A slow website not only costs you traffic, but also reflects badly in search engine rankings. To avoid any of these issues, you should regularly check your site’s speed and optimize it as needed. There are several free services intended for this, the most popular one being Pingdom. After running a quick test of your URL, you can see how your website ranks on a scale of 100, how its loading speed compares to that of other sites and how much time it takes to load. It’s a good idea to do such checks regularly, especially after new plugins were installed or a lot of image-heavy new content was added. Here are a few ways to optimize your WordPress site, if your speed doesn’t rank as high as it should.
1. Choose a Good Hosting Provider
If your loading speed tends to jump up and down a lot, your current hosting provider might be to blame. Check with the hosting company to see how many other sites you are sharing the server with. The higher this amount, the more likely you are to experience spikes and drops in speed. Something to keep in mind is that on a shared server, your speed depends not only on your own traffic but also on the traffic of your neighbors. Switching to a different hosting provider might be a good idea if speed is constantly an issue. Dedicated hosting is a much better option, but if you can’t afford this option, try to stick with a provider that hosts no more than 10 sites on one server. In addition to a dedicated one, you might want to consider a managed hosting solution. The latter will give you more control over your server, allowing you to optimize it if you have the appropriate skills or are willing to learn. You might also want to check if your provider offers caching, compression and CDN services, all of which can help you achieve higher speeds. Or check into plugins for existing solutions to these enhanced web site features.
2. Speed Up Your Database
All the information you have on your site is stored in the database, including posts, pictures, plugins and comments. If the database is too bloated, the site will take more time to load the information it needs. If you have at least some basic amount of knowledge about how your website’s database works, you might want to optimize it as well. To do so, select all tables and click Repair, then select them one more time and click Optimize. If you’d rather not do any changes to the database manually, use one of the popular plugins to perform the task for you, such as WP-DBManager or WP-Optimize.
3. Choose a Good Theme or Framework
Some WordPress themes are faster than others, and choosing the right one will help you ensure your site’s speed is good from the very start. WordPress default themes are usually fast, and so are several popular frameworks like Thesis, Genesis, Headway and AppThemes. Speed, security and design are some of the things you should always take into consideration when choosing a new theme for your site, along with support and frequency of updates.
4. Optimize Images
The majority of the sites suffering from slow speeds are loaded with images that are not optimized for the Web. If your site is rich in media, there are several ways to ensure your loading times are not affected by it. Firstly, try to use the 8-bit PNG format for any of your simple graphics that don’t need to have too much color or detail. For images you want to display in higher quality, use the 24-big PNG or JPEG format. Besides picking the right format, it’s also a good idea to optimize your images for the Internet before uploading them to your website. You can use a simple free program like Paint to do this, or a more complex premium one like Photoshop. To reduce the file size, you can both reduce the size of the image and slightly reduce its quality, but not to the extent where it will become obvious.
Another way to go about it is to use a popular Yahoo service called Smush.it. You can upload your pictures to its site and have the Web app optimize them for you. Smush.it works with individual images or with groups of files. You can provide a URL and the service will optimize all images on the given Web page, providing you with a ZIP file of everything it has optimized. The program removes any unneeded bytes from the images without reducing their visual quality. It also comes in plugin, which many WordPress users prefer over the Web service.
5. Use a CDN
Content Delivery Networks ensure that your cached content is stored on a network of geographically distant servers. This means that when opening your site, the users only have to access the server that’s closest to their own geographic locations, leading to loading speeds that are much faster than if all users were to all access the same central server. Many hosting services come with free CDN, and if yours doesn’t, you can always set it up separately through a content delivery service like Amazon CloudFront.
6. Check Your Plugins
While plugins are great at adding any missing functionality to your core WordPress, they can also slow your site down, especially if they are badly written or outdated. You can use a plugin like P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to check which plugins are slowing you down. P3 will measure each plugin’s effect on your website’s loading time, helping you determine which ones are poorly configured and might be worth getting rid of. In addition, you might want to keep the overall amount of your plugins to a minimum, as a high number of these can also badly reflect on the loading speed.
Some other good practices for speeding up your site include cleaning your comments’ spam section regularly and using a plugin like Revision Control for deleting unnecessary old post revisions. It’s a good idea to also install a caching plugin, such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. And finally, you can reduce your broadband usage even further by compressing your blog pages with the help of WP HTTP Compression or a similar plugin.