WordPress is an excellent option for individuals who want to be able to access and control their own website and blog. It puts the power in company owner’s and individual’s hands, but this means that individuals often don’t know what to do when things start to go wrong. For instance, if you learn that people aren’t staying on your website or they are not returning to you site, you may need to look for the reason why. Chances are, you may need to speed up WordPress!
Website speed is essential when it comes to making a positive impression, when someone lands on your site for the first time you only have a couple fleeting moments to make an impression and convince them to explore your website more. If your site takes a while to load, most people will grow impatient or lose interest and look for another website offering the same service. AKA: Your competitors. This also prevents individuals from visiting your site again, it’s all about the experience. Furthermore, Google, the king of search engines, includes site speed in its ranking algorithm. This means that website speed effects Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If your site is slow to load, you’re not only losing visitors but also getting reduced search rankings.
Before you go into a full blown panic attack, take a deep breath. There are things you can do to speed up your site! Here are three quick and easy ways to speed up WordPress!
1) Clear Your Database Junk!
It’s pretty awesome that WordPress autosaves everything, this feature can be a total saviour! But, this autosave feature means that your database quickly becomes filled with an overwhelming amount of trackbacks, pingbacks, post revisions, unapproved comments and trash.
Fear not! There is a plugin called WP-Optimize that will help speed up WordPress by routinely clearing out the trash in your database.
This serves to help your database to run efficiently and allows you to keep only what you need. However, it is always essential that you back everything
up so you don’t lose anything that you want to keep.
2) Compress Images!
While images make your site look catchy and entertaining, they also usually take up an extreme amount of bandwidth on most websites. There is an excellent plug in to help with this! WPSmush helps to speed up WordPress by automatically compressing images as you upload them to the media library.
You also won’t notice any difference in the quality of images from the compression, which makes it a win-win. You can run all of the images that are saved in your media library through the plug in, compressing them to a more convenient size, and it is basically effortless.
3) Optimize your homepage!
There are a few simple and quick things that you can do to make sure that your homepage loads quickly. This is very important because more often than not, people coming to your site will land on your homepage. Make sure that you minimize the number of posts on your home page, and display excerpts rather than the full posts. Remove any redundant widgets and inactive plugins from your home page and only include them in posts. Remember that content is more important than widgets when it comes to your homepage. By keeping your homepage clean you will help to reduce loading time.
Bonus: Use a WordPress Host…
Not to toot our own horn or anything, but one of the best ways to speed up your WordPress website is by using a good WordPress optimized webhosting provider! A lot of people who are just starting out try to minimize costs by using basic hosting plans that are not optimized for WordPress, but this can actually be detrimental to your site and can cost you rankings and views. You don’t want to have slow site speeds and frequent down time during high traffic periods. This is why you should always choose a WordPress optimized host for the speed and reliability benefits!