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Just a few weeks ago, Google announced that website speed is now used to determine search engine ranking.  So if you want your website builder to perform professionally and get you on page one of search engine results, you need to make sure your site is loading and running as quickly as possible.

There’s also another important reason for speeding up your website, aside from SEO.  A fast website enhances your visitors’ browsing experience, encouraging them to stay on your site for longer and hopefully click on your ads or convert into customers.

It’s easy to see why exploding your website’s speed is vital for all round success.  So here are 10 effective ways to boost your website’s speed and performance:

1.   Check The Speed of Your Website

The first thing you need to do is find out how well your site is performing.  Are you one of the fastest websites on the internet?  Or is your search engine success being compromised by an inefficient website?  One way to do this is to go to Google Webmaster Tools, click on the dashboard, then labs, then site performance.  This will give you the average load time for your pages, which is what Google uses when ranking your content, and display where you rank in comparison to other websites.

Now you know how well your site is performing, you can work on speeding it up to ensure you hit the top of the search engine results.

2.  Install a Caching Plug In For Optimal Website Speed

WP Super Cache is one of the most popular caching plug ins with professional website builders and can make your site much faster.  Caching is basically when dynamic content from your site is temporarily stored and made static, to allow your pages to be accessed much more quickly.

This plug in creates static html files to prevent the continual processing of heavy WordPress PHP scripts.  This reduces the load on your server, speeds up your site considerably and helps manage large traffic volumes, particularly great if you’re experiencing a traffic surge from a recent publicity campaign.

3.  Get Rid of Any Unused Plug Ins

If there are any plug ins you don’t use anymore, these can really slow down your website speed due to the drain on your database.  Only keep what’s necessary and remove any unused software.

4.  Use the Clean Options Plug in

There’s nothing like a bit of spring cleaning to speed up your website.  Clean Options ensures that any deleted plug ins are removed completely from your database, freeing up valuable space and ensuring your site can run faster.

5.  Store Your Images Offsite

Images and video clips can cause a huge drain on your site.  One solution is to store these heavy files offsite with a third party, which can really help to boost the load time of your site by reducing bandwidth consumption.  The WP-Offload plug in is ideal, offloading images and videos to a SteadyOffload account.  Once you’ve opened your free account, use this plug in to offload via the plug in administration menu.

6.  Embed Your Images and Videos for Optimum Speed

Another way to offload your images and video is to upload them to a sharing site, such as Flickr, YouTube and Google Video.  Then you can simply use the embedding codes to add them to your site.  This dramatically frees up your database and ensures a faster load time and speed for your website.

For more advice on how to use embedding codes this article has some simple tips on how to add video to your website.

7.  Compress Your CSS For More Speed

CSS is a type of file that contains any information about the layout, font and style of your website.  By compressing your CSS files, you can dramatically optimize the speed of your site.  The CSS Compress plug in automatically does this for you and avoids the need for manually rewriting scripts that any professional website builder would find challenging.

8.  Optimize Your Database for Peak Performance

The size of your database can dramatically affect your website’s speed and download performance.  Whilst you can configure your database manually, it’s much easier to use the Optimize DB plug in, which automatically does the job for you, reducing the size of your database and optimizing its performance.

9.  Banish Spammers!

Not only is spam a nuisance for your readers, it can also clog up your website and slow it down considerably.  Use the Akismet plug in, one of the most effective tools for getting rid of spammers, to prevent them from using up your valuable resources and reducing your website speed.

10.  Is your host slowing your website down?

It’s a fact that some website hosts offer a more efficient and quicker service than others.  If your website is continually running slowly, consider switching your host or upgrading to a better package.  To find out the various hosting options available and which ones professional builders of websites are choosing, this article Which Web Host Do I Choose has all the answers you’ll need.

Don’t forget that all of the plug ins mentioned in this article are available to download for free from our resources and plug ins page.