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“.]
i try to use only that plugins that are worthy enough and brings me something useful…too much plugins take a hell lot of time to load and it spoils the visitors mood
I mentioned this in another blog post also, which dealt with improving WordPress Load time. Over at Dev’s blog Technshare, it got suspended because of the related post plugin:
“Hello Everyone, 21 June,10 was a very sad day for me, a very sad one indeed. Why? because my my blog suspended for hours. Yesterday i saw my hostgator account got suspended because of high server load and the same time my net stopped working (what a.. bad luck).
Hostgator – One of the most Reliable Hosting I have ever seen, they are very reliable.
What now happened?
The problem was of high server load. Today i come to know Yet another related posts plugin causing the high server load. I just removed the yet another related posts plugin. Now i’m using wp related posts plugin. I’m also using W3 Total cache and clean options plugin to reduce the server load.”
As you can see, the related post plugin caused the high server load.
Nabeel
Good post, Ann. I also referred to some tips optimizing Speed for WordPress blog a month ago. It has some similar points with this one.
http://tek3d.org/optimize-speed-for-wordpress-blog
Nice tips Ann.W3 total cache and super cache plugins can really improve page lood time.WP Sumush.it and jQuery Lazyload plugins can also help you to improve page load time.
jQuery Lazyload plugins not help your site faster, it make you feel that but it’s Not 🙂
Ya, the lazyload plugin just fools you by making you feel that the site is faster but actually it doesn’t helps in speeding up in any way…It just loads them in background and when you scroll down, it starts appearing immediately just like a hover effect..So nothing there like speeding up the blog using lazyload plugin.
There is also one bad thing about it…Sometimes, it doesn’t loads the images even the person have scrolled the page. I just experienced this thing while I was looking on famousbloggers blog that uses this plugin..His thumbnail pictures in the sidebar didn’t loaded.
How do we make the jQuery lazy load WP plugin to work with W3 Total cache plugin?
Why you would like to use the lazy load plugin? If you are thinking that it improves your blog speed then you are completely wrong. It just makes you feel that way but it doesn’t helps in improving your blog speed in any way.
I think the question to ask is how much will page speed influence our rankings.
My wordpress blog gets cleaned out regularly just to make sure everything is running fast. That process includes deleting unwanted plug-ins and validating my code.
Ann, Great advice, I always new speed was important but ever since Google went on record to let us know they are now factoring it in, I have taken it much more seriously. I have deleted all unnecessary plugins and that has helped. I will have to look into the caching plugin. Is there any downside to using a caching plugin?
Also you can set to load all your script to load at end
For us, limiting the number of iframes sped things up for us dramatically. When we blog locally, we try to include a Google map, Flickr slideshow, etc., be we found these things were slowing down our blog.
The second point is absolutely true and not only for WordPress blogs, but also for the ones hosted on the Blogger platform. I was surprised by how fast my site started to go after making a small code clean up. Optimizing just few lines of code can give you a good boost in speed, which is always welcomed.
I particularly like the point about caching plugins. Blogs that take a long time to load oftentimes become avoided by readers.