8 easy ways to speed up your wordpress site
TRANSCRIPT
8 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Site
By Sereyboth Yorn
http://sereyboth.com
Oct- 2015
Admit it, we ourselves as internet user hate slow loading and we even feel worse when we own a slow site. WordPress itself is a fast loading CMS but when you don’t have things done right, it can be super slow. People love fast loading website and Google also prefer to rank fast loading website higher too.
Here I will share you with 8 easy ways you can start doing now in order to speed up you site, (There are some more ways and I might not list it here since it can be too much involved with technical stuff. If you really concern about that ,talk to your technical guy about it).
8. Keep your WordPress site up-to-date
WordPress always release update from time to time. Upgrade your WordPress site whenever new version available and also do that to your plugin and them too. Update your site and plug-in not only increase the performance of your website but also to prevent any loophole on your site or plugin which can be hacked by someone too.
Before and after you do these steps, make sure that you can note your website speed by doing its speed test on Google page speed or Pingdom. For Google Page Speed, Speed score about 85 is something very good. If after perform these 8 easy ways and your website still has no increase performance in speed, you might need to talk to your technical guide to find out some solution which might using advance solution to fix it such as server conflict or related to any custom plug in or theme etc.
7. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is network of server which synchronize and duplicate your files to custom location based server. They copy all your image and css/javascript file to their server and when you website is view by a visitors, the image is loaded from those CDN server based on the location of user. If a user is from US, the CDN server that load for user is also from US and vice versa for user from Asia or so. Using CDN is not only to spee up your loading time but also to save your bandwidth too. However, CDN is a bit costly, only use it when your site got bigger and get heavy traffic. You can have free CDN service by Wordpress.com called Photon whcih can be activated inside Jetpack Plugin, a free way to save your bandwidth.
6. Clean Database
A trick to improve your WordPress performance is about to clean up your database. As you have some plug install and then stop using it, much more spam coming in, many post revisions grow up in the database as long as you keep producing more and more post. It is time to keep your database smaller in size and being tidy. Use a plugin call Wp Clean up which you can perform almost anything related to database clean up such as orphan metadata, clean all draft, post revision as well as spam comment at once and optimized them with one click. Note: Always backup your website before your do this.
5. Optimize Image size
Of Course, if you are having too big size for each image on your website, you will have your website load very slow, especially on any page that is having so many image. To have this problem fixed is about to lower your image size by having it resize to correct dimension before upload to you website, as well as optimized them for file size. in Adobe Photoshop, you can save web optimized image by click to File -> “save For web” and choose the suitable file type to save which can be jpg or png. But what if you already upload a non-optimized image to your website? we have a solution by install and use Wp Smushit(Formerly known as Wp smush.it) which will optimized all images to decrease image size in your image as well as to optimized image every time you publish new post too.
4. Install a Cache Plugin
A Cache plugin will help to store static versions of your web page and deliver to your visitors, it will save much bandwidth as well as CPU usage for your website. 2 Good recommended plugins to use is w3 total cache and wp super caches, these plugins is easy to use.
3. Lazy Loading your Image
A good ways to load your website fast is about to put lazy loading plugin for your website to stop loading all image inside your blog post at a time. By using lazy loading, it means that the image only load whenever the user scrolls down to each image. When your website having many images per blog post, try to use this option. A good plugin to use is BJ Lazy load or Unveil Lazy Load.
2. Use Fast Loading ThemeYour WordPress won’t load fast if you are using a slow loading theme. The theme which the developer code it carelessly by not follow the WordPress standard. So how to choose a fast loading WordPress theme? it is easy, most free themes on WordPress.org are almost okay with speed while most of them are highly moderate by WordPress.orgteam before they going live. For Premium theme, try to use a theme from some good company such as ThemeCountry or MythemeShop. Some premium themes on ThemeForest which is a big WordPress premium theme marketplace are very slow because of many features and option but however, you still also find some good and fast loading there. Take a bit time to test before decide to purchase any theme.
1. Choose A Good Hosting
Choose the most suitable hosting for your website. Let’s say if you run a few or more websites but which is small in size as well as not receive much traffic (totally less than 3000 pageviews per day combined), then you can host them on a normal shared hosting. But when it come to bigger website which consume more disk space or just to handle more visitors (3000 page views or more) you need to it move to VPS or even dedicated server when it come bigger. Good hostings that I have experience with are Bluehost and A2 hosting. I am currently using Bluehostfor some of my smaller sites and use A2 managed VPS hosting for a big my site of mine which got around 20k page views per day.
