Everyone hates a slow website and most internet users will head somewhere else if they encounter a site that loads slowly. If your site is painfully slow, then you will lose visitors to another site. Many internet users detest slow websites.
Is your WordPress site slow? Are you wondering how to solve this problem? This article will give you some advice on making your site load faster.
WordPress sites are having one of the best content management systems out there today. It is possible to make mistakes in the setting up process, which could cause problems with the speed of your site. Your site needs to be fast for ranking well in search engines and so that your subscribers, customers or readers can access your site in a quick way.
So now you are going to learn a few tasks that you can perform on your site to get it to work faster. Perhaps you are not confident with the technical side website maintenance. It really is very straightforward and you will be happy that you followed this advice because you will learn some great stuff. So, it’s time to get started.
Speed is important
If you have been managing a website for some time now, you will have realized that having an eye-catching format and thinking about where you will put certain things is essential to attracting new visitors. You want to put your most attractive attributes where the visitor will see them when he or she clicks onto your site. You would also be aware that if a page takes forever to load, most people will leave.
Some experts believe that you have a window of about three seconds before a visitor will click away and go to another site. This will happen on a higher level if your visitor came from another site that was linked to your site.
Another issue to consider is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Google now ranks sites based on site speed. So you might not just be losing visitors, your ranking in Google may fall as well and you will lose some more visitors. All site owners will tell you that they want to rank well on Google. This is understandable given that Google is the most popular search engine.
How to make WordPress faster
Maintaining the speed of your site is probably the most urgent task that needs to be done. Even after doing everything in this article, you must always keep a check on your site to make sure it is running fast enough. No-one wants to be losing visitors and not know it and you also don’t need your site to drop its ranking in Google without you have any idea.
Use a good caching plugin
The method that WordPress employs to load each page is called dynamic loading, so when someone clicks onto your site, the page will load all of its features, text, pictures, banners and video files by pulling these items from different places; the site’s image files, third party sites, the database and other files. This can often slow down your site.
However, if you use a caching plugin on your site, it will load pages much faster.
Use a CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a service that will copy your site to servers all over the world. What happens when a visitor clicks your site is that they will receive your site from the closest server. If they live in Melbourne, Australia, then the page is loaded from a server within that country. The set up process usually takes a few hours. If you decided to go with a CDN, you will see how much it helps the speed of your site. Your bandwidth usage will go down too.
Remove the plugins that you don’t need
You should only have the plugins that you definitely need installed on your WordPress site. Too many plugins can slow it down and some plugins can slow your site.
So you have to ask yourself; “do I really need all of these plugins?” Make sure you check your site’s speed and performance whenever you add a plugin. There are tools available free that can monitor how well your site is loading and performing. Two popular ones are Pingdom Tools or Google PageSpeed Insights.
When deciding which plugin you need, think about what they actually do for your site. Do they help your site gain more subscribers or customers? If not, then consider uninstalling it. There is also the risk that some plugins may not have been coded properly and this can put your site in jeopardy of being unprotected, which essentially leaves you open to unauthorized people getting access your site. To put it another way, you could be the victim of a hacker.
Use Gzip compression
Most people have heard of Zip files, these are files that have been compressed to a smaller size to create space on your hard drive. The larger the file is, the longer it will take to open or send. When digital cameras first came out, many people had trouble emailing their photos as they were so big that it took forever to send. However, if you knew how to compress files with a Zip program, you solved the problem.
Gzip is therefore, what you would use on your site to do the same thing explained above. Your files are compressed, ultimately making your site perform faster. When someone clicks on your site, all the files are immediately and automatically unzipped so that the visitor can see your page.
Place CSS and Javascript properly in the page
When a page is loaded on your site, quite a lot happens. Scripts are located and the HTML is parsed, resources load and your style sheets are rendered. If you are not familiar with JavaScript and HTML code and have no idea what CSS is, then you may need to do some research. Once you understand what is it you need to do and can follow a basic tutorial, which can be found online – you should be able to do this yourself.
Most website owners who are fluent in webpage code will tell you to keep your style sheets and your JavaScript separate. JavaScript should be as far down the page as possible, and your style sheets should be up the top. When the browser renders a page, it will render the CSS file first.
As for the JavaScript, it needs to be at the bottom; because the browser will not parse the other elements until the JavaScript has loaded. By carrying out the advice above, your site should run faster. If you don’t feel confident to make these changes, there is bound to be someone online who can talk you through it.
Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks
Pingbacks and Trackbacks are a great idea and WordPress is automatically linked via other blogs that have the same system enabled. A trackback will be created when another blogger links to your site within their post or article.
Disabling these are quite simple, and you will still receive an email when someone links to your site. Many website owners complain about SPAM being on the increase, which is probably another good reason to disable them. Go to your Settings menu and then Discussions.
Optimize database
Tidying up the database on your site is necessary maintenance and something you should be doing on a regular basis. Your time-frame is up to you, however this can be weighed on the number of visitors you have. Put simply, the more visitors you have, the more often you should optimize or archive your database.
Quite a lot of data that you do not want or need anymore gets left in the database. You may have posts that you updated and the draft copy will still be saved in the database. There could be lots of SPAM comments that need to be removed. Deleted plugins will often leave data behind that should be deleted. There are plugins for WordPress that will assist with optimizing the database.
I’m using Optimize DB for this and have been satisfied with what it does. I’m sure there are other plugins which do the same thing, so you don’t have to take my word.
Plugins for making WordPress faster
There are a few plugins that will assist you in getting your WordPress site to perform much faster. As great as WordPress is, it is not perfect and site owners need to do some work to get the best out of what it has to offer.
A list of the best WordPress plugins that will modify and speed up your site is below. Perhaps you have some favorite plugins that you would like to add or maybe we missed some that deserve mentioning, hit the comments section with your favorites, we would love to read your opinion.
W3 Total Cache
Easy Web Performance Optimization (WPO) using caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
See which plugins are slowing down your site. This plugin creates a performance report for your site.
BJ Lazy Load
Lazy loading makes your site load faster and saves bandwidth. Uses jQuery and degrades gracefully for non-js users. Works with both images and iframes.
Use Google Libraries
Hammy
Hammy speeds up your website by generating and serving resized images for your content area depending on content width.
GTmetrix for WordPress
GTmetrix can help you develop a faster, more efficient, and all-around improved website experience for your users. Your users will love you for it.
Ending thoughts
So now you know why a site that loads as fast as possible is very important. Whether you are in business or you are creating a site about the things that you love, if your site is running at optimum level then your readers and visitors will be happy.
You now have the tools to go ahead and get your WordPress site to run at lightening speed, and it is recommended that you use every tip provided here in this article. Most of them are very simple, some of them might require you to get some help from an expert or someone who has built a WordPress site.
You will definitely like these articles
Source: http://ift.tt/130O8Uq
No comments:
Post a Comment