5 Simple Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Blog
If you are a blogger, you probably know the importance of speeding up your WordPress blog. If not, then you must understand it right now. Speed is a very important factor of your blog, that you should properly deal with. It can increase your blog’s user experience and engagement. Speed is also a very important metric in SEO. Google and Bing loves faster search engines, so should you.
In this article, I am going to show you 5 easy and simple, yet very effective ways to speed up your WordPress blog. If you apply these proven techniques in your blog, I can guarantee you huge increase in your WordPress Blog’s Speed, as these tricks have worked in my blog too.
Check the speed of your blog, before starting to read these article. You can check it from Google Page Speed or GTMetrix. Note down your speed score in a paper. Read this article carefully and apply these speed up techniques in your blog, and re-check the speed of your site from the above mentioned sites. I don’t need to say anything more. You yourself will see the huge increase in speed with your own eyes.
1) Always Use A Premium or a Custom Theme
Each and everyone who owns a blog uses a theme in their blog of their choice, but while choosing a theme, no one takes things much into consideration. You will probably say yes to a free theme, but I will say NO. Don’t use a free theme in your blog as they are no way optimized for speed. Always go for a paid or premium theme, or if you have knowledge about designing then definitely consider designing your own theme.
If by chance you have no other way than using a free theme, then customize each and every element of your theme and optimize it for speed.
2)Use Minimum External Scripts
This is yet an another important factor that determines speed of your blog. Whatever web host you use, or whatever CDN do you pay for, too many external scripts can drastically slow down any blog’s speed. So, never get into the fascination of embedding too many external scripts in your site. This will do not much help to you but in turn will drastically comprise with your site’s speed.
Only use the most important and much necessary scripts like Facebook, Alexa, Google Analytics, etc in your blog. Try to realise what is more important, useless features or valuable speed.
3)Use Optimized Images
By optimized images, I mean to make your blog optimized for speed in terms of the images that you use. Always use scaled images in you blog. Never go for high resolution images, as they will do no good to you. Also remember never to use too many images in your blog unnecessarily. Google and Bing have oficially recommended to keep the size of you posts below 150kb and not use too many high resolution images in it unnecessarily. But if there is a need for it, then definitely go for it, but consider reducing the size of the images by a great tool named Yahoo! Smush.it.
4)Use a CDN
CDN is a Content Delivery Network, whose main aim is to speed up your site and improve it’s security with its simple yet fantastic technology. A CDN stores a copy of your site in its server’s that are widely distributed throughout the World, thereby making it easy for your visitors to fetch your site, and reduce the loading time of your site drastically.
To speed up a WordPress blog, there are many paid as well as free CDN’s. But I personally use and prefer CloudFlare, as it provides premium quality service for free. And setting up Cloudflare for you site is the easiest thing you can imagine. So dont wait for anything, go to the site, grab a free account, and start setting up Cloudflare for your blog.
5) Use Caching Plugins
Caching plugins claim to increase the speed of your WordPress blog, by even more than 10x. At least some plugin’s literally do so or even better. I personally have used many caching plugins in my blog, and found that W3 Total Cache stands out from the rest. It is a great plugin that effectively performs various nifty jobs like minifying your CSS, HTML, JS, object caching, leveraging WordPress caching, etc.
I personally recommend that each and every WordPress blog must use a caching plugin. And I personally recommend W3 Total Cache for its exquisite performance I myself have obtained in my own blog. Even Mashable uses this same plugin to speed up its own blog. So why shouldn’t you.
These quick, easy and simple techniques will help you to speed up your own blog. These techniques are very effective as I personally have tested them in my own blog and is very happy to increase my own blog’s speed with these. Share how much have you been able to speed up your WordPress Blog with the help of this article?
This post has written by Aritra Roy, who is an eminent blogger at daPazze, which is a Technology blog focusing on Blogging, SEO, Social Media, Tutorials and more. He invites you to check his ultimate guide to speed up WordPress using 15 simple yet proven ways.
