A slow site has its magic: it makes all your visitors (and clients) disappear!
A site’s loading time is one of its most important assets; a good speed will enhance your visitors’ experience when visting your site, and will most likely convert them into clients. If this wasn’t enough reason for you to think about your site’s loading speed, let me tell you something. Search engines’ (Google, Yahoo, Bing…) results are based in a mix of different characteristics, one of them being the user experience. In other words: if your site has a good loading speed, visitors will likely stick there; if they stick there, they are bound to become your clients. If more people visits you, the search engines will consider you as their new best friend.
But…how to accelerate your site? In this article we have compiled a list of 8 useful tips to speed up your WordPress site:
- Use a fast and clean theme
Picking the right WordPress theme can make a huge difference in the speed you see from your site. Some design themes have more features than you will ever need. Choose light, clean coded design theme and try to find a balance between the looks, functionality and speed.
- Enable caching, mify and CDN
Install a caching plugin, activate it and you will automatically see an improvement in your speed.You also have the option to enable CDN (Content Delivery Network) support to offload static files to fast data centers around the world.
- Optimize and resize images
The bigger your image, the slower your site will load and the more server resources you will use. When saving the image in your image editor make sure to resize the image to the exact dimensions you need it for your content.
- Choose the right Web host
People try to save a few dollars and compromise quality. Invest in a good web host and the right hosting plan as your server is the foundation and the first step towards having a speedy site. Also make sure to keep an eye on the uptime of your server.
- Use WP-CSS
Is a plugin that uses a shorthand technique. It allows you to confidently use import inside a CDD file and not worry about what happens on the user’s end. It will look through your style.css file and put any import files into it. This can make a difference in your site load time because it makes the file size smaller.
- Stay updated with the latest WordPress Version
You should always stay updated with the latest stable release of WordPress in order to boost performance of your site.
- Optimize your WordPress
To improve the performance of your WordPress install, make sure to regularly optimize the database and remove all the spam, trash and post revisions. WP-Optimize is a great plugin that helps you do just that. Also make sure to fight and eliminate those spam comments by using my guide. Last but not least follow this advice to keep your WordPress safe and secure.
- Reduce the use of External Websites and Scripts
Try to avoid relying on external scripts wheter it is directly or through the plugin. Some plugins take a lot of time to load depending on the server connection. They can often be the reason for page not loading properly if you are
experiencing high traffic.
In order to keep your site speed as fast as possible think like a minimalist; lean and simple. Avoid using so many items on your page: remove buttons, widgets, flashy ads and pop-ups. Keep those that really add value to your customers’ experience. Remember, they are have the patience to wait for a specific site to load. More often than not, other people offer the same service or information than you, so….don’t let them go!
Here at ClickIT we are experts on the CMS administration like WordPress, if you have any trouble with your page we are here to help you. Contact Us Now!
