I decided to popup into your faces again today, and this time I decided on showing up very early! And in today’s post, I simply am going to share with you 5 great tips to speed up your wordpress blog!
For the newbie bloggers out there, you might be wondering and asking yourself the one-million-dollar-question: what has speed got to do with the overall success of my wordpress blog?
You can almost trust that the speed of your blog has everything to do with the overall success of your wordpress blog!
You see, with the ability to install plethora plugins for different purposes on WordPress, one can easily get distracted by the features attached to each of those plugins, thereby installing as much as 35-plugins – just as I did sometimes in 2013 when I was getting all started on the web – which really does have an adverse effect on the performance of your blog.
Believe it or not, you only have a few seconds to hook a visitor to your website and really get them to stay away from hitting the “back” button on your website. And if I were you, I’d make their visits count at all times!
Though, I have seen and I have read countless articles from top bloggers advising newbie bloggers to take the design, imagery, and content of their blogs really seriously if they were to capture the hearts of such visitors. While I think that to be a great advice, I also felt none of those would really matter if they are unable to reach your most priced content due to slow website loading.
Gosh!
You can’t believe I forgot where I got the below statistics from. Well, doesn’t mater, but you can trust that I didn’t write that. I found it online…hmmm I think on HowToMakeMyBlog[dot]Com. Not sure though.
“53% of mobile visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load according to a Google study published in September 2016. Page loading time is also one of the ranking factors Google uses to determine which content will show on top of their search results.”
Recently, I noticed a great loss of traffic on my website, and on closely analyzing what could be the problem for such a huge loss, I realize that my website was excruciatingly and profusely sluggish.
How come, you might ask?
Well, it took a whooping 14seconds for my website to load up my contents…now this led to a huge decline on the huge traffic juice I normally gets from my referral sources.
That was crazy!
It really was!
Did you just ask to know how fast loading is your content right now?
Great question!
The best place to start improving your wordpress blog’s speed is to check what your current load time looks like, then you can use the metrics and advice provided via the below tools to fix your website speed performance.
Now that’s really what you need to know to get started with optimizing your wordpress site for speed.
Read this: 5 Simple tricks to Keep Your Blog Secure
5 Tips to Speed Up Your WordPress Blog
While there are many speed optimization and boosting tips out there, I have decided to share with you just 5 of the most basic, yet power tips to speed up your wordpress blog!
Here you go:
1: Stop Installing Videos on Directly to Your Server
Many newbie bloggers make the mistake of uploading videos and other large files directly into their wordpress blog. And based on personal research, I have found out that doing that always slow down your site as it adds to your site’s overall bandwidth.
So if you really intend to maximize these tips to speed up your wordpress blog then you’d be better off uploading on online cloud storage systems like Google Drive, Dropbox, Mediafile. There are a bunch of them out there. You only need to look around for them.
As soon as you upload your works/files on those platforms, what you want is to extract the shareable links, then paste it into the desired spots in your wordpress writing editor.
For videos, you can easily search for video you want to use on YouTube. There are chances that whatever video you are looking for has been uploaded on YouTube. Just right click, then click “Copy URL in current timezone” and simply paste the URL into your wordpress writing editor. The video would automatically load up, and you would now be able to publish your posts with videos gotten from YouTube.
2: Minify HTML, CSS and Javascript
This is the process of cutting out white spaces from code wherever it is possible.
Although spacing out your codes make for a good readable experience for your blog readers, it doesn’t mean a thing for servers and browsers as long as its valid and executes without error.
So, instead of going into your wordpress editor to manually edit your codes, you could always use plugins like WP Fastest Cache, WP Minify or even WP Total Cache to handle minifying ad caching your codes at run-time.
3: Optimize Database Tables
Most of the time, there are lots of information that might have become really obsolete and that you do not have business having on your wordpress database. In cases like this, optimizing your database tables is always the right thing to do.
The simplest way to explain and view optimizing database tables is to look at it from the perspective of defragging your computer or changing the oil in your car. It simply helps free up unnecessary file spaces on your wordpress database, thereby speeding up your wordpress blog and making it run optimally.
There are two different ways you could optimize your wordpres database tables – manually or automatically.
The first one is via login into your server cpanel and to phpMYAdim area to manually clean up the database tables. Or you could automatically free up these database tables by installing plugins to help you automate the process. Plugins like WP-DBManager and WP-Optimize helps you optimize, repair, backup, and easily restore your database. I prefer to use the later though as it helps to remove and thrash post revisions, useless “spam” comments, un-approved comments, and other unnecessary file items.
4: Use a Theme that is Optimized for Speed
Sometimes, or should I say most times, the culprit to a lagging and slow website is the theme being used on such wordpress blogs. There are some themes that have been overly designed and coded – sure it makes your blog beautiful, but it also drives people away from beholding its beauty due to sluggishness in loading up your content on time.
The simple thing to do here is to find simple and soft coded themes in place of such heavily coded themes. They would eventually speed up your wordpress blog over 200% if you decide to make the move.
Generally speaking, Studiopress, Themify, and even Elegant’s Divi Theme are well optimized for speed. In the past, i have used Schema theme on one of my blogs and it helped in improving my blog’s load time over 95%.
5: Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
These is another powerful way of optimizing and speeding up your wordpress blog.
It simply connects and speed up your wordpress blog loading time across all countries of the world.
Usually, the speed of connecting to your blog is dependent on the location of your web host server.
So if your web host is located in Nigeria, it simply means that your web pages would open very fast to the people in your Geo-location than it would to people from United States or United Kingdom.
This is where using a CDN or Content Delivery network comes into the equation of solving and speeding up your wordpress blog.
WP Beginner defined a CDN to be “A network made up of servers all around the world. Each server will store “static” files used to make up your website. Static files are unchanging files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript, unlike your WordPress pages which are “dynamic” as explained above.”
So basically, anytime a visitor visit your page, they get served a static(s) from a server closest to them. This simply means that your web host will be twice as fast since the CDN is doing a large chunk of the work.
Conclusion
I have just shared with you five cool tips to speed up your wordpress blog. But you will have to get to work asap if you truly are concerned about speeding up your wordpress blog.
However, you really would love to automate things, then installing plugins might just be your best bet. Our friend at BloggingWizzard[dot]Com has got you covered here.
Let me know what you think in the comment below. Thanks!