If you grew up in the 90s, then I’m sure you still remember the dial-up connection days. Everything seems much faster now compared to then, so your WordPress blog needs to be up-to-speed. Nobody has time to wait around for your blog to load and that’s why for the past few days, I’ve been optimizing my blog to make it load faster.
A faster blog delivers a better experience for both your readers and for the search engines like Google. Believe it or not, Google and other major search engines rank websites based on relevancy as well as how long the blog takes to load. In this article, I will go over a few tips to help make your blog load faster than the speed of light. Well, I’ll try!
Tips To Make Your WordPress Blog Load Faster
Remove Useless Things
If you take a look at my homepage, you’ll notice that I have completely eliminated majority of the elements that were there previously. When you have a cluttered homepage, it will take more time to load.
I’ve removed my recent blog posts, social shares and likes, testimonials, and more. While removing all of those unnecessary things, I tried to maintain a functional and actionable homepage for my readers.
Now that the page is cleaned up, it loads almost 3x faster than it was previously! Now that is a significant difference and I’m sure my readers will appreciate it.
Remove Unused Plugins
Plugins can have a significant effect on your blog’s performance. First of all, don’t install every plugin you see! Some are poorly coded which can expose your blog to hackers. The fewer plugins you run, the faster your blog will be.
Over the years, you’ll find lots of inactive plugins in your WordPress blog. Simply remove them and reinstall them again if you need it later on. Chances are, you removed it the first time for a reason and probably will not reinstall them again.
Enable Cache
If you run traffic heavy blog, you might want to consider installing a cache system. A cache system will save system resources which will help speed up loading time. Personally, I use one of the best cache system called W3 Total Cache. It creates a static version of your content that renders quickly for your readers.
Compress The CSS and JS
Compressing your CSS and JS will speed up your load time by removing white spaces, lines, and pointless characters from the source code. This is also known as minifying. W3 Total Cache has a feature to help you minify CSS and JS, so that saves you from installing another plugin.
Optimize Your Images
The images on your blog can really add to the appearance, but did you know images can slow down your blog? You can reduce this slow down by optimizing your images. EWWW image optimizer reduces the image file sizes and improves your blogs overall performance.
You can optimize your images in bulk and once this plugin is installed. Every image you add to your blog posts or pages will be automatically optimized in the background.
Use A Good Website Hosting Service
My website is hosted by Wealthy Affiliate, an internet marketing education community as well as resources and tools provider. The premium membership comes with lightning fast uptime with double hosting. If your website appears to be down, a mirror image of your website will be running at all times. This gives their website hosting service unparalleled uptime in the industry.
Purchase A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
For normal website hosting, your content is housed on a single server. Whereas a CDN takes your blog’s static content and replicates it through hundreds or maybe even thousands of servers around the world. Which means, your visitors will receive your website’s data from the city closest to them.
Similar to internet providers, the closer you are to the host, the faster your blog will load. A CDN essentially brings your website closer to your visitors which increases the load time providing them with a better experience.
MaxCDN is one of the largest CDN providers on the internet and many top bloggers are using them to make their blog load faster. I haven’t tried using them yet, but the top players are using it, so I’m sure MaxCDN delivers great quality services.
It does cost money, but the good news is, MaxCDN offers affordable pricing, so even smaller bloggers like myself can take advantage of their service.
If you use W3 Total Cache, you can set up MaxCDN with your WordPress blog with ease. Simply select MaxCDN under general settings and enter your CDN URL to configure it.
In Conclusion
The speed of your website determines if someone is going to read your articles, so do take it seriously. If it takes longer than a few seconds to load, your visitors will leave and go somewhere else.
Do you have something else that optimizes your WordPress blog for speed? If you do, please share it with us by leaving a comment below.
Kind Regards,
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