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“.]
Thanks Mr. Darrel Ellis.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.
can you suggest any good fast web host???
Implementing all the above points would definitely speed up the blog but still there are few more things like using minimum javascripts and using static post sharing buttons etc which can make reduce the blog loading time.
hi ann,
I’m a big fan of yours 🙂 since the day I’ve read your famous hub, then eventually followed your posts on sej. but anyway, there are some tools that may come in handy when it comes to site speed, like seositecheckup and pingdom. well, that’s the tools I use in checking mine, since seositecheckup also gives recommendations on how to tweak possible problems within a blog. hope that add something of value to you guys.
regards,
jason
Hi Ann , how to clean the code that is not used or damaged. is there any software that is able to perform these tasks? thank you once if applicable.
Well, particularly I think something else we should take into account to know the reasons why we need to improve the loading time of our site is that Google takes into account in the sense that they take statistics of each of its users . Depending on the average time duration of a user on our site, that gives Google to understand his experience and of course, the quality of our site. For that reason, among many others, we should worry a lot about this issue. We must not forget that the cache system is essential to have it. Greetings!
Thank for these helpful tips. I did it and they seems working 🙂
I also did a post on 10 Tips to Speed Up WordPress Blog and I think I would have also added point of Reliable Webhost
I agree that the loading speed of the site is very important.
specially to cleaning code, I still haven’t qualify
great post! 🙂 I use W3Total Cache to speed up my photography blog!