10 Tips to Speed Up Your Wordpress Website Load Time

You can’t impress people with the great content you have on your Wordpress website  if it takes ages to load. Here are a few tips to ensure that people don’t turn away from your site for this reason at least!

1. Framework/theme

The theme you have installed in WordPress affects the speed of your site. Twenty Fifteen “framework” which is the default WP theme is very lightweight and quite speedy. However, bloated frameworks, which have tons of features that you will never use, not only slow your site but also produce a crawling error, so choose your theme with care.

2. Caching Plugins

Plugins provide most useful add-on features to your WordPress. In the category of Wordpress plugins, there is a category of cache plugins which drastically improve page loading time and the best thing is they are free and easy to use. I would recommend W3 Total Cache, as it has all the features you’ll need and is easy to install and use.

3. Optimize your database

You can simply use the WP-Optimize plugin or WP-DB Manager plugin, which will simply optimize your database that contains spam, post, revisions, drafts, tables, etc to reduce their overhead. You can also schedule dates for database optimization in these plugins.

4. CDN (Content delivery network)

CDN is a group of multiple servers on different locations that takes all your static files (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors visit your site by loading them in the browser as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible. You can use the CloudFlare type of free CDN to increase the performance.

5. Optimize your homepage to load quickly

The first page of your site or your homepage is the load quickly. Show excerpts instead of full posts; no. of posts on home page should be between 5-7. Remove unnecessary widgets, inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need. Your homepage should be clean and focused.

6. Optimize images automatically

The images on your site are one the most time taking and heavy to load. Especially, if you have some photo intensive website. Try to use the images which are small in size. Fortunately, there is a free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will automatically reduce the size of your images without reducing the quality of the images.

7. Install the Lazy Load plugin.

The Lazy Load plugin offers a smart solution to image rendering and management. In essence, it only loads images when they are visible to the user to decrease server bandwidth.

8.check for viruses or exploits in your website.

Malicious scripts are known to slow down the site loading speed. Theses scripts can be downloaded in your website when you use any un-official source of plugins and themes. Get rid of them with the Anti-Malware plugin in order to eliminate threats to your server.

9. Remove post drafts and revisions.

Please delete unwanted old draft posts as soon as possible using Bulk Delete, a plugin that enables you to delete post batches by status or user.

10. Delete and stop spam comments.

If you see your WordPress comment section, you would notice spam comments. Please clear them because they are slowing down your site’s loading capabilities. Delete your comments manually in WordPress, and defend against spam by using Anti-Spam plugin.