8 Ways To Speed Up WordPress Blog Instantly

Want to speed up wordpress blog, here’s a perfect guide to help you.

WordPress as we all know is a blogging platform, loved by millions of bloggers and professional companies. But it has a problem, as the time passes and you start gathering huge traffic, this platform starts getting slow and more slower.

The reason behind this problem is huge database size, thousands of comments, lots of hack attempts, lots of spam and huge traffic.

If you can solve these problems ( probably for which you have visited this page ) then you can instantly speed up your wordpress website.

Few of the biggest problems which bloggers and companies start facing due to slow website speed are low conversion rate, low pageviews and probably low rank in search results. And do you that Google has been considering page load time as one of the important ranking factor since 2010. I know you are shocked, I was too when I came to know about it.

Lets Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

Here in this post we will discuss all possible methods and tricks to improve your website’s performance. They all are easy to perform and will take merely one to two hours for complete setup.

Now before we proceed let me ask you a question, how long it has been since you have checked your website’s speed. If you haven’t performed it yet, I will suggest you to perform a Google page speed test today and get your score.

This test will not only provide you with score over 100, but will breakdown your site’s structure in different parts and will accordingly suggest you methods to improve the faults. For example if your images are not optimized ( compressed ) then it will ask you to do it. Similarly if you have too many outgoing requests, then it will suggest you to minimize it.

See the screen shot below. I have used a service named GTmetrix to find my site’s score.

My scores are really good. On Google page speed test I scored total 97% and in Yahoo’s speed test I scored 95%. Want to have score like this, check out the guide below.

1. Don’t Let Plugins Slow You Down

WordPress community offers plugins to help you add more features to your website. There are thousands of free and premium addons which can handle the jobs of eCommerce, SEO, social media and many other with ease. They help you automate most of the task without touching a single code. But Unfortunately, the more plugin you use, the lower will be your website’s speed. The responsibility to prevent plugin lag is ultimately yours and yours alone.

The good news is that there are a few simple things you can do to prevent plugins from adding to your site’s load time.

• Make sure you don’t use two or more plugin which perform same function.
• Next is to disable and delete all non usable plugin. This will help you lot to reduce your database size.
• Update all your plugins whenever you get notifications.
• Don’t use high resource dependent plugins, as they will slow down your server.
• Use premium themes which comes with inbuilt related post feature, social media integration support, content forms and shortcodes.

2. Cache Your Content

Caching your content can do wonders for your site’s load time. To cache content means to generate static HTML files of your dynamic site. There are many free plugins that will take care of this so you don’t have to, including W3 Total Cache and W3 Super Cache.

By caching your content, you prevent your site from needlessly generating its pages over and over again. This will dramatically speed up your site, especially during peak traffic times. This will protect you from missing out any opportunities to build your brand and audience.

I personally use wp-super cache along with database optimization plugin on all of my sites. These both work very smoothly, are easy to customize and are low on server resources.

3. Clear Your Spam Comments

Spam is the biggest problem faced by any website. Spams are useless comments which not only waste your time but also increase your database size. The fact is that the less content your database has, the faster it will load. If your WordPress blog’s comment sections are full of spam comments, then your site is carrying dead weight and so it’s time to ditch it.

It is especially important to manage incoming pingbacks. To do so, regularly delete all spam from your site’s database. Alternatively, you can disable pingbacks altogether from within WordPress. You can also use disqus comment plugin so that all comment are stored offline on different server.

4. Optimize Your Database

Now that your database is free of spam, it’s time to optimize it for speedy performance. If you’re a novice or simply unsure of how to do this, then relax. There are a few good plugins available to help you out. WP-Optimize, WP-DB Manage, or Optimize-DB will all do the job for you, plus they are well reviewed.

5. Delete Your Revisions

If you’re an active blogger, it’s likely that you revise your posts often. Did you know that all of these revisions are saved to your WordPress blog and can slow down its load time? Once again, it’s time to rid your site of extra pounds of data so that it can be a lean, mean loading machine.

There are several quality plugins that will manage your revisions for you so that you don’t have to give the matter a second thought. WP-Optimize will take care of both your database optimization and revision management needs. Better Delete Revision plugin is another trustworthy choice.

6. Disable Your Hotlinking

Hotlinking the images on your WordPress blog might make your job easier, but it’s a pretty inconsiderate practice. If other bloggers are hotlinking your images, then they’re definitely slowing your site’s load time. In fact, hotlinking images is a constant drain on bandwidth because it allows other site’s to piggyback on your bandwidth for images.

To protect your images from hotlinking without the hassle of editing your site’s code, simply download and install a handy plugin. The Hotlink Protection plugin will get the job done for you and your site’s load time back up where it belongs in a flash.

If you using professional hosting service like hostagtor, bluehost then there host panel have inbuilt functionality for hotlink protection.

7. Optimize Your Images

We know images, graphics and gifs are really good way to create inteactive content, but they need to be optimized.

Though your post images may increase social shares and pageviews, but they also have negative impact on your website’s loading speed. And in order to minimize their impact, you should take time to make thoughtful choices in regards to the size and format of your images.

Or you have one another option, you can let a plugin to optimize all your images. One plugin that is great at automatically optimizing your images is Wp-Smush.it. It performs all sorts of clever little tricks, including compressing images and stripping metadata.

You can also use an online service named tinypng, which can compress all types of .png extension images without compromising with quality.

So these were some of the most important and easy to implement tips. They will for sure speed up wordpress blog without any hassle.

Add Expires Headers

Expire header plays an important role in website optimization. It tells the browsers whether it should grab the static content like image, css, javascript etc from its local cache or it should request it from the server.

Usually its recommended to set the expire header to more than a week or to atleast a month, since static files usually never change. Or if you ever make any change to css or java files then just clear your cache and the update will start working.

You can add the following code in your .htaccess file. It will make all your static resources cached for one month.

ExpiresActive On 
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"

Remember to make a copy of .htaccess file before editing it.

8. Using CDN Services

There are both free and premium CDN services available for bloggers and professionals. They don’t only help you to speed up your wordpress website by distributing your images, java scripts, css and other files to corresponding POPs. But they even protect your website from any unknown harm like brute force attack or DDos attacks.

One of the most popular free CDN service is Cloudflare. It will help you protect your website, will help to track your visitors, offers different sets of apps to add more functions for free of cost. According to them within just 5 minutes they can supercharge your website.

So now you came to the end of this post. I wish you would have liked these 8 tips. If you implement them properly then you can suerly improve your blogs loading time.