To
speed up your website, is to have happy visitors and happy Google,
isn't that true? A website that loads fast for its visitors gains
credibility and traffic much faster than those that do not. So, how
do we do that?
Fast
Website And Slow Website Image - Googlebot Watching Them Load
Maintaining
your WordPress blog itself is a task that needs regular attention. On
top of that, publishing fresh content on a regular basis is a task
enough to easily keep you busy for a few hours.
But
what is the point of writing fresh, well written and exciting content
if your visitors aren’t happy about the way your website loads?
What is the point of putting so much hard work into design and
content if Google is not happy because your website loads too slow?
You
and I both know that website speed is important. Also, as you
continue to put more and more content and images into your website,
the load on your server increases and your website becomes slow. We
also know that slow loading of your website hurts your SEO, as it is
one of the factors Google uses in the ranking process.
When
you are running a WordPress powered website, you can be on top of the
game with some awesome plug-ins and a few tips and tricks. You can
speed up your WordPress, optimize your resource usage and also,
protect yourself against some vulnerabilities.
Speed
Up WordPress To Make Your Website Load Faster
Before
you follow this tutorial and start using some of the awesome plugins
and services to speed up your WordPress and improve your website
loading time, I have two questions to answer for you:
Is
it going to be a quick fix? No.
Will
it break something on my website? Probably! And if you aren’t
confident that you can do it, seek help from someone you think knows
the stuff.
I
think that it’s better to do this exercise and to fix any glitches,
once and for all, so your visitors and search engines can have good
feeling about your website. Don’t you think?
I am
now going to share with you a few awesome WordPress plugins and a few
optimization tips for WordPress that is going to help you speed up
your website and keep your readers happy. I am speaking from
experience and I know these will help you because they have certainly
helped me.
1.
First, Know How Fast Your Website Loads
To
be able to know whether or not you are making progress as you walk
through this tutorial, you need to know the current loading time of
your website. You need a tangible way to measure your improvements
along the way, don’t you?
Some
people use Firebug in combination with YSlow on Firefox browser to
know a detailed information on how long it takes to download your
website and how much bandwidth it uses etc.
However,
I prefer to use these online services for that purpose and I think
they are not only easy to use, they are fun to use as well:
- Pingdom Tools
- WebPageTest.org
- Google Pagespeed Insights
- GTMetrix
All
of these services give you slightly different numbers and
recommendations and that is why I use them all. But if you are just
starting, you can begin with one and have fun testing your website’s
loading speed.
Make
a note of the information you gather by testing your website through
these above services. Things like, page size, page load time, YSlow
grade etc. That way, you will be able to track your progress as you
follow this tutorial.
2.
Save Pictures in the Right Format
A
picture is worth a thousand words and so, we all love using images on
our websites. Our readers also love pictures along with search
engines. However, it is important to make sure the pictures you are
loading in your website, are optimized.
Image
format is an important aspect of your overall website optimization
work. There are only three most popular image extensions – .png,
.jpg and .gif. But what you should do is, based on the type of
picture, either use .jpg or .png because these are the most optimal
image formats.
Since
.jpg is the smallest in size when it comes to pictures taken with a
camera, I prefer to use this format. However, if I create a graphic
or add some text to images (such as quotes and things like that),
then I save it as .png and .jpg both and whichever has smallest size
without losing quality, I use it.
If
you don’t pay attention to the image formats, this can make your
website images bulky and unmanageable as your website grows. It’s a
good idea to be smart about it right from the beginning.
3.
Do Not Make WordPress Resize Your Images
Whether
you get your images from image repositories or you shoot your own
pictures, usually the images are pretty larger in dimensions.
However, the width of your website (and your blog content area) is
usually much smaller when compared with the image width.
If
you load your images in AS IS condition, you force WordPress to
resize your image to fit your window which is a lot of work at the
time of page loading. You don’t want to put that stress on your
server.
So,
it is important that you resize your image to the exact width and
height that you desire for it to have when it is displayed on your
web page. You can use any image editor such as Photoshop for resizing
your images. I use Paint.Net which is a free program and it does a
great job.
Once
you have resized the image, upload it and when you are inserting it
into a page or a blog post, make sure you select the “Full Size”
option so the dimension is specified correctly for the page to load
the image without trying to resize it again.
4.
Install WP Smush.It To Optimize Your Website Images
In
spite of above two steps, images are still one of the things that
cause most of the page loading time delays for your website pages.
So, there is a bit of more optimization that is still possible.
Even
though you have the correct dimensions of the image specified and
have resized it to fit correctly before uploading it, it is also
important that you use images in such a way that they are of the
smallest possible file size without losing image quality.
Let’s
understand this a bit more.
Usually,
any picture contains along with it a lot of additional information
such as information about the camera, the lens used, date and time
etc. This piece of information isn’t really needed along with your
image when you are loading it on your pages.
So,
in order to optimize your images to strip out extra information, you
need WP Smush.it plugin which is designed to use the Yahoo! API to
reduce the size of your images without losing any quality as soon as
you upload an image to your blog.
Do
you think this will help you improve your website page loading time?
You bet!
Once
you have installed the plugin and activated it, go to your WordPress
Admin Dashboard and go to Media > Bulk Smush.It option. Use this
to smush all the existing images in your media library. Please note
that the service will smush images that are less than 1MB in size. It
doesn’t work with larger images.
5.
Install & Configure W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin
Unless
you have a membership website (where things get a bit more complex),
you need a caching mechanism for your website no matter how much
traffic you have. Otherwise, imagine how much load your server has to
go through each time somebody is trying to access your website.
What
a cache plugin like W3 Total Cache does is, it simply saves the pages
rendered by the web server whenever somebody accesses the page for
the first time and then shows it to the next user. That way load time
is significantly reduced for the cached pages because the server
doesn’t have to compile the whole code every time a user visits a
page.
W3
Total Cache does a great job of caching and much more. When you
install and activate it, you will also have options to compress
(minify) your HTML, CSS and Javascript code which is an additional
benefit. W3 Total Cache also allows you to configure CloudFlare and
CDN services easily which is very valuable as your website traffic
expands into other parts of the world.
While
the detailed settings of this plugin is beyond the scope of this
tutorial (and I am planning another post about that in near future),
you can learn about configuring W3 Total Cache by visiting this
article by Ansh.
6.
Empower Your Website With CloudFlare Rocket Loader
A
few months ago, I wrote a blog post specifically about CloudFlare and
how much difference it made to my website’s loading time. If you
would like to read more about it, check out this post.
CloudFlare
works really well and configuration of CloudFlare becomes very easy
when you have W3 Total Cache installed.
CloudFlare
not only brings security benefits to the table, but also a basic CDN
service that allows your website pages to load much faster using the
distributed network of servers that CloudFlare uses around the world.
Last
but not the least, the Rocket Loader of CloudFlare is the reason why
CloudFlare is so awesome. You enable Rocket Loader and if things work
out well, you will see instant improvement in your website’s
loading performance by at least 50% on most cases. And guess what?
All this for free!
7.
Host Objects On Your Server Instead Of Hot-Linking
Although
it’s not possible to completely avoid this without losing on a few
features, you should pay attention to this aspect as much as
possible.
Whenever
you include an object such as a script or an image, the browser needs
to serve an additional DNS request for that website. This usually
adds to the page loading time. That means, if you can host that code
or that image on your own server, you reduce that http trip for your
reader’s browsers helping your website load a bit faster.
For
example, when you are promoting an affiliate product or a service, it
is a good idea to not just copy and paste the code that is given to
you. Instead, look if the code refers to an image and if it does,
download it, optimize it using Smush.it and then upload it to your
blog. This will help you be in control.
8.
Split Comments Into Multiple Pages
If
you are getting a lot of comments on your blog, it simply means you
are having a good engagement and it’s a great thing to happen.
Congratulations!
However,
you may want to split your comments onto multiple pages because
loading all comments in a single go will cause your page to load much
slower. Also, loading all comments in one page makes your page too
large.
You
can set the option to break comments into multiple pages using your
WordPress Admin dashboard by going to Settings -> Discussion menu
item.
9.
Reduce The MySQL Overhead By Leveraging WP-CONFIG
Some
of the things that WordPress does by default causes your website to
do unnecessary lookups into your MySQL database adding to the
overhead. Some of those lookups can be reduced by leveraging your
wp-config.php file located under your website’s home directory
(usually the /public_html directory under your website’s root).
Also,
when you are editing your blog posts and pages, WordPress keeps
storing post revisions which occupy a lot of space and eventually
slow down your MySQL performance.
Here
are a few things you can add in your wp-config.php file to reduce
some of those overheads:
/***
WordPress URL Settings to avoid database call each time. ***/
define('WP_HOME',
'http://www.YourWebsite.com');
define('WP_SITEURL',
'http://www. YourWebsite.com');
/***
Disable post revisions and keep your database clean ***/
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',
false);
WARNING:
If you don’t understand this, then it is not for you. Do not do
something you do not understand because it can break your website.
10.
Limit The Number Of WordPress Plugins Installed
If
you don’t know it yet, this is your opportunity to know that the
more plugins you have installed, the more overhead your website is
going through. While plugins are installed for a reason, it is
important to know which plugins are really needed and which ones can
be removed.
If
you have a few plugins that are not serving a great deal, it is a
good idea to get rid of them and help your website speed up a bit
more.
You
should know that deactivating your plugin will not help. Even if you
deactivate a plugin, it is still loaded in memory. So, if you don’t
need a plugin, you need to remove it completely.
11.
Optimize Your MySQL Database Regularly
Depending
upon your publishing schedule and the comments engagement, you may
decide to do this on a weekly basis or on monthly basis. However,
optimizing your MySQL database is an important activity to help
speed up your WordPress website.
There
are two ways to do it and either way should work fine. One way is to
use a free plugin called WP Optimize (or any other similar plugin)
and the other option is to use the phpMyAdmin tool from your cPanel
account.
If
you choose to use the plugin, the work is simple. Activate the plugin
and then go to Tools > Optimize DB menu item and click on Optimize
Now. That’s all. It will optimize your database tables momentarily
and you are done!
I
prefer the other option because I don’t want to add another plugin
to my website just for this purpose. This method requires me to log
into my cPanel account and then start the app called phpMyAdmin.
Once
phpMyAdmin is started, select all the tables by clicking on the check
boxes on their left hand side and then scroll down to the bottom of
the page. You should now be able to choose the Optimize Table option
from the drop-down menu. Select the option and this will optimize
your database size.
12.
Empower Your Website With A CDN Service Like MAXCDN or CDN77
There
is a reason why I mentioned this option last. And the reason is
simple – it’s requires you to allocate budget to do this
(although it’s not much).
I
don’t want to explain a lot here about this topic because I already
wrote two detailed posts about the importance of using a CDN and how
much impact it makes on your website’s overall page loading speed.
For your reference, I am providing the links to those posts here so
you can check them out:
- Blazing Fast And Secure Website Using MaxCDN And CloudFlare
- How To Increase Your Website Speed With CDN77 And CloudFlare
As
you see, I wrote about two CDN service providers through those two
posts and both are great providers with great prices. I use MaxCDN
for the obvious reasons that they are the best as I found out through
experience. However, CDN77 is also a great service with great
support.
You
will see an immediate improvement in your website loading speed when
you implement a CDN service.
Conclusion
As
you follow these steps, you will not only make your WordPress
stronger, secure and better, you will be able to give a better
experience to your website visitors as well. When your WordPress
website loads faster, Google will like it too and you will see
improvement in your search engine rankings as well.
Therefore,
it’s worth the investment of your time and efforts to get this
done. I highly encourage you to pay attention to the details I’ve
just shared with you and I am sure you will be glad you did.
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