Google prefers sites that load quickly. Although WordPress is a great blogging platform, but it is also a fact that its load time is higher than any Blogger blog or any static HTML site. The load time gets worse when it is configured improperly. A few months back, when I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress, my blog’s load time was so bad that it wasn’t good for my blog’s performance in SERPs. I then tried out several tricks by reading recommendations from experienced persons, and at last, I succeeded in improving my blog’s load time considerably. Today, I am going to share some tips with you that will help you out in improving the load time at your blog.
These tips are common, yet effective. Most WordPress users either ignore these factors or don’t know how they impact the load time of their blog. So after learning and applying the tips below, you will be able to improve your blog’s load time greatly, and it will improve your blog’s ranking in SERPs in turn.
Speeding Up WordPress
Choose a Light Theme: The first and most important approach to ensure that your blog loads faster is choosing a light theme. On the web, there are a lot of themes available for WordPress, but ot all are perfect. You need to choose a theme where scripts, including JavaScript and CSS, are few and the theme is simple and clean. Don’t look for beauty. Some themes look beautiful to the eye, but they contain a lot of scripts that negatively impact your blog’s load time.
When a theme contains different sliders, popups, news tickers, and other widgets, the scripts are also more numerous there. The more scripts there are, t, he longer it takes for a browser to download these scripts, and thus, your WordPress-powered blog’s load time goes up dramatically. Always remember that your visitors visit your blog for information, not for viewing beauty. So choose a simple and light theme to ensure that your blog’s load time is fast.
Hosting: The performance of your host’s servers also impacts the load time. When I moved to WordPress from Blogger, I chose HostGator because it is the most affordable and stable shared host, where resources allocated for accounts are the best among all other shared hosts. But during the last few months, my blog traffic improved greatly, and HostGator’s shared hosting failed to cope with the demand. To improve the load time, I upgraded my hosting to VPSa.
So, while choosing a hosting for your blog, first do some rough research and see what users are saying about the host. Then purchase the hosting. A crappy host will end up with the worst load time and uptime for your blog.
Optimize Images: I am still unable to fix the issues with images on my blog. In the beginning, I was unaware of image optimization and uploaded larger images. Images on your blog must be optimized, i.e., must be smaller in resolution and must be in the web-recommended format, like GIF. Remember that images eat a lot of bandwidth a,, nd they put a great load on your server.
Use a Caching Plugin: Caching plugins improve the load time of your blog up to a great extent, so you must install and use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. These plugins compress JavaScript and CSS, too, and they ensure that the browser downloads your blog quickly.
W3 Total Cache is more effective than WP Super Cache, but it sometimes breaks the CSS. If it alters the look of your blog, deactivate it, uninstall it, and use WP Super Cache instead.
Install WP Smush. This is a great plug that optimizes image sizes on your blog. The plugin is extremely simple to use. Just install and activate it. It doesn’t have any settings and starts working immediately. WP Smush. It’ll optimize images upon uploading.
Install WP Optimize: This plugin optimizes your blog’s database and keeps it lean and organized. In addition, it optimizes the tables ult quiin quick delivery of posts and other content from the database. Install WP Optimize from the WordPress plugin directory here.
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