How to speed up your wordpress website?
The load time of website can build or break your business. Assume you have a good looking website, unique and well written content, thousands of visitors a day. But your website is slow and takes more than 5 seconds to load
Then I can guarantee, you are missing a lot of visitor's attention. Because study shows that lot of visitors will leave your website if it is taking more than 1 second to load. Take a look at the best ways you can use to speed up your WordPress website.
1. Choose the hosting company wisely
There are many hosting companies and increasing daily as well. So to make your website fast, you have to choose the fastest hosting available. I always recommend host gator. Shared hosting always create problems. So go for dedicated hosting or choose the Wealthy Affiliate hosting where you can upload unlimited website and it is fast as well.
2. Use CDN for fast loading of website
CDN(content delivery network) is a network close to visitor location. If your visitor try to open your website from India, then your content will be delivered from India not from USA. This is very effective way to reduce the website load time.
3. Host your Images on WordPress.com
Well, WordPress.com is not providing any hosting. But you still can host your website images there. It will boost your website speed because WordPress.com hosting is very fast. Most website loads slow because of images. But now your images are loading from different hosting which is very fast. So your website will be fast.
To host your images on WordPress.com, use the jetpack plugin. This is a great plugin and it's free as well. It provides many other functions including hosting of images to WordPress.com
4. Use Cache Plugin
Use cache plugin for your WordPress website. There are many plugins available for cache. But I recommend w3 total cache. This plugin is free, reliable & works very well. Caching make the website load fast for returning visitors.
5. Use less plugins
It is recommended to use less plugins. Only use plugins which is required. Using too many plugins affects the website load time. I try to restrict myself on 5-7 plugins. Also keep our plugins and wordpress version up to date.
6. Choose clean theme
Theme is what we choose according to design. But also keep in mind that more clean the code of theme more fast your website will load. If you are looking for paid theme then I recommend genesis themes. Thesis is also providing good and clean themes. You can also use free theme provided by WordPress but always test your load time with different themes.
These are the methods you can use to make your website load fast. I have left few things like using gzip, canonical url, specifying image size etc.
But these above methods are easy and reduce your website load time dramatically. Also your are welcome to share other ways to make the website fast. Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Recent Comments
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Thanks for this- My sites average time is currently just over 15 seconds :( Need to get it down asap so I'll be trying these!
It's worth mentioning that a lot of people have experienced problems with Jetpack, some stating that it has in fact slowed down their sites or worse.
Search "Jetpack" on this forum for more details.
I am using jetpack on my 3 websites and never faced any issue. Also there are many things in jetpack. So do not activate all. Only use the thing you need. I usually use it to check website stats, hosting images on WordPress.com, using publicize plugin to share my posts automatically to social media sites.
I can't comment personally as I have never used it. You may not have faced any issues and that's great that it works for you, but many have and I think it's important that people are aware of those potential issues which have been well documented on this site.
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I thought jetpack didn’t wokrk with WA