How to Get Your Wordpress Site Load Faster In Less Than 10 Minutes

bynewmarketpro

3K followers

Updated 6 years ago

Getting your site to load fast is crucial, not only for better customer experience but more importantly, it has impact on how G sees it which will effect you site ranking (indirectly). A faster load site would means your site visitor would stay longer on your site which would helps your site to rank better.

What slows down your wordpress site?

There are many factors that may cause you site to load slowly. Remember, a site page that load more than 3 seconds is considered below G standard.

One of these might be the root cause of your site not loading fast:

• hosting - nothing much you can do about this - so choose the right hosting like WA (:))
• theme - a premium theme not necessarily good for your site. It is good for site design (appearance), but if it is coded poorly, it will bring more problems than good to your site. If you find your site is slowing down, you might want to test if the theme actually the cause by changing the theme and test it again.
• too many plugins - we are taught here in WA the max number of plugins to install are 5. Personally I can't run a site with 5 plugins only but it is recommended to have not more than 15 plugins. The lesser the better. If there are plugins that you have installed but not using them, deactivate them. Even better, delete them.
• Trash folder - too many posts in your trash folders can also cause your page to load slowly.
• too many images with huge file size. This is one of the biggest culprits that cause a website loading poorly.
  
  Make sure you compress your image before uploading them to your wordpress site. This will ensure you site is not over loaded.
  
  I have created a blog some times back on why you need to compress your images for your website.

What is caching?

In a plain term, Caching is a process to store your site pages, data, images, scripts on the internet browsers so that when people visit your site they are presented with a saved version of your site instead of requesting a new one from your server which in many cases displayed slower that those cached pages.

So today I am going to share a very simple tip how to get your site load faster by implementing a cache plugin.

Main process

Before you go to the most fun part, let's do some ground works so that we know our site is actually load faster after implementing this strategy.

This what you MUST do First

1) Test your site using site speed test. In our case, we are using Pingdom. Just input your domain url > choose the place where you it to run the test and record down the load time. Keep it somewhere handy as we need to use them a bit later for comparison.

Your test result, should look like this (pic).

2) Now, here's the fun part.

Ready?

The WP Fastest Cache plugin.

It is free plugin you can download from wordpress repository. By now I assume you already know how to install a new plugin to your wordpress site. Otherwise, just follow the step below.

Dashboard > Plugin > Add new >Search > just type cache > choose WP Fastest Cache (picture) > install > activate.

(Warning: If you already have a cache plugin installed (WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache or any cache plugin), you need to deactivate it first. DO NOT DELETE THE PLUGIN).

The plugin should looked like the one above. It is easy to set up and should not take you more than 10 minutes to set up. This plugin has 100,000 installation and compatible with the latest Wordpress version. As you can see, the developer keeps maintaining and upgrading the plugin which is good for end users.

Setting Up The WP Fastest Cache

Once activated, you need to go to setting to enable the setting you like. Here is an example how the setting looks like.

After the setting completed, wait for one minute or so before heading to Pingdom again to run the test again.

You should see a different in the page loading time. Now try to compare with the result you got before installing the WP Fastest Cache and see if you got positive result like the result we got below.

This site has a Grade C with load page of 1.75s, which is still good as it below 3.0s. However, after installing WP Fastest Cache pluing, the result is impressive with the load time improved to mere 672ms.

Yeesssssssssssssssssssssssssss.!

So there you are. In less than 5 minutes, we have made our site load much much faster than before.

Happy caching and hopefully you'll get your site load much faster now.

What are other cache plugins you have tested?

Let us know your result after testing this strategy.

Pen off now.

:)

Joe