20+ Easy Ways To Improve Your WordPress Blog Speed

by

The maximum response time before users lose interest while waiting for a blog to load is around 10-12 seconds. Its time to put on your thinking cap. Below I mentioned some tricks and tips for improving your blog’s loading speed. Follow them if you want to retain your readers and drive traffic to your blog. Moreover even now Google Search Rankings Considers Site Speed.

Note : Some of the below mentioned tips may not be applicable to Blogger blogs.

Blog loading speed1. Upgrade The Version: To make use of all the tips and tricks it is better to upgrade to the latest WordPress release. Latest versions have many improvements and features when compared to previous versions. Also upgrade your plugins to stay up-to-date.

2. Become a plugin minimalist: You can easily replace most of the plugins with direct codes. Most of the blogs use plugins for creating archives like mine. It can be easily done with little codings. It is enough these MUST HAVE WordPress plugins, you can make others optional.

3. Avoid JavaScript: Many of the themes have unnecessary JS codes, especially for displaying date and time. Remove them or replace them with some other relevant stuff. If you still want to use means, put the JavaScript into a single file and then load it at the bottom of the page.

4. Clean And Better Coding: Keep the codes clean and tidy. Remove unwanted codes like comments, new spaces and so on. Also remove unnecessary PHP tags. Check the list of 13 of the most common unwanted tags to remove. Also validate your HTML and CSS and correct the errors if you have any.

5. Simplicity is Essential: Keep everything simple and elegant, let it be your archives page or categories page. Simple design helps the blog to load faster, Google, for instance.

6. Optimize Images: Don’t overload your blog with images, unless you run a photo blog. It is ideal to keep 1-3 relevant images per article. Try to crop or resize the images. Let it be for your thumbnail or article images. Avoid animated GIF images, if you want to use it means, pick a small image. You can check these tools to optimize images for your blog.

USEFUL: 15+ Tips To Optimize Images For Search Engines

7. Avoid Flash Content: Unless you are running a huge and popular site, it is better to avoid flash content and any other plugins related to flash. They take more time to load and irritates readers/visitors.

8. Advertisements: Kills better than others. Don’t overload your blog with ads; let it be image ads or text ads. Don’t use too much of In-Text ads. Many PPC and CPM ads are full of HTML errors and they kill the blog’s loading speed mercilessly.

9. Themes and templates: Choose a simple and good theme for better loading. It is recommended to choose a theme with right sidebar, it helps to load the content first. You can try Swift Theme, which is a super-fast loading WordPress theme and the best thing about this theme is the delayed loading of Gravatar. It helps to improve loading speed.

10. Hosting Images: It is better to upload images in your own server other than third-party sites. Local files almost always load faster than external files. Always host images locally. It saves lot of time. You can also host the images in a subdomain. If you can afford, you can try hosting your images in CDN. Learn how you can Supercharge WordPress Blog With Cloudflare, MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache.

11. Use Excerpts: Using excerpts reduces immense amount of time. Limit the number of posts to be displayed on homepage. Let it be for magazine style themes or normal themes.

12. Avoid Gadgets and Widgets: To be candid, they don’t add much value to your blog. So it is better to avoid gadgets like shout box, polls, and so on. Also if that gadget’s site is down, then it could keep your site from loading properly as well.

13. Add Slash: If you include a slash (/) at the end of the link, the server will conclude that it is a directory page, thus reduces the loading time of the site. Eg : “hellboundbloggers.com/contact/” is better than “hellboundbloggers.com/contact”.

14. Optimise Your Database: You can increase your load time easily by optimising your database. There are two ways to do it, you can do it manually or you can use a plugin.

15. Reduce the HTTP Requests: Combine all the external files or scripts in a single location. Get rid of unnecessary images and headers. This helps to reduce the delay from HTTP requests.

16. Disable Hotlinking: Hotlinking refers to direct linking to a website’s files from someone else’s website. Victims of hotlinking are running out of traffic quota. Optimize your images and save the bandwidth. You can easily disable hotlinking via .htaccess file.

17. Turn Off Post Revisions: Post Revision is useless for single-author blogs. Whenever a post is edited, a new row will be created in wp_posts table and if you edit your posts or pages 10 times, then you will have 10 new rows in wp_posts table. Check this tutorial to turn off Post Revision.

18. WP Super Cache Plugin: It caches your blog for fast and quick loading. This plugin generates static html files. If your site is struggling to cope with the daily no. of visitors, or if your blog is viral on Facebook, Twitter or any other popular site then this plugin is for you. Just download and activate the plugin.

19. Use image heights and widths: Adding height and width tags to images helps a lot to improve the loading speed. If the browser knows the width and height size of the image, then it can let it load in the background. If those tags are not used, the browser has to wait until the image loads.

<img src="https://hellboundbloggers.com/demopic.png" alt="Demo Pic" height="300" width="200" />

20. Analyse The Speed: You can analyze your blog’s loading speed and see what is making is slow. There are many tools to give you excellent report over your blog’s loading speed. You can check these 7 Free Best Tools To Check Website Loading Speed. You can also use Google Analytics to check site speed.

21. Use PHP Flush: PHP function flush() allows you to send your partially ready HTML response to the browser so that it will start to fetch the components while your backend is still busy with the rest of the HTML page. You can experience this effect when you have busy backends or light frontends. [Learn More]

22. Leverage Browser Caching: The phrase “Leverage Browser Caching” actually means that different items on your site should have different expire times set. This is recommended by Google, and it will improve your overall Google Page Speed Score. [Learn More]

23. Choose Better Host : Last but not least, nothing can substitute a better host. Find a secure and reliable host for your blog. I advice you to avoid Free Servers. You can try HostGator for your WordPress blog and if you start to get huge traffic, try KnownHost VPS.

I hope these tips will help your blogs to improve loading speed. Do you have any other tip? Kindly share them in the comments below.

59 thoughts on “20+ Easy Ways To Improve Your WordPress Blog Speed”

  2. Wow.. I enjoyed this post, I have found many simple tricks through which I can increase my site load time. Two of them which I liked is limit the number of posts displayed on main page & height + width tags for image.
    Some of the terms were too technical for me, but will try to learn about them from hellboundbloggers only if I can find them.

    Thanx a ton for this post.

    Reply

  3. Thanks Pradeep for detail information on how to improve website loading speed. I strongly believe that the Speed is very important perspective for website to succeed.

    Reply

  4. Hi Pradeep,

    Thanks for the informative post. I tried W3 total cache and had caching issues where the plugin was loading another site and I disabled it. Any such issues or side affects with WP super cache plugin?

    Thanks,
    Cent

    Reply

  8. Very useful information! This is information where I was looking for! I will implement all the advices on my website and place a backlink to your blog. It helped me a lot with making my blog! Thanks again!

    Reply
  10. Pingback: 5 ways to keep you blog readers engaged longer

  13. Undoubtedly useful. Reducing the blog’s loading speed is a must. Nobody wants to wait too long for a site to open. If a site takes too long to load, the visitor closes the site and we lose a reader and who can forget, without readers, a blog cannot work. So, reducing the blog’s loading speed should be done by every blogger.
    Very nice article with very useful tips.

    Reply

  14. 19. Use image heights and widths : Adding height and width tags to images helps a lot to improve the loading speed. If the browser knows the width and height size of the image, then it can let it load in the background. If those tags are not used, the browser has to wait until the image loads.

    Never heard of that. Adding width and height is a must for valid code…

    Reply

  15. All the tips that are said are highly effective and useful. There is an assurance that the users will be able to create something easy and unique.

    Reply

  17. Nice info pradeep,,,, Keep going,,, i want to know more about such stuff,,, like how to make less spam,, and pendings to approved fast etc,,,

    Reply

  19. Hi,
    great article, but with regard to your comment on Java scripts..?

    1. Are Googles ads not Java scripts..?

    2. Surely you cannot move these to an external store..?

    Also whilst I would agree that the fewer plugins the better, would you not agree that certain security plugins are indeed necessary because WP continually fails to build these into later versions of WordPress.
    In fact with Google’s recent focus on site loading times, I think it high time that WP included Super Cache in the same way they include Akismet.

    Regards Steve

    PS Great Blog

    Reply

  20. Nice tip dude, you done lot of homework before posting article.
    Well wordpress r built on heavy php and php took lot of time to load. Wp-cache plugin convert it into html. Also we limit our post on homepage becoz nobody like to scroll also it takes time to load. Disabling hotlinking and post revision should be revised, becoz we must update our old post so they will more valuable. Old post also work fine in seo. Post revision must be done. Also use png format not jpeg, png files are low in size, load faster.
    Nice work regards

    Reply

  23. Here’s A Quick Tip For Blogger Blogs –>
    Add “b:if” conditional tag before ‘data:post.body’, after you do this, your homepage will show only post titles, so it will load faster… And another advantage is that if you make your title teasing, it will act as a teaser.. So visitor will be eager to see your post.

    Reply

  25. Well done, very handy information. I must agree choosing the right hosting service is essential, along with the right plugins and eliminating unnecessary flash or heavy images. I didn’t know backslash will have some effects too. ^^ Thanks for sharing the ideas. Stumbled the post for you!

    @wchingya
    Social/Blogging Tracker

    Reply

  26. As is clear from the article the guidelines provide well searched and experienced information from the people who are in “thick” blogging.Nice information.I would apply it from now on.(It amazed me too!)

    Reply

  28. Lots of good tips shared. I appreciate your work pradeep. Even Google crawler does not accept flash while crawling.

    Reply

  29. I totally agree with you on these points. They really work, I can definitely tell you that. You can see the page source of Internet Techies where we are not using a single JavaScript on Head part apart from JQuery for Slideshow which is also optimized for only home page. That means no JQuery on Post’s head. Page loading speed is very important and that’s why we released our own plugin’s i.e. Smooth Slider’s optimization code recently.

    Now you can use Smooth Slider without giving load on your posts. Nice tips Pradeep, appreciated.

    Reply

  30. You covered all important points , i don’t follow many.I will surely try to follow from now. Thanks for post review link, I never thought about that.

    Reply

  31. This article is really great.Even as a blogger user, most of these tips can be put into practice in my blog also .

    I have favorited this in face book

    Reply

  32. Very good tips. I was knowing some, related to javascript and plugins.But adding slash and turning off post revisions are something new for me. Ya, they are simple, but thanks for those.

    Reply

  36. Brilliant tips dude! I have read such articles at many different blogs. You have made the article unique by mentioning all the points known. I don’t really miss anything here.

    Reply

    • It took time for me to prepare this list Rohit, I took a paper, wrote all I knew and searched other blogs for updated tips.

      Glad this is informative to you ! Cheers ! 😉

      Reply

  37. Some good tips you have mentioned here. Inlink text ads can also be avoided, I have personally experience it that it increase bounce rate and loading time. I am using new swift theme which uses no images and it is claimed that it is on of the fastest wordpress theme

    Reply

Leave a Comment

© 2024 • Built with GeneratePress
Privacy Policy Terms Contact