Speeding Up Your WordPress Blog

This is a guest post by Ann Smarty who is a SEO consultant.

It seems that everyone these days has a WordPress blog. It’s not at all surprising. After all, these blog sites are easy to create and maintain. Beyond that, they allow individuals to easily run their own site, and provide a great marketing mechanism for any business that’s smart enough to branch into social networking.

Despite how attractive and simplified a WordPress site is, however, you still have plenty of options for improving your blog. One of the major areas that advanced webmasters can fine tune is the loading speed of the site.

Why Site Speed Is Important?

The load time of your site may be a more important factor in the success of your website than you realize. It should be obvious that your visitors will be far happier with fast load times than slow ones. Beyond that, however, your load speed may actually have a direct affect on your site’s search engine optimization.

According to the official Google blog entry created on April 9th, 2010, Google will be using a site’s load speed as one of the factors in its search algorithm. In plain talk, that means that a faster loading site will rank better. While Google is the only major search engine that has announced that load speed will be a factor as of June, 2010, the other major search engines frequently mimic additions to Google’s search rankings.

Here Are Some Simple Tips For Speeding Up Your WordPress Blog :

Choosing A Reliable Hosting Plan

Sticking to a reliable hosting provider is crucial. This is why I usually recommend choosing a well-known hosting provider: it may cost more but it will save your time and money in the long run!

You may also consider going with some wicked hosting service like hosted exchange for example which usually means more reliable plan as well as other cool benefits as well.

Cleaning Your Code

Speeding up your WordPress blog can start with running through your code and cleaning it up in a few different ways. While the standard WordPress templates are fairly clean, they are also designed for “the average blogger.”

To make these templates easier to upload and simple enough for beginning webmasters to use, the code of WordPress blogs includes a long list of php references that could easily be hard coded or deleted entirely. Eliminating these php references will speed up how quickly your blog loads, and can also add to the stability of your site.

Clearing Out Your Plugins

Plugins and widgets can add some great functionality to your site, but they aren’t going to help you achieve the “fastest possible load time.” You certainly shouldn’t eliminate useful features from your site, but removing any unused plugins will make a significant difference in load time.

Add A Cache Plugin

While clearing out plugins that you don’t use is a great idea, one specific type of plugin should be added: a caching plugin. Cache plugins make large strides toward speeding up your WordPress blog by storing each of your posts directly on the server.

Normally, WordPress uses a database query to load your post, and this can result in a slow site load time if you have a lot of traffic. Beyond these tips for eliminating unnecessary database delays and clearing up messy code, you will also want to be sure that any elements, such as images, that you include are individually optimized.

I hope you would have liked reading this article and you attain the best possible loading speed for your wordpress blog. Do comment below if you have more tips or ways to speed up wordpress blog.

[If you liked reading this then you must consider reading : "How To Speed Up WordPress Blog In 3 Simple Steps".]

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Article Written By Ann Smarty

Hi! I am Ann Smarty, an SEO consultant and search blogger. If you like (or plan to start) guest blogging, check out Ann's community of guest bloggers to find plenty of people who are really interested in guest posts (and you won't be rejected!). You can Follow Ann On Twitter @seosmarty

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