In this post, I will share two things you can do to speed up your WordPress website. The great thing is, it should take no more than 10 minutes to vastly improve your page load time.
Why should you speed up your pages? Well, in addition to Google incorporating site speed in search engine rankings, page load speed is very important in keeping your visitors on your website. Mobile users expect pages to load within 2 seconds, and you can provide a better user experience to site visitors.
Remove unnecessary plugins
While plugins add a great deal of functionality and bells and whistles to your website, they are most prone to making calls from external sites. The more functionality and neat things added to your website take up more resources and slow down your page loading process.
Ask yourself what real value each plugin adds to your site, and does it help you achieve your website goals? If the plugin does not help you achieve your website goals, the plugin should be deactivated and deleted. Cleaning out your plugins every so often is also a great practice for maintainability. You don’t have to constantly be asking yourself what each plugin is doing, and worrying if your site will break when it is removed.
If you deactivate a plugin, and realize you actually need it, it can easily be reactivated. Ah, the beauty of WordPress.
Install a caching plugin
While it seems contradictory to install another plugin, caching your website is one of the most noticeable things you can to to improve your page load time. Caching is the process of storing parts of your website that do not change (such as an about page) and loading those parts once instead of every time a page loads. You can install w3 Total Cache Plugin or WP Super Cache for this.
If it turns out you have more than 20 plugins to go through, this process may take longer than 10 minutes. The quickest and easiest thing you can do to speed up your WordPress website is install a caching plugin. And, if you have a lot of plugins, you know just how easy it is to install them!
Looking forward
Here are a few tips to keep in mind for future updating:
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- Choose the right image format. In general, .jpg is better for photographic images and .png is better for images with text and fewer colors.
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- Use WP smush.it to further compress image sizes.
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- Delete or remove unneeded post revisions.
Have any other tips for quickly improving the load time of your pages? Leave them in the comments below or discuss with us on twitter (@iwanttobesocial).
