Easy Tricks to Optimize Your Wordpress Loading Time

With Google's new emphasis on web page load times, many Wordpress administrators are scrambling to decrease their load time. There are two basic actions that can be taken. The first option is to use some of the standard best practices of website design and the second option is to utilize a number of great plugins. Here is a quick look at what both options have to offer.

Website Design Best Practices to Decrease Wordpress Loading Times

Reduce the Number of Images and Image Sizes

Images often take up a majority of the bandwidth that is being used and can really slow down your page's load time. While the simple solution is to simply get rid of as many images as possible; images are critical to keep visitors entertained and catch their attention. That means that you need to compress the size of the images as much as possible or use a plugin that can combine several images into one image. Most image editors, even free ones, allow you to compress images and it is an option that needs to be taken advantage of.

Page Speed Best Practices

Beside reducing images sizes there are other common ways to speed up a web page like optimizing caching, minimizing request size and payload size, minimizing round trip times and optimizing browser rendering. Please read Optimizing Your Website for Speed is Essential to find out more.

Stay Current

It is important to always stay up to date on all of your plugins as well as the Wordpress core itself. The Wordpress squad is always working hard to make sure that each new release has a better performance than previous versions. By not taking time to update your Wordpress installation as well as your plugins, you are causing longer load times.

Deactivate Unused Plugins

Almost every plugin adds pieces of Javascript and maybe and additional CSS file to your web page If you are not using the plugin, but it is still active, then it is still being loaded. Make sure to deactivate any plugin that is not being used, this is especially true for social media plugins. It is also a good idea to check out alternative plugins that have a better performance level than the plugins that you are currently using.

Best Wordpress Plugins to Decrease Your Load Times

WP SuperCache

When it comes to decreasing your web pages load time, the first plugin that most people think of is WP SuperCache. This plugin should be considered essential for any Wordpress site. It caches your page as a static HTML file so that when a visitor comes to your page, they will get the static file instead of the much larger normal page.

CSS Compress

CSS Compress is another great Wordpress plugin that will minimize your load time. It compresses all of the CSS files that are loaded, including third party CSS files from other plugins. There are a number of great CSS related plugins, however many of them will not compress third party CSS files.

WP Smush It

There is no bigger roadblock to decreasing load time than images. WP Smush It is a plugin that will compress all of your images, which will significantly help your load time. The best part is that it has little to no effect on the visual quality of the images. It will even compress your header, logo's, and any other embedded theme images. Keep in mind, that while it automatically compresses images that are added to new blog posts, previously loaded images will need to be compressed manually.

WP Optimize

WP Optimize is designed to cleanup your databases as well as optimize the rest of your website. You can remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, utilize MySQL optimize commands without the hassle of using phpMyAdmin. It will even show you which databases are not optimized and how much space you saved, after you have optimized them.

There are a number of website design best practices as well as a number of other Wordpress plugins that can be used to diminish your load time, but these four plugins will give you excellent results immediately after they are used. While you should always keep you eye out for better options, that shouldn't stop you from taking action now.

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