Make Your WordPress Website Load Faster

by Miguel · October 30, 2011

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First, test your current site loading time, to compare after optimization.To test for your site loading time, I recommend using the following free services.

Pingdom – Great tool to test for site speed. Pingdom offers DNS health check and free alert service that notifies you when your website is up or down. Great!
GTMetrics – Provides analysis of your website by giving grades on both PageSpeed and YSlow. In addition to measuring speed.
WebPageTest – Recommended by Google for their Page Speed Service comparison. You can also test how your site performs on mobile devices and on different browsers.
Google Developers – Google developers is a page speed online test site, which provides some great insights on what you need to do to improve your sites performance.

Now that your done testing your site speed, it’s time to move on to the next step.

WordPress plugins to optimize speed performance.

1. WP Minify – Compress The CSS and JS grabs JS/CSS files in your generated WordPress page and passes that list to the Minify engine.

2. W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. – Installing a cache plugin is “mandatory” for better site speed performance. Cache plugins Improve site performance and user experience by caching – browser, page, objects, database, and more.

3. WP Smush.it – Images slows down a website significantly . This plugin reduces image file sizes and improve performance by compressing the files. All you have to do is install and activate, nothing else.

4. WP Optimize – During the course of time, your WordPress database piles up a lot of bytes by keeping post revisions, among other things. These post revisions may occupy a lot of space and may hurt your websites performance. This simple but effective plugin allows you to clean up your database and optimize it without an need for technical knowledge. In addition, it also comes with other features to improve your WordPress sites security.

5. Choose a Good Web Host – HostGator The selection of a good web host can improve blog load speed.

6. Uninstall unused or useless WordPress plugins – WordPress plugins are great, and makes our lives a lot easier. but they “slow” down your sites performance and some can eat up lots of server resources.

7. Add A Content Delivery Network (CDN) — Is important to speed up your website loading time a CDN is one of the best way to improve blog performance. Unlike normal web hosting, where your content is housed on a single server, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) takes the blog’s static content (CSS and Javascript files, downloadable objects, applications, real-time media streams, etc.) and replicates it through hundreds of servers around the world instead of a single host at one locatioon. To make sure your blog loads fast for every reader no matter where they are.