1. Picking a Good Host
In the beginning, a shared host seems like a bargain. It makes you pay another price in the end: slow site speed and frequent down time during high traffic phase. If you think to do something off the track, then you are going to kill your WordPress site through the shared hosting. Invest in proper hosting and the right choice will be WP Engine. Their support is top-notch. You get huge features, and their backend is stupidly simple.
2. Use the Right Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Most of the popular blogs are using this, and if you are using the WordPress for online marketing, then you won’t be surprised to know that Copyblogger is one such blog, which prefers to use CDN’s.
A CDN takes away all the static files and let your visitor download them as fast as possible by serving the files on the servers as close as possible. You can use the Max CDN Content Delivery Network on your WordPress sites. Since, they are reasonable and help to keep the dashboard simple.
3. Have Firebug and Yslow
Find a way to measure your improvements before you start optimizing your website. The best way to measure is to use Firebug in combination with Yslow, which helps to give detailed information on how long your website takes to download and how much bandwidth it uses.
Don’t start the optimization, better jot down all the information. It helps you to track whether the thing you have implemented has really improved your site speed. Finally, you can check out how much you have saved.
4. Smush Your Pictures
One of the notable time-killer is images. Be careful when you use images on your website. When you use the high quality images on your blog make sure they have a small size file, without compromising the quality.
To save bandwidth decrease the loading time to remove unnecessary information from pictures. If you share a picture all information on image stay embedded within, mainly – image ISO, lens used, and megapixel. To save the spaces remove this information. That is what Smush.it does. A popular WordPress plugin automatically decreases the size of images, without compromising the quality. Whenever you upload an image, Smush.it will help to increase the blog speed.
5. Cleaning up of Old Plugins
Let us begin with the basics. You need to maintain a minimum number of WordPress plugins. Since, downloading tons of plugins will make your WordPress blog slow. You have to check the WordPress site and see if you have any inactive plugins. If you come across those plugins, which are unnecessary, remove them. You can easily find them when you need. As soon as you get rid of the old plugins, update the remaining ones to the latest versions.
6. Choosing the Right Theme
Yes, selecting the right WordPress theme is important. As some themes are slow and resource intensive, you have to read the review, and make sure they are a good fit for you. Popular themes are easy to search, and you can learn about them from other users in the community. Some of the themes have built-in SEO features, and they help bloggers to have a good search engine ranking.
7. Updating Your WordPress Site
To accelerate your blog then make sure that you are updating your WordPress blog at regular intervals. WordPress will give you a notification and will let you know that it is the time to update. Keep a backup and then update WordPress after notification.
8. Install a Cache Plugin
Caching is a great way to promote your blog. It is the key credential to accelerate your WordPress blog. You can use plugins to handle your site’s caching. They are very simple to use. People often use W3 Total Cache, which is a well known and a frequently updated Cache Plugin.
9. Easy Optimization to Load Homepage Quickly
Let the homepage load quickly, as it is one of the important parts of your site. As the visitors will be landing on the homepage often, make sure that you follow these simple rules to maintain a WordPress blog:
- Show extracts instead of a full post
- Reduce the number of posts on the homepage
- Remove unworthy sharing widgets from the home
- Remove all inactive plugins
Have a clean and focused homepage design. This will help your page to look good and have a quick upload.
10. Compress CSS and Java Script
To compress both of them you can use an online tool Styleneat to get rid of the white spacing and to keep your WordPress blog neat and clean. You may not notice any difference, but soon you will realize a drastic speed recovery in your blog. Put all your JavaScript into a single file and then load it in the footer.php File. This helps to guarantee that styling is loaded first and then the JavaScript assemble faster.
Traffic is dear and precious to every blogger, and with a slow running blog, it is just impossible to achieve. Make WordPress blog smoother so that visitors keep coming back for enjoying a faster browsing blog with exciting contents.