{"id":1112,"date":"2018-07-04T08:44:59","date_gmt":"2018-07-04T08:44:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstsiteguide.com\/improve-wordpress-blog-speed\/"},"modified":"2023-10-04T05:14:58","modified_gmt":"2023-10-04T05:14:58","slug":"improve-wordpress-blog-speed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstsiteguide.com\/improve-wordpress-blog-speed\/","title":{"rendered":"21 Tips on How to Speed Up a WordPress Blog","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"
When browsing the Internet, you probably don’t overthink website speed. If your Internet connection is good enough, you probably have only two conclusions about each and every site regarding the speed – the site is or isn’t fast enough. And that’s how most of the\u00a0Internet users will see your WordPress website<\/a>. Even if it’s attractive to a specific visitor, if the blog isn’t loading fast enough, you will lose that visitor. That’s for sure. And that’s why you have to do everything in your power to make your WordPress site as fast as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While there are numerous ways of speeding up a site<\/a>, some will require technical knowledge, some will require total dedication from you while some will be simply too expensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As always, WordPress can help you with the problem. Not only WordPress is constantly improving, but so are plugins, themes and hosting companies<\/a>. In this article, we are about to show you how to speed up your WordPress website. There are many factors that impact the site speed and depending on your site, you can improve the speed in the next few minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n By installing and setting up a caching plugin, you can instantly feel the change in the speed of your site. All websites will have parts that aren’t changing that frequently. Whether it’s an image, a CSS or JS file, a caching plugin can deal with those files so that they don’t have to be downloaded from the server every time a user opens your site. This will mostly help returning visitors who will already have those files stored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are numerous WordPress caching plugins, but only a few popular ones. The good news is that those plugins are coded well, they will speed up your site instantly and they are completely free! The most popular plugin for the job is W3 Total Cache<\/a> which has more than 1 million active users. That’s impressive! There are other plugins that can do the same, like WP Fastest Cache plugin<\/a> which we already mentioned in one of our earlier articles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether it’s only one image on your homepage or there’s an entire gallery of photographs you want to show, unoptimized images can slow your website drastically. Let’s say that you’re using a camera that can shoot high-resolution photos. Those photos will probably be more than 2MB, and they can surpass the 4MB limit easily. Even images from modern smartphones will generate large files. If you don’t think about that and you simply upload a picture, imagine the load on your site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just by adding that one image which is 2MB or 4MB “heavy”, your users will have to download that image once they open your site. While users coming from a broadband connection won’t feel much of a difference, those users with slower Internet speeds will suffer. Not only that; even Google will frown upon slower loading times so your page rank might suffer in the long run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That shouldn’t be a problem since you can optimize images so easily. First of all, if you’re not showcasing your latest work and you don’t need to display images in full resolution, start by lowering the resolution. For example, if your theme shows a maximum of 800px width, your image shouldn’t be wider than that. You can simply change the size or maybe even crop an image. There are also many tools and apps which can help you optimize pictures. Whether you want to use professional software like Photoshop<\/a> which can do miracles to your images and optimize them specifically for the web, or you want to use a simple online tool, you should optimize your images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your homepage is an important page. Even if a person doesn’t land on the homepage, they will likely want to visit it from your other posts and pages. And that’s why the homepage has to be optimized correctly<\/a>. As mentioned before, take care of the images on your website and make sure they’re optimized. Use smaller excerpts for your posts instead of showing larger ones. Don’t show images from posts; instead, leave a “read more” link before the first image in a post. Don’t use too many sidebar and footer widgets which can slow your site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
1. Use a caching plugin<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
2. Optimize images<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
3. Optimize the homepage<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
4. Load Google Maps correctly<\/h2>\n\n\n\n