How to Speed Up Word Press Website Loading Times
What is the optimal load time for your site? The faster you can get it the better! My site was loading very slow. This is not good as Google factors load time into their ranking algorithm. Your focus should be to provide the best user experience possible.
A site that is slow to load primarily does two things.
1. It annoys your visitors because it is taking too long for them to find what they are looking for and you know what that means. They are not going to wait around for your content to load, even if it is awesome and exactly what they are looking for, so any improvement to site loading time is a plus.
2. Google knows that your site is going to provide a poor user experience due to the slow loading time, so why bother in ranking your content higher up in the search results when your site will just frustrate people. At this point your content might as well be in the graveyard if it ranks on page two, three or even worse on page one hundred.
So how do you fix it? The solution is actually quite simple.
1. Don't Go Plug-In Crazy
There are lot's of great plug-ins available for use in WordPress, but you don't need them all. If you are in doubt ask another WA affiliate what the recommended plug-ins are. It is still OK to add others that are not recommended but check the star ratings before you download and use them. Afterward if you don't like the way they function, remove them.
2. Remove Duplicate Plug-Ins
For example. There is no need to install more than one plug-in that integrates Google Analytics on your site, especially if both of them insert your user ID into the blog pages for you. Doing this causes your Analytics reports to be skewed and slows down page loading time.
3. Install Plug-Ins that Speed Up Your Site
I got tired of how slow my site was loading so I searched for plug-ins that would speed it up and it here is what I recommend. Read each description carefully as each speed-up method used is not necessarily the same, although they might be similar. In this case you may install more than one so long as each one speeds up the site using different methods. You don't want to use any redundancy or any conflicting methods here or you'll just end up in the same boat again.
Here Are the Plug-ins Tested
I decided to use the following plug-ins specifically designed for site speed.
1. EWWW Image Optimizer
Reduce file sizes for images within WordPress including NextGEN Gallery and GRAND FlAGallery. Uses jpegtran, optipng/pngout, and gifsicle.
2. Vihv Speed Up
Increase speed of you site by creating additional database indexes. No configuration needed, just install.
3. WP Super Cache
Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.
4. WP Widget Cache
Cache the output of your blog widgets. Usually it will significantly reduce the sql queries to your database and speed up your site.
5. WP Super Cache - Clear all cache
Occasionally you may want to clear all cached files of the WP Super Cache plugin directly from the admin menu (option only available to super admins).
If you have made changes to the way your site looks or have updated a blog post and don't see the changes reflected you may want to clear out all cached pages and allow them to be created again.
Optional Plug-Ins
1. Clean up wp_head
Clean up wp_head from unnecessary tags
2. WP Clean Up
WP Clean Up can help us to clean up the wordpress database by removing "revision" "draft" "auto draft" "moderated comments" "spam comments" "trash comments" "orphan postmeta" "orphan commentmeta" "orphan relationships" "dashboard transient feed". It allows you to optimize your WordPress database without phpMyAdmin.
3. Clean Media Library File Names
This plugin cleans uploaded file names to remove special characters and spaces.
So far I am pleased with the results of the installed plug-ins. I am testing others to see if they are faster. I will post my findings if I find ones that work better than the ones mentioned above.
Want to See How Fast My Website Loads Now? Click the Link Below!
http://computersecuritytools.org/
Recent Comments
9
Hi Edward, thanks ever so much for this great information. I have an ecommerce site and when I tested it's load time on http://tools.pingdom.com/ it told me that my site was 93% slower than all sites tested. I then installed three of the plugins you mentioned and now my site is faster than 88% of all sites tested. A remarkable improvement thanks to you.
Keep well and keep writing.
Wow!!! thank you so much!! this info was soo helpful and my wesite now uploads so fast its amazing!! Thank you so much.
Jonicas, I don't have a WP website. I built my site before I knew about WA. My site is built using the Geodesic Solutions platform. Are there any general website tools that I can use to optimize all my images?
Hello trader,
I suggest you look at the size of each of your images and reduce it accordingly so that the loading times are smaller.
Could you give me a typical size in bytes of your images as well as dimensions in pixels like 1024X768 for example?
Having that information would help in finding out if the images can be optimized.
How difficult would it be to create a Wordpress site and transfer your content across?
To Our Success Online,
Jonicas
Hello Edward,
Thank you for sharing this fine post here at WA, I will be sure to use up all that I can to speed up site access.
There is however something that I am a bit confused with, do you use all the plugins you mentioned?
Your site load time was very impressive, do you have any suggestions on site security plugins you are willing to share?
To Our Success Online,
Jonicas
Yes, I am using all of the plug-ins mentioned above. Although I have looked a a couple of security plug-ins I have not had adequate time to review them just yet.
Hello Edward,
Thank you very much for the heads up, the reason I asked about the security plugins is because I have read quite a few tales of site hacking, knocking things awry even with some protection.
I guess there is no perfect security system ever however we reduce our chances of being hacked somewhat.
To Our Success Online,
Jonicas
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This is really helpful, many thanks. My website went from being 72% slower than all websites to 92% faster just by deleting one plugin and using the wp clean up you suggested