this before, but when a person lands on your site for the first time, you only have a few seconds to capture their attention to convince them to hang around.
If you’ve been doing this online business thing for a while, you’ll recognize the importance of branding, a nice layout, putting important things above the fold, and all of that good stuff in order to try to capture visitors into staying.
But if your page loads slowly, you may lose people before you even have the change to convert them.
Most studies have confirmed that you have a very short time to load your site before people click away, especially if they’ve been linked there from another site that they visit.
Think about that.
Someone just gave you a good reference with a link, and yet you are doing both of you a disservice by having a slow loading site that nobody would want to wait around for.
Not only that, you are stunting your own growth by losing these potential subscribers, especially early on.
You have on average a single digit time frame before you lose somebody to a slow loading page.
That means if your site takes longer than 10 seconds to load, most people are gone, lost before you even had the change to convince them to stick around and give your blog or website a change.
Not only that, but Google has now included site speed in it’s ranking algorithm. That means that your site’s speed effects it’s SEO, so if your site is slow, you are not only losing visitors out of impatience, but you are also losing them by having reduced rankings in search engines.
So let’s see how we can fix that.
How To Speed Up WordPress
As a side note, these are not ordered by importance or any criteria, I’ve just gathered everything I’ve learned about speeding up page loads on WordPress and compiled them here.
I guarantee that using even a few of these will drastically speed up your site.
1. Choose a good host
While starting out, a shared host might seem like a bargain (“Unlimited page views, wowie zowie!”), it comes at another price: incredibly slow site speed and frequent down time during high traffic periods.
If you plan on doing awesome stuff (aka the kind of stuff that creates high traffic periods), you’re killing yourself by running your WordPress site on shared hosting.
The stress of your site going down after getting a big feature is enough to create a few early gray hairs: don’t be a victim, invest in proper hosting.
The only WordPress host I continually recommend is below… (drum roll please…)
- WP Engine (aff link)
My sites are always blazingly fast, never have downtime when I get huge features (like when I was featured on the Discovery Channel blog!), and the backend is stupidly simple.
Last but not least, support is top notch, which is a must when it comes to hosting… take it from a guy who’s learned that the hard way!
Head on over to the WP Engine homepage and check out their offerings, you’ll be happy you did.
2. Start with a solid framework/theme
You might be surprised to here this, but the Twenty Ten/Twenty Eleven “framework” (aka the default WP themes) are quite speedy frameworks to use.
That’s because they keep it the “guts” simple, and light frameworks are always the way to go to have a speedy site.
From my experience, the fastest loading premium framework is definitely the Thesis Theme Framework (aff).
Whatever you might say about it’s SEO abilities (I prefer to use plugins and my own edits), it is definitely a solid framework for quick page loads, I’ve always had this experience as have many others.
3. Use an effective caching plugin
WordPress plugins are obviously quite useful, but some of the best fall under the caching category, as they drastically improve page loads time, and best of all, all of them on WP.org are free and easy to use.
By far my favorite, bar none, is W3 Total Cache, I wouldn’t recommend or use any other caching plugin, it has all of the features you need and is extremely easy to install and use.
Simply install and activate, and what your page load faster as elements are cached.
4. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
All of your favorite big blogs are making use of this, and if you are into online marketing using WordPress (as I’m sure many of my readers are) you won’t be surprised to here that some of your favorite blogs like Copyblogger are making use of CDN’s.
Essentially, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all your static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.
I personally use the Max CDN Content Delivery Network on my WordPress sites, as I’ve found that they have the most reasonable prices and their dashboard is very simple to use (and comes with video tutorials for setting it up, takes only a few minutes).
There is a plugin called Free-CDN that promises to do the same, although I haven’t tested it.
5. Optimize images (automatically)
Yahoo! has an image optimizer called Smush.it that will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality.
However, if you are like me, doing this to every image would be beyond a pain, and incredibly time consuming.
Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. No reason not to install this one.
6. Optimize your homepage to load quickly
This isn’t one thing but really a few easy things that you can do to ensure that your homepage loads quickly, which probably is the most important part of your site because people will be landing there the most often.
Things that you can do include:
- Show excerpts instead of full posts
- Reduce the number of posts on the page (I like showing between 5-7)
- Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (include them only in posts)
- Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need
- Keep in minimal! Readers are here for content, not 8,000 widgets on the homepage
7. Optimize your WordPress database
I’m certainly getting a lot of use out of the word “optimize” in this post!
This can be done the very tedious, extremly boring manual fashion, or…
You can simply use the WP-Optimize plugin, which I run on all of my sites.
This plugin lets you do just one simple task: optimize the your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead.
I would also recommend the WP-DB Manager plugin, which can schedule dates for database optimization.
8. Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content
Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft.” It occurs when other sites direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your server load increasingly high.
This can add up as more and more people “scrape” your posts or your site (and especially images) become more popular, as must do if you create custom images for your site on a regular basis.
Place this code in your root .htaccess file:
disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?sparringmind.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/sparringmind [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
You’ll notice I included my feed (from FeedBurner), you’ll need to replace it with your feed’s name, otherwise your images won’t appear correctly there.
9. Add an expires header to static resources
An Expires header is a way to specify a time far enough in the future so that the clients (browsers) don’t have to re-fetch any static content (such as css file, javascript, images etc).
This way can cut your load time significantly for your regular users.
You need to copy and paste the following code in your root .htaccess file:
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
The above numbers are set for a month (in seconds), you can change them as you wish.
10. Adjust Gravatar images
You’ll notice on this site that the default Gravatar image is set to… well, nothing.
This is not an aesthetic choice, I did it because it improves page loads by simply having nothing where there would normally be a goofy looking Gravatar logo or some other nonsense.
Some blogs go as far to disable them throughout the site, and for everyone.
You can do either, just know that it will at least benefit your site speed if you set the default image (found in “Discussion”, under the settings dab in the WordPress dashboard) to a blank space rather than a default image.
11. Add LazyLoad to your images
LazyLoad is the process of having only only the images above the fold load (i.e. only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window), then, when reader scrolls down, the other images begin to load, just before they come into view.
This will not only speed you page loads, it can also save bandwidth by loading less data for users who don’t scroll all the way down on your pages.
To do this automatically, install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin.
12. Control the amount of post revisions stored
I saved this post to draft about 8 times.
WordPress, left to its own devices, would store every single one of these drafts, indefinitely.
Now, when this post is done and published, why would I need all of those drafts stored?
That’s why I use the Revision Control plugin to make sure I keep post revisions to a minimum, set it to 2 or 3 so you have something to fall back on in case you make a mistake, but not too high that you clutter your backend with unnecessary amounts of drafted posts.
13. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks
By default, WordPress interacts with other blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.
Every time another blog mentions you, it notifies your site, which in turn updates data on the post. Turning this off will not destroy the backlinks to your site, just the setting that generates a lot of work for your site.
For more detail, read this explanation of WordPress Pingbacks, Trackbacks and Linkbacks.
14. Replace PHP with static HTML, when necessary
This one is a little bit advanced, but can drastically cut down your load time if you are desperate to include page load speeds, so I included it.
I’d be doing this great post injustice if I didn’t link to it for this topic, as it taught me how to easily do this myself, in a few minutes.
So go there and check it out, it wrote it out in plainer terms than I ever could!
15. Use CloudFlare
This is similar to the section above on using CDN’s, but I’ve become so fond of CloudFlare since I discussed it in my best web analytics post that I’ve decided to include it separately here.
To put it bluntly, CloudFlare, along with the W3 Total Cache plugin discussed above, are a really potent combination (they integrate with each other) that will greatly improve not only the speed, but the security of your site.
And, both are free, so you have no excuse!
Thanks for reading, please share this article if you enjoyed it.
15 Easy Ways To Speed Up WordPress: Why Slow Page Load Equals Slow Blog Growth
