If you have tons of users visiting your website you got to make sure that your website page loads fast. Slow page loading speed affects your SEO, conversions and page ranking. Even your sales performance is directly related to your page loading speed.
Make your WordPress site load faster for SEO
Related: How to improve to performance of WordPress
Caching
Why do want to cache your WordPress site?
As the traffic of your site goes up, the efficiency of your server will go down. Instead of adding a lot of servers to reduce your server load you can implement caching layers. A Cache stores data so future requests for that data can be served faster.
A caching plugin will store your posts and pages as static files so that your server doesn’t need to think every time it serves a page.
If you want your WordPress site to run fast and smoothly, install caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.
A browser caching also reduces server load and increases load speed. Browser caching stores website files on a local computer when a user visits the webpage.
Gzip compression
You can go for Gzip compression where your server sends your data in compressed form to your viewers browser. This can reduce load time by over 300% in some sites like Dwuser.com.
Gzip compression can be activated from your hosting cPanel. Even caching plugins like W3 total cache also offer this.
Use CDN
CDN is Content Delivery network. If you are not using CDN, you are basically putting stress on your server.
CDN distributes the static content your website like images and videos and puts them in locations closer to the people you are serving the content. It uses several servers around the world to better serve data to your viewers dependent on their location. Cached content is then served from theses superfast servers to your users to reduce the stress on your site and page speed dramatically.
This is very easy to incorporate when using services such as CloudFlare or Free CDN. W3 total cache can also incorporate CDDN.
Reduce and combine CSS and Javascript on WordPress
To make your sites load faster you need to reduce the amount of data being downloaded. When you write CSS or JavaScript it’s important to indent your code correctly using empty lines to group content and adding comments to provide context. However, when the browser reads your style sheets or JavaScript it doesn’t need comments and ignores comments, spaces or blank lines for indentation. All of these things are extra bytes that reduce the load time so it’s better to eliminate them as they are meaningless to the browser.
You need to reduce the amount of characters needed to represent your code without changing the meaning of the code. This refers to minification.
Concatenation refers to combining your CSS and Javascript files. You may split up your scripts or style sheets into multiple files for the sake of organization but each of those has to be requested separately. There is a cost for each connection established and each file set so often times it’s faster to join or concatenate all of your scripts or files into one file.
You can use Better WordPress Minify to compress CSS/JS/JAVA scripts for faster page load speed.
CloudFlare CDN also offers to combine both internal external files.
Delete unused plugins
Your server undergoes strain when a lot of plugins are being used when you blog is viewed. You need to regularly go through and make sure that any plugins you aren’t using are deactivated.
Reducing the number of Advertisements
Having excess of advertisements on your page also burdens your server. Reducing the number of ads might be difficult for people because ads on the web page are their source of revenue.
Image based and Javascript based ads can put a lot of strain on load times. You can use link ads or text ads which will help your servers load faster.
Google Adsense is served from fast servers, make sure that your ads are loaded asynchronously.
Image compression
If a user has a decent internet connection but it still takes twenty or thirty seconds to load a page, then your user will become frustrated and leave your site. So it’s important to take close attention to the images that are being used in your WordPress site.
Image compression is of two types
Lossy, where you lose image quality.
Lossless, where you don’t lose image quality.
Compressing images doesn’t always mean you are going to use poor quality images.
Wherever possible you should use lossy compression, but lossless compression is suffice for larger images.
You can use EWWW image optimizer which is a plugin that will reduce image size in WordPress including NextGEN, GRAND FlAGallery. This plugin will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.
WordPress Database optimization
Unfortunately when you delete unused plugins, spam comments or blog posts, the debris is left in WordPress database. This takes a lot of space in the database that reduces the loading speed. Leaving this type of data can lead to unnecessary passes when your server is browsing through your database to find a specific piece of content.
To prevent bloating your database with debris, you can use a plugin WP Database Optimizer which will clean up your WordPress Database.
You can also use the WP-DB Manager plugin, which can schedule dates for database optimization.
Remove your WordPress blog post revisions
Besides this, the revisions that you make in your blog posts are stored in the database. So if you make revisions to 100 blog posts in your WordPress, then these revisions will keep piling up until you remove them.
Revision Control is a plugin for WordPress which gives the user more control over the Revision functionality. Use the Revision Control plugin to make sure you keep post revisions to a minimum, set to 2 or 3.The plugin also allows the deletion of specific revisions via the Revisions post meta box.
Limit number of posts on home page
Make sure your visitor doesn’t have to load more than 10 posts on the homepage. Keeping the number of posts to a more practical amount will ensure fast loading.
Most WordPress themes use thumbnails on your homepage, so you should try to serve as few images as possible. If you manage to keep to less than 10 on your homepage, that would be great.
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