6 Tips of WordPress Speed Optimization
Wordpress is great blog and cms software. Since it's used by over 20% website platforms, it's necessary to make it more efficient for better speed. One day, your find you have made a big wordpress site and you have to wait long time to get it loaded, it's time to optimize for better performance. Based editorial experience, we have composed the following 6 tips on how to optimize your wordpress site speed.
Tips 1. Get a right wordpress hosting service
Hosting is the most important and should be your primary consideration for any kind website. WordPress can be the core platform for any kind website development such as personal blog, enterprise website, content management system website etc. You will need different hosting plans for different website purpose. If you just use wordpress for hobbies that's viewed by very few people, a budget hosting service will work perfectly because no much server resource will be ultilized there. However, if you're going to promote your wordpress site to a business platform, a regular shared plan will not work. Instead, you will need either vps or dedicated server or a special optimized service for wordpress like wpengine. We highly suggest check out the top 5 wordpress hosting providers for success choice.
Tips 2. Use WordPress Cache plugin
Wordpress cache plugin is great feature that should be used by all sites. We highly recommend to install W3 Total Cache which is simple and powerful to all sites. Your wordpress site speed will be greatly improved after installed this plugin because all your static contents will be cached so they don't have to reload every time when visited.
Tips 3. Use CDN Service
CDN is used by most big websites. Especially for those world wide popular sites, CDN is a MUST for quality loading speed from different locations. The concept of CDN is to deliver your site content to different networks, when users send out http requests to your website, it will be downloaded from the most nearby network nodes. In this way, fast loading from different locations is possible. High performance CDN services are not cheap but worthy of the money if you plan to deliver services to different areas on the planet. You can also use some free cdn service like cloudflare or simply install this Free-CDN wordpress plugin.
Tips 4. Optimize wordpress database
When you write/update your articles, wordpress will leave lots of duplicated contents in database. Also, if you have used some spam control plugins like akismet, it will create a big table in database. Such useless data will result in big size database and slow down its performance. We highly suggest install WP-Optimize to clear out such data and optimize your tables every few periods.
Tips 5. Optimize your pictures
Pictures always take long time to load, you can either compress it before uploading to website or use WP-Smushit plugin for live compression on website. It's highly recommended plugin if your wordpress site is photo gallery based. It will greatly reduce the picture size for better loading speed.
You might also need to avoid hot linking if you have great pictures on website. When more and more people link to your pictures, your server resource usage will be high and your site performance will be downgraded a lot. There's great wordpress plugin called hotlink protection. It's highly suggested solution if you have lots of great value pictures and would like to improve performance as much as possible.
Tips 6. Add delay loading function
It's extremely helpful solution if you have long page on website. Delay loading will only load the first screen content, when you scroll down page, rest contents will be loaded. Such function will not only help with fast loading, it will also save bandwidth. We can easily add this function by jQuery Image Lazy Load wordpress plugin.
If you're operating a wordpress site, you can follow above tips and receive better loads. All above writing is generated from editorial experience so you can use directly with worry free. Of course, you might have other solutions based your website requirements, just feel free to share your experience.