15 easy ways to speed up wordpress

7/26/2019 15 Easy Ways to Speed Up WordPress

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WordPress is a great platform. One weakness that

it suffers from, however, is it can be quite slow.

Without taking the right precautions, you could end up with a sluggish

site.

Thats not only a hassle for repeat visitors but will cause you tolose

subscribers and customers.

In this quick post, Ill cover all of the best ways that Ive found to

consistently speed up WordPress.

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When a person lands on your site for the first time, you only have a few

seconds to capture their attention to convince them to hang around.

Get ready to lose sleep at night:according to a report by the

Microsoft Bing search team, a 2-second longer delay in page

responsiveness reduceduser satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lostrevenue

per user by 4.3%, and a reducedclicks by 4.3%.

If your site takes too long to load, most people are gone, lost before youeven had a chance.

Not only that, but Google now includes site speed in its ranking


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algorithm. That means that your sites speed effects SEO, so if your site is

slow, youre now losing visitors from impatience and reduced rankings in

search engines. Yikes.

Lets fix that.

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As a side note, these are not ordered by importance or any criteria, Ive

just gathered everything Ive learned about speeding up page loads on

WordPress and compiled them here.

I guarantee that using even a few will help speed up your site.

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Last but not least, support is top notch, which is a must when it comes to

hosting. Take it from someone whos learned that the hard way.

Head on over to theWP Engine homepageand check out their

offerings, youll be happy you did.

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You might be surprised to here this, but the Twenty Fifteen framework

(aka the default WP theme) is lightweight and quite speedy.

Thats because they keep the guts simple; compare that to bloatedframeworks which have tons of features that you will never use, slowing

your site to a crawl.

From my experience, the fastest loading premium framework is definitely

the Thesis Theme Framework. It surpasses the basic WordPress

themes by being far easier to customize.

Its an incredibly solid framework that wont slow you down with excess

plugins or custom edits. Make the changes right from the theme and

avoid bloat, hoorah!

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Simply install and activate, and what your page load faster as elements

are cached.

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All of your favorite big blogs are making use of this, and if you are intoonline marketing using WordPress (as Im sure many of my readers are)

you wont be surprised to here that some of your favorite blogs like

Copyblogger are making use of CDNs.

Essentially, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all your static files

youve got on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitorsdownload them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close

to them as possible.

I personally use the Max CDN Content Delivery Networkon my

WordPress sites, as Ive found that they have the most reasonable prices

and their dashboard is very simple to use (and comes with video tutorialsfor setting it up, takes only a few minutes).

There is a plugin called Free-CDNthat promises to do the same, although

I havent tested it.

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Yahoo! has an image optimizer called Smush.it that will drastically

reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality.

However, if you are like me, doing this to every image would be beyond a

pain, and incredibly time consuming.

Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin calledWP-SmushItwhich

will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/free-cdn/http://www.sparringmind.com/max-cdn


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uploading them. No reason not to install this one.

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This isnt one thing but really a few easy things that you can do to ensure

that your homepage loads quickly, which probably is the most importantpart of your site because people will be landing there the most often.

Things that you can do include:

Show excerpts instead of full posts

Reduce the number of posts on the page (I like showing between 5-7)Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (include

them only inposts)

Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you dont need

Keep in minimal! Readers are here for content, not 8,000 widgets on

the homepage

Overall, a clean and focused homepage design will help your page not

only look good, but load quicker as well.

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Im certainly getting a lot of use out of the word optimize in this post!

This can be done the very tedious, extremly boring manual fashion, or

You can simply use theWP-Optimizeplugin, which I run on all of my

sites.

This plugin lets you do just one simple task: optimize the your database(spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead.

I would also recommend theWP-DB Managerplugin, which can
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dbmanager/http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-optimize/installation/


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schedule dates for database optimization.

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Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth theft. It occurs when other sites

direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your

server load increasingly high.

This can add up as more and more people scrape your posts or your site

(and especially images) become more popular, as must do if you create

custom images for your site on a regular basis.

Place this code in your root .htaccess file:

disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or

custom image optionRewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}

!^http(s)?://(www\.)?sparringmind.com [NC]


!^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]


!^http(s)?://(www\.)?

feeds2.feedburner.com/sparringmind [NC]

RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ [NC,F,L]

Youll notice I included my feed (from FeedBurner), youll need to replace

it with your feeds name, otherwise your images wont appear correctly


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there.

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An Expires header is a way to specify a time far enough in the future so

that the clients (browsers) dont have to re-fetch any static content (suchas css file, javascript, images etc).

This way can cut your load time significantly for your regular users.

You need to copy and paste the following code in your root .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000

ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

The above numbers are set for a month (in seconds), you can change

them as you wish.

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everyone.

You can do either, just know that it will at least benefit your site speed if

you set the default image (found in Discussion, under the settings tab

in the WordPress dashboard) to a blank space rather than a default

image.

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I saved this post to draft about 8 times.

WordPress, left to its own devices, would store every single one of these

drafts, indefinitely.

Now, when this post is done and published, why would I need all of those

drafts stored?

Thats why I use the Revision Controlplugin to make sure I keep post
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/revision-control/http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jquery-image-lazy-loading/


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revisions to a minimum, set it to 2 or 3 so you have something to fall back

on in case you make a mistake, but not too high that you clutter your

backend with unnecessary amounts of drafted posts.

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This one is a little bit advanced, but can drastically cut down your load

time if you are desperate to include page load speeds, so I included it.

Id be doing this great postinjustice if I didnt link to it for this topic, as

it taught me how to easily do this myself, in a few minutes.

So go there and check it out, it wrote it out in plainer terms than I ever

could!

!": /&- ;>*G.^>%0-This is similar to the section above on using CDNs, but Ive become so

fond of CloudFlare since I discussed it in mybest web analyticspost
http://www.sparringmind.com/best-web-analytics/http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/09/22/the-3-easiest-ways-to-speed-up-wordpress/http://www.wpkube.com/deal-trackbacks-pingbacks-wordpress/


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that Ive decided to include it separately here.

To put it bluntly, CloudFlare, along with theW3 Total Cacheplugin

discussed above, are a really potent combination (they integrate with

each other) that will greatlyimprove not only the speed, but the security

of your site.

Both are free!

Thanks for reading! Please share this article if you enjoyed it.

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http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/https://www.cloudflare.com/plans.htmlhttp://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://www.sparringmind.com/speed-up-wordpress/http://www.sparringmind.com/speed-up-wordpress/#

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