A WordPress (WP)blog look quite efficient to one who don’t have such a domain, but when you become the owner of a WP blog, you will find how difficult it is to maintain such a blog platform. Experts might not encounter any issues with blog maintenance but novices will find it very hard. When you add plugins and extensions to your blog, it starts reducing its performance and responsiveness. Therefore, here we share some steps that might help you to decrease the loading time of your WP blog and improve its performance. Go through the below 10 steps that will help you speed up your WordPress blog.
1. Eliminate all unnecessary plugins
You may be using many plugins, and if so, then chances are lot to get your blog decreased in speed. Therefore, take out all the unwanted plugins or the extensions that do the same job. Removing one or two plugin will not cause any damage to your blog and you will see good results in the long run. Besides, take out plugins that can be replaced with some codes. Use a paragraph of information for the contact page and email address. Hence, you can avoid using any contact plugin. When you remove all the unnecessary plugins, you will find decreased loading time. You can also try this technique on different places.
2. Employ or install a Cache plugin
Giving the cached versions of your blog is an effective method to speed up your WordPress blog while reducing the CPU and memory usage on your server. You can accomplish this by employing or installing a cache plugin. W3Total Cache plugin is the most employed and highly recommended plugin as it works in an efficient manner and gives good results than that of other plugins.
3. Consider post-level plugins
In the case of blog, the traffic goes to the posts you make and not to the homepage. In fact, the archives, the category or the homepage gets more than 20% of the entire traffic while the posts get around 80% of the traffic. You use plugins at post-level, but they are not visible on the homepage. You need to use plugins that are used for SEO such as CommentLuv. Or else, you can remove them to boost the performance of your WP blog as well as the speed of it.
4. Mix images using CSS Sprites
CSS Sprites is considered as the most efficient way to mix images into one image that include all the images and then uses CSS codes to display the divided image from the big Sprite image and also decreases http requests. Therefore, use CSS Sprites, the better plugin to mix images, so your job will become much easier.
5. Optimize images
Many bloggers like using images in their contents or posts. But, if the image size is bog, then it will affect the blog page to load slowly. Therefore, make effective compression of images spirit to give the pictures to load faster. Image construction plugins can be used such as WP-SmushIT, which will automatically optimize your blog image through many lossless algorithms.
6. Consider your theme
You might have tried all the techniques, eliminated the plugins, optimized the pages, etc. but still your blog is taking a lot time to load. Then it must be related with your theme. Remember, all the themes are created differently and so, to let a theme run efficiently, you need to look at whether it has robust and clean coding, right use of style sheets and all factors at the right place. In fact, the default theme is the fastest loading theme out there. But, if you want some unique themes, then go for hiring a professional to get s unique, reliable and efficient themes.
7. Consider your hosting
Majority of bloggers kickoff with a shared hosting scheme as the blog is and does not have enough stuff. Therefore, there is no any important need of the bandwidth. But, when the traffic increases, your blogs starts getting big influxes of visitors from different sources like social networks and you will need to enhance your hosting account. This may cost a lot, but it is worth when you start getting benefits at your blog. Hence, this will keep your visitors visiting your blog again and again.
8. Compress CSS & JavaScript to decrease load time
WordPress is equipped with certain powerful plugins, to combine many scripts into one file. This is reducing http requests. Therefore, use JS and CSS script optimizer to make your job simple. These plugins will combine each and every script in one file and then you don’t need to use them anymore.
9. Optimize your WordPress Database Tables
Dynamic content management systems that use a WordPress blog do receiving, storing, eliminating and updating the data available on its database. Hence, if you can make the most of your database tables, then you can easily enhance the performance levels of your site. WP-Optimizer is one of the amazing plugin that help you do the job easily. This plugin will eliminate your post revisions, run optimization equerries and clean all the comments.
10. Validate your blog
You can use W3C validation to validate your blog code. This is an online markup validation service that fixes your blog errors. Though it cannot fix many common errors, it will try fixing at least important errors. This service therefore, improves the homepage of your blog from the search engine itself.
These are the major steps to speed up your WordPress blog in an efficient manner. You need to be careful and attentive while applying any method for enhancing the loading time of your blog. You can take assistance and advice of SEO experts or online professionals regarding speeding up of WordPress blog. No matter what your blog contents are and what you want share with your friends and social network followers; you are recommended to use these 10 steps to efficiently speed up your WordPress blog.
