How To Speed up Your WordPress Site
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How To Speed up Your WordPress Site[/caption]When Google made their “page speed is now a ranking factor” announcement, it wasn’t a significant new ranking factor, but it is significant because it means Google wants to use usability metrics to help rank pages. Your site speed should be a priority as slow sites decrease customer satisfaction and research has shown that an improvement in site speed can increase conversions.
Let’s face it, no matter how clever your website, and how amazing your content is, if your pages load at a snail’s pace then you can’t help but provide a bad user experience. This will not only affect your search engine ranking (as Google factors site speed into its algorithm), but also the retention rate of existing customers, and level of acquisition of new customers. Fortunately for us, there are many ways to improve the speed of a WordPress website.
With nearly every prolific blogger and WordPress user offering quick tips for speeding up your site, it’s easy to get bogged down in information. We aim to provide a quick run down of the most effective steps you can take to improving your website’s speed—starting at the very beginning with your hosting provider.
- Minimize HTTP Requests - Your pages will load faster if they have to wait for fewer HTTP requests. This means reducing the number of items that need to be loaded, such as scripts, style sheets, and images.
- Combine all of your CSS into an external file and link to it from the <head> section each page instead of loading it in the HTML of a page. This allows the external page to be cached so that it loads faster. JavaScript should be handled in a similar fashion as CSS.
- Use CSS sprites whenever possible - This combines images used in the background into one image and reduces the number of HTTP requests made.
- Make sure your images are optimized for the web - If you have Photoshop, this can be done by simply clicking “save for web” instead of “save”. By optimizing the formats of the images you are essentially formatting the images in a smarter way so that you end up with a smaller file size. Smashing Magazine has a nice article on optimizing png images.
- Use server side caching - This creates a html page for a URL so that dynamic sites don't have to build a page each time that URL is requested.
- Use Gzip - Gzip will significantly compress the size of the page sent to the browser which then uncompresses the information and displays it for the user. Many sites who use Gzip are able to reduce the file size by upwards of 70%. You can see if sites are using Gzip and how much the page has been compressed by using GID Zip Test.
- Use a Content Delivery Network - Using a CDN allow your users to download information in parallel, helping your site to load faster. CDNs are becoming increasingly affordable with services like Amazon CloudFront.
- Reduce 301 Redirects - Don’t use 301 redirects if possible; definitely don’t stack 301’s on top of each other. 301 redirects force the browser to a new URL and require the browser to wait for the HTTP request to come back.
Behind every good website is a good hosting provider. And if you want to ensure a high baseline speed, along with minimum down time—particularly in high traffic periods—it is best to steer clear of shared hosting.
The problem is that a renting a full, dedicated server of your own can be quite pricey, and it is not really necessary unless you have very high traffic. However, there is a way to attain the power and control of a dedicated server with the affordability of a shared server: its called a VPS (virtual private server).
When visiting your site, images are quite likely the largest source of data that your users will download. If the size of your homepage is 1MB, a visitor with a 10Mbit connection will load it in 800 milliseconds. Reduce your images by 500kb, and it will take less than half a second for that page to load.
To compress your images while avoiding clogging your site with additional plugins, try the JPEGmini application—available for both windows and mac. It uses an intelligent and ‘lossy’ optimisation algorithm to reduce image size by up to 30%, without losing quality.
When searching the web our browsers cache some data from websites automatically to improve page load speed. We can improve the caching process by specifying a longer duration of time for our static content (JavaScript, CSS, images etc.) to be stored.
Do this by adding the ‘Expires’ header into your .htaccess files. It may sound a little bit tricky, but it couldn’t be simpler; You can find the code for the Expires header everywhere online, but we recommend using the HTML5 Boilerplate which can be found here.
You can also optimise caching at a server level so that whenever a user visits your site, they will be served with a static html file instead of having to load the comparatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts.
A great way of doing this is with the WP Super Cache plugin. With over 6 million downloads it is the most popular caching plugin for WordPress, largely due to its usability and ease of adjusting the rate at which static html files on your pages refresh.
Databases are where all the valuable data shown on your pages is stored. Every so often, it is advisable to check your ‘database overhead’ and remove any stale data that may be slowing down your site.
Another plugin that outweighs itself in value is the WP-Optimise plugin. Rather than precariously sifting through your database, WP-Optimise can quickly identify spam, post revisions, and drafts, and reduce their overheads.
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