WordPress is undoubtedly one of the best website content management systems in the world today. With many small and medium-sized businesses using WordPress, the baseline experience of consumers online has been increased.
With this new influx of quality comes new expectations from online consumers. People who are online today expect their websites to load very quickly. Whether or not you have a great word press template on your side, if you do not have the fastest WordPress hosting available, but you are likely losing out on business or subscribers.
The top search engines now also include the speed of your site as a variable in its ranking. Basically, if your website takes longer than 10 seconds to load, you are losing your direct customers as well as potential customers indirectly because of your lower search engine ranking.
Fortunately, there are many ways that you can speed up the functionality of your WordPress site without incorporating expensive professional help.
1) Pick a fast WordPress theme
You have probably noticed many differences in the looks of the various templates that are created inside of the WordPress theme. Some WordPress templates look great and others look amateurish. There are also huge differences in the coding and the performance speeds of WordPress templates.
If you are not checking the quality of the coding within your WordPress themes with as much vigor as you check how it looks, then you are probably missing out on business. There is definitely an art to coding. Things can be coded so that they happen more quickly. Certain programmers will create a reputation for themselves in this discipline, so look for comments and reviews about it.
In some cases, you can also judge the speed of a WordPress theme by how streamlined it is. Every single extra app that is incorporated into a template slows it down. Any template with useless apps should be discarded no matter how good it looks.
The default frameworks for WordPress (the Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven templates) as well as the Thesis Theme Framework are extremely fast frameworks to use if you cannot find a third party template that you like.
2) Use easy optimization features
There are many different ways to optimize your WordPress theme to increase its overall speed. Make use of them all to get the fastest WordPress functionality possible.
You can start by optimizing your images by using the highly effective WordPress plug-in WP-SmushIt. This application will drastically reduce the size of any image that you upload without reducing its visual quality. This is an especially important app to make use of if you have a multimedia heavy template.
Caching plug-ins such as W3 Total Cache will take advantage of the resources on your computer and sometimes in the cloud to load page elements that much faster. There is no reason not to use a caching plug-in.
One of the best ways to optimize your website as a whole is to optimize your homepage. First of all, your homepage should be defined as the page that your ad campaign links to if you have one in progress. Instead of loading full objects on that page, you can load excerpts that link to full objects on other pages. This will give your audience a quick load time up front with the choice of where to go next depending on the information that most interests them.
The overuse of sharing widgets is a mistake that many rookie webmasters make. If you must have these sharing widgets, put them on pages other than the home page. Limit the sharing widgets to the ones that your audience uses most frequently. Also, make sure you reduce the size of the image that you use to represent the widget on the page. Some webmasters will only put sharing widgets in posts, completely leaving them off from the homepage.
3) Limit the amount of post revisions that are stored
If you have a website that is constantly updated with text posts, you will want to limit the amount of revisions that are stored. WordPress stores every revision that you ever make for an indefinite period of time; you have to specify your limitations based on the personal needs of your Web servers. Although this tip is rather simple compared to the others, it is definitely one of the most effective ways to speed up a WordPress website.
4) Get the fastest WordPress hosting
Great coding is nothing without great distribution to the Internet pipeline. Do not pay attention to all of the that web hosts used to advertise their various features. Pick the features that are most important to you and narrow down your list of web host that way.
Once you have your shortlist ready, you want to pick the fastest WordPress host that is available from that group. Do this from the very beginning. Do not waste time with shared hosting from an inferior web hosting provide. There is nothing worse than being on a web hosting who can’t handle your traffic growth when you finally get your big break on a top industry blog. Your site will break down because of the additional web traffic and everyone will forget about you as quickly as they learned about you.
We only have one recommendation… GreenGeeks. They consistently proves itself to be the fastest host of WordPress sites that also has all of the newest features that webmasters are looking for.
Their proprietary SSD-Acceleration feature is just one of the ways in which GreenGeeks separates itself from the competition when it comes to speed. SSD-Acceleration gives GreenGeeks the ability to increase the performance of the storage arrays as well as the reliability of database calls.
Backed up by an army are some of the most durable servers in the business complete with the latest Intel Processesors, 48GB of DDR3 RAM, RAID-10 storage arrays which are accelerated with solid state drives increasing page load times by 50-100% versus traditional mechanical drives.
GreenGeeks will give you the speed that you need at a price that you can afford. These top-flight servers are housed in environmentally conscious buildings with raised floors, water detection systems, fire suppression systems as well as an array of physical and technical protections that will ensure the speed and quality of your data. They’ve also been in business since 2006, are an INC 5000 fastest growing company and well respected in the web hosting industry.