How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site in Five Easy Steps

How important is speed to your website? Google found that increasing load time by one half of a second decreased traffic by 20%. Needless to Say, it’s important. So how do you do it? How do you turn your “Homer Simpson” of a site into a “Michael Phelps”.  What you need to do if you want to speed it up is figure out what is bottlenecking your wordpress blog or site, and fix it. I have a few time-saving and helpful steps to follow that will speed up the process of speeding up your WordPress site.

1. Test your site. I recommend the free tool at tools.pingdom.com which does an excellent job of presenting what occupies your loading time in a user-friendly way. By typing in your website URL, you get load time, and how your site compares to the rest of the world. Pingdom Tools also provides an in-depth analysis of what elements take up how much time when your page loads . This is good for getting a sense of how to speed it up. Test multiple times, as results do vary based on server location. Also try their DNS tool to locate any DNS errors you may have.
2. Decrease content per page. I set a hard limit of three posts per page (which may one day rise to four if I can find other elements to speed me up). This keeps overall content-loaded to a minimum. Extra loaded posts means extra images, extra code, and more, and the more you load, the slower your page will load.
3. Check plugins. Get rid of the unused. Don’t leave junk to load. Simply dropping one plugin that was load-intensive on my homepage cut three to five seconds from the load time of the entire site. Remember to delete tables created in the database, and look for files that the plugins may have created. Deleting plugins is a good first step, but deleting the tables and created-files will really help.
4. W3 Total Cache. Total Cache is a great plugin that sets up all kinds of fancy caches I barely understand to somehow magically speed up my site. Though I can’t articulate how it works, it works well. It’s free, and there are several alternatives that work as well.
5. Use an Optimized Theme. The content of your site isn’t the only possible slow-to-load aspect of your site. Messy code and unnecessary elements hidden in bad WordPress themes can add entire seconds to your precious load time. Consider buying a premium theme (like one from Studiopress) to save valuable time, or use one of the many free and optimized WordPress themes available.
6. Surprise Sixth Step! Check this video Out. This lecture by Mashable’s Chief Technology Office is basically a guide to making your site as fast as lightening.
7. Subscribe to the App Store Chronicle. After all, we did share all this valuable info with you. Hopefully this helps you on your journey to a speedier site. This info shaved our time by six seconds.