10 Ways to Speed up your Free WordPress Website
So you’ve created your free WordPress website and you have perfected the design and functionality, but it is slow to load up and you are losing potential viewers who won’t wait around and feel their time is being wasted.
If your pages are taking too long to load, people are not going to wait. They expect lightning speed in their browsing activities and they are quick to move on if they get bored waiting for your content to appear. What can you do?
There are actually several things you can do to speed up your WordPress site’s loading time. Begin by finding a site that offers a free website speed test to find out just how long it is taking your pages to load. If it’s taking more than just a few seconds, something needs to be done. Here are some tips you can use to help increase your site’s loading speed:
All Plugins mentioned in this article are available in our Plugins Directory.
Adjust Your Theme
It’s possible, likely even, that your chosen theme is using PHP rather than HTML. Every time your page loads, it has to translate the PHP into HTML. You can install the WordPress Super Cache plugin to automatically convert your PHP into HTML.
Plugins Bogging You Down
Perhaps when you first built your free WordPress website, you went a little overboard with the plugins. Go through and get rid of any plugins you don’t need or use on a regular basis.
Check Your Web Host
Sometimes you get what you pay for in a web host. It could be that your web host is hosting more sites than it can efficiently. Do some research to determine the best website host to choose.
Control Your Image Size
If your images are large files, the chances are good that they could be slowing down the loading process for your site. Use a photo editing program to reduce the file size of your images.
Adjust Your Database
If your database is not optimized, it can really slow the loading time down for your site. If you know how, manually adjust your database. If you don’t know how, get a plugin that will do it for you like WP Database Optimizer which is in our Plugins Directory.
Disable Hotlinking
If people are copying your images and linking to your site, this will also drain speed from your loading time.
Post Revisions Are A Drag
Every time you revise a post, WordPress is adding a file to the database. Disable the “Post Revisions” option and get rid of old posts that have been revised. If the site doesn’t have to read and load them every time, it will speed up.
Combine Javascripts
Reduce the number of javascript codes you are running on your page. Often, five or six can be reduced to two or three, and that can make a big difference.
Compress the CSS
You can compress your CSS into a single file using special compressing tools online. You can also do this with your javascript.
Clean Your Options
One plugin you should install and keep is the “Clean Options” plugin. It will remove any remnants of deleted plugins.
There are other ways to improve your site’s speed, but these 10 steps will help you create a website that loads with impressive speed, and will stay that way.
About the Author
Tammy Magarie is a little piece of sunshine from Jupiter, Florida. Her bubbly personality allows her to express herself freely in hopes that her writing will impact someone in any way they can relate. Tammy has been writing about online commerce for over 5 years. Her friends and family are her “test lab” for the newest ideas and trends. They pride themselves as being on the “cutting edge” of tech knowledge by being in Tammy’s “inner circle”. Tammy’s loves being the first to write about a new website, tool or success story online. When she is not at her computer researching and writing Tammy is out on the water as an avid wind surfer and swimmer. “The beach is my lifeline…it’s my kind of coffee break”