Simple Tricks To Make Your WordPress Faster

Optimizing Your WordPress Website

How To Make WordPress Run Faster

As it stands, millions of people are using WordPress. If you are going to get a good hosting plan, chances are that you are going to want to utilize this as well. Don’t let yourself lose sight of how powerful of a tool this is. With a good WordPress install, you could set up a website, a blog, or just update a stream of content that is easy to get optimized and sewn across the internet. Whatever the case is, make sure that you consider a few tips and tricks to ensure that your WordPress installation is smooth, fast, and snappy.

Upgrade Your WordPress Template

First and foremost, make sure that your template is updated. Do not allow yourself to use an older, antiquated line of code. There’s a lot of cool themes out there, but be careful. Make sure that you have something new, unique, and definitely worth your time. If you focus on the right WordPress install and theme, you will not have to worry about broken lines of code, or antiquated PHP at all. This is a crucial thing to remember when you are working with WordPress on any level. Without a proper upgrade and utilization of updates, you will find your page loading like molasses. WordPress installs can be snappy, if you get the right code in line.

If you’re looking for a new template for WordPress check out ThemeForest, they have one of the largest collection of premium WordPress templates available.  With thousands of WordPress templates there’s something for everyone.  ThemeForest has some of the best WordPress themes many of which are free but personally I prefer the paid themes.  They are definitely affordable and give you more functionality.  Plus you’ll get regular security updates from the theme developer.

Cut The Plugins

When utilizing WordPress on any level, don’t overuse plugins. It’s very important that you don’t allow yourself to lose sight of this. WordPress is a good content management system, but it has its limits. If you have too many plugins, even if you mean well, you could end up stifling the load time. Remember, every time someone visits your page, the plugins have to load in the background, and that could cause a great deal of problems. Make sure that you don’t put too many in the backend to load, or you will see your site crawl through the loads. Keep in mind that plugins aren’t bad for WordPress, it’s just that you can add way too many for comfort.

A simple rule of thumb is to only use plugins you need.  I can’t stress this enough, I’ve seen people use 20-30 plugins not realizing that each plugin contributes to load times.  The fewer plugins you install the faster your site will load.

Only Display Limited Posts

One of the most important aspects of WordPress is simple, make sure that you only utilize a limited amount of posts up front. When someone hits your landing page, make sure that you look into isolating things to a very specific amount. For instance, if you are going to have a blog, put only 4 or 5 posts on the front page. When in doubt, put several snippets instead of the whole post. Let people decide whether or not they want to click through to read the whole page or post. When updating WordPress, you will not want to display everything, or all that load time will fall back into a negative thing for you.

Use A CACHE Boosting Plugin

Speaking of WordPress and plugins, you should look into getting a cache boosting option. There are several good ones out there, and this will help you get the right elements isolated. A good push in terms of cache means that visitors that come back to your page often, will get a faster loading time. Furthermore, it will help keep certain posts and pages static if need be. You’ll find that this can help you rank higher, as well as get faster load times across all the WordPress pages that you decide to put up. This is an easy fix to a slow loading page, that’s for sure.

One of my favorite caching plugins for WordPress is W3 Total Cache.  It’s a free caching plugin for WordPress with a preset configuration so you don’t need any technical skills to get it up and running.  You can decrease your WordPress load time by seconds almost immediately.

Don’t Use Too Many Images

There are a lot of cool features that you can go through within the framework of WordPress. One of which includes how it handles images and displays them. If you want to end up with a positive flow of images, and you want to ensure that things are moving forward without slowing down the loading time, then you will need to look into utilizing a limited amount of images overall. Don’t overload your WordPress page with large scale images, and don’t just edit them with HTML. Make sure that they are optimized properly before you upload them, or else you’re going to run into serious issues in terms of loading speed.

If you’re using PhotoShop you can compress your images by using the ‘Save For Web’ option in the File menu.  Using the ‘Save For Web’ option will compress your images and make them web-friendly.  It’s a simple way to shrink your images without loosing any quality.

Don’t Use Too Many Iframe or Embedded Videos

One last thing that you want to look into is the world of video sharing. There are a lot of codes out there, and you want to make sure that you use the right one. Make sure that when sharing videos with WordPress installed, you don’t use too many iframes, or JavaScript for that matter. This can end up killing your load times, especially if you are displaying full posts up front. When it comes to WordPress, less is more when video sharing.  If you plan to add video on your website I’d recommend using YouTube and embedding the video in to your post.  This will save you bandwidth and load from YouTube directly.

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