7 Effective Ways To Make Your WordPress Blog Load Faster
Time is money. This is especially true on the internet, where users typically have very low attention spans, and are not willing to wait more than a few seconds for a web page to load. If you have a WordPress blog and are wondering why the number of visitors to your blog is perpetually stuck among the single digits, the problem could be that you’ve accidentally made your page so heavy that it is taking a long time to load, especially on somewhat slow servers.
Moreover, website speedsare taken into consideration for Google rankings as well, thus pushing you down even though your blog is excellent. This can, however, be avoided if you keep a few precautions in mind, and make them your habit while posting on your blog, or customizing it. Seven simple steps to increase your WordPress page speed are:
1. Stick to smaller images
If you upload pictures of giant sizes on to your post, knowing that WordPress will automatically compress them to fit the page, you are making a big mistake. Though the picture will appear on your published post in a compressed version, actually, your page is carrying the big version. So it is no wonder that the loading takes so much time. Make the effort of resizing your pictures manually before you upload them.
2. Be careful about plugins.
The more plugins you have installed on your page, the more will be the number of files required to open your page. This will multiply your loading time incredibly. Particularly, WordPress plugins tend to add extra CSS lines. So keep your page simple and get rid of all the excess ornaments that you don’t really need.
3. Install the W3 Total Cache Plugin
However, not all plugins are bad for your page. In fact, some actually work to keep it light, such as the W3 Total Cache Plugin. This free little tool can minify code, cache dynamic content pages and database queries, and combine scripts and stylesheets, making your blog much easier to load.
4. Avoid @Import while calling stylesheets
If you have developed the habit of using @import to call stylesheets, we advise you to change it fast. If you use the import tool, browsers, especially Internet Explorer, will load them as if the reference came from the bottom of the document. It’s a much better idea to use the <link> option to call stylesheets.
5. Use robots.txt to control how search bots treat your site
At your site’s top level directory, you will find the robots.txt file. You can use this file to tell bots sent out by search engines which part of your page to skip and which to consider. If you feel that bots are spidering across your page too frequently, you can limit their access. And if you feel that in spite of all the searching they are doing, they are not sending any traffic your way, you can simply block them, using robots.txt
6. Invest in a content delivery network
This option will cost you some money, but it’s totally worth it. A content delivery network service means that your site’s static file will be delivered to visitors from servers near where they live, rather than all the files in your page being delivered from a single host. A CDN service will set you back by approximately $40, and is easy to install and activate.
7. Try CloudFlare
If you feel that content delivery network is totally beyond your budget, you can go for a free option like CloudFlare that will offer a similar result. CloudFlare acts as a proxy between your server and the web by means of a network of data centers spread throughout the world. In essence, it gives the same type of service as content delivery network, and reduces your page’s loading time substantially in other parts of the world.
