Blogging 101: Steps On How To Drastically Increase The Speed Of Your WordPress Blog

[ad_1]

Internet marketers have a blog as their home base and personal hub. WordPress, without a doubt, is amazing. Having a WordPress blog may become challenging as we move forward. The #1 challenge most people face is the speed of their blog or their loading time. It may become so slow that it takes ages to load the page or it loads filled with errors…not good at all. If this happens, we could lose some old and new visitors which would sky-rocket our bounce rate…something we don’t want to happen at all.

2 Reasons Why You Would Want To Speed Up Your WordPress Blog:

1. People WILL leave before they even get the chance to see how the page looks or read any posts on that page. No matter how much value you provide, people will not get the chance to see it because the site takes so darn long to load.

2. Your site speed is part of Google’s algorithm, which will determine how well you rank on the search engines. It’s not one of the major factors of Google’s algorithm, but it’s always great to not ignore the small things that can make a huge difference later on. Google is just protecting their users and they don’t want them clicking on the #1 spot that would take around 5 minutes to load.

Here are the steps on how to drastically increase the speed of your WordPress blog:

1. Deactivate unnecessary plug-ins

Plug-ins can affect your site speed. The more plug-ins you have, the longer it will take to load your page. Plug-ins take up a lot of memory, so it would be a good idea to deactivate some of the unnecessary plug-ins you have on your blog. Take the time to check out your plug-ins. Look for the ones you don’t really need and deactivate them.

2. Caching

Caching is very important for your site. That’s when WordPress will cache a bunch of information also known as “database queries” instead of starting new server requests each time you get a new visitor on your site. It will reduce the number of information/queries, which results in a great increase in your site’s loading time and a decrease in your server’s usage. In other words, it pretty much stores information about your site so that when someone visits your page, it wouldn’t have to load the whole site every time.

For your site to actually start chaching, you will need a plug-in called “WP Super Cache” which is a free plug-in and super easy to set-up. All you have to do is to install the plug-in and select turn on caching on the settings tab.

P.S When making changes, make sure to disable this plugin and enable it once the changes being made is done.

Caching is like taking a snapshot of your page, so disable the plug-in and enable it again once done so the changes would update and you have a new cache. It would also be good to clear your browser’s cache as well to see the new changes.

3. Get rid of those wretched spammers!!!

Spammers will slow down your site and they take up bandwidth. No matter how stupid and senseless the comments are, they actually hurt your site and will make it a whole lot slower. So it’s our duty to hire the best guards we have.

To do that, we’re gonna need another plug-in. I’ll be mentioning a few but all you’ll need is one. I personally use “Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin”. It works pretty well and so far, our spams have disappeared. Some do though, but it’s very rare now. Other good plug-ins are Akismet, which is a paid plug-in, SI Captcha Anti-Spam, Bad Behavior and WP-reCaptch. Whichever one you prefer is fine. Blocking spammers would also drastically decrease your bounce rate, which is really really good. When we did not have an active anti-spam plug-in, our bounce rate had an average of 50-60%. Now with the plug-in, our average is well below 6%. That’s a huge difference!

4. Choosing the right theme

Our theme actually affects our site’s speed as well. This is sometimes overlooked. All we need to keep in mind is that the simpler our theme, the faster it would load. You should also know that the more images there are on your theme, the longer it will take to load. Same goes with banner ads and some text widgets. Try to limit down on the images. Anyway, when it comes to a blog, design should come 2nd. It’s our quality content that is very vital and should always be 1st. The design would only distract our visitors who might click something else and end up on a different site. Bye-bye to your site when that happens.

5. Home Page

Your Home Page should not be fully packed with posts, pictures, videos, etc. If you want to speed up your site, you should start organizing your posts. We show 10 blog posts on our home page and we use the “Insert More Tag” tool which can be seen on your tool bar when adding a new post. This way, a visitor can read a short summary of your post and click “read more” to read the rest of the post. This will also lessen the loading time, especially if you have a bunch of images and videos on your post. Make use of this feature. Let’s say use 5 posts as the minimum for your home page and 10 as the maximum.

Doing these steps will drastically increase the speed of your WordPress blog. After speeding it up you will, without a doubt, notice more visits, experience higher conversion rates, better Alexa rankings, and lesser bounce rates.

[ad_2]

Source by Pete Zafra