Tips to make your Wordpress blog load faster

[aceofadsense]

As all of us knew website's speed is one of important factors for Google Search consider your to have better positions on search engine results.
I want to share some easy tips and tricks on how to make your Wordpress Blog or Website to load faster and here's ways I am using
- Choosing a fast web hosting - Search for web hosts on the forums which offering a built-in Wordpress caching as well as a CDN.
- Adding CDN like Cloudflare to your site is a need.
- Choosing a light theme: If you don't have more time to build a WP theme, go for a paid them, keep in mind that you always choose a fast and light theme which has less images and scripts on it.
- The images - optimize them before publishing on the site, don't upload full resolution ones. Optimize it though graphic softwares like Photopshop or Gimp
- The homepage - this is where most of your users will come and visit it, make it clean and fast, if you don't want get high bounce rates, optimize it and showing less posts or images.
- Keep Wordpress cms up to date. Don't ignore CMS updates

What about yours? I would here your opinions on how to make our Wordpress blog load faster. Waiting for your valuable answers!!

 

[virtubox]

You have list the most part of the best practices to have a fast WordPress website.
But remember your visitors from google will probably found your website by reading an article, doesn't focus only on your homepage.
And the first reason of a slow WordPress website is to use too much plugins.
If you have a slow web hosting, using a cache plugins will not make your website faster, think to remove all your inactive or useless plugins.

 

[HostColor]

A very good option is the web server used to serve any website to be Nginx, instead of Apache. CDN helps but it is not a must at all and it dosn't have anything to do with the improved website performance itself. CDN just catches the static content, that's all it does. The smaller images and the light version of the home page works, it depends very much of the website type however.

 

[TheStrugglingNewb]

As all of us knew website's speed is one of important factors for Google Search consider your to have better positions on search engine results.
I want to share some easy tips and tricks on how to make your Wordpress Blog or Website to load faster and here's ways I am using
- Choosing a fast web hosting - Search for web hosts on the forums which offering a built-in Wordpress caching as well as a CDN.
- Adding CDN like Cloudflare to your site is a need.
- Choosing a light theme: If you don't have more time to build a WP theme, go for a paid them, keep in mind that you always choose a fast and light theme which has less images and scripts on it.
- The images - optimize them before publishing on the site, don't upload full resolution ones. Optimize it though graphic softwares like Photopshop or Gimp
- The homepage - this is where most of your users will come and visit it, make it clean and fast, if you don't want get high bounce rates, optimize it and showing less posts or images.
- Keep Wordpress cms up to date. Don't ignore CMS updates

What about yours? I would here your opinions on how to make our Wordpress blog load faster. Waiting for your valuable answers!!

I use all of the strategies that you mentioned with the exception of the homepage tweak because I don't have one...

But I also use a really cool free plugin called P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler).

This plugin shows you which plugins are slowing down your site. It also creates a profile of your WordPress site's plugins' performance by measuring their impact on your site's load time.

Try to eliminate or replace any plugin that's slowing down your site.

It really does make a difference.



Fred

 

[Mike001]

I love reading through these speed strategies when dealing with WordPress and Joomla. It amazes me how many of you will tolerate the slowness of the out-of-the-box CMS systems. When you have a one-size-fits-all deployment strategy of course they are going to be slow. They are trying please everyone and in the process pleasing very few.

Not only are they slow, which they are and it does have a negative impact on your SEO, but most of the plugins send data back to the providers and they get the benefit of your users. Did you ever stop to think why most of those plugins are free. I mean let's be realistic we are all in this to make money and build are brand, and those groups that develop those plugins are no different.

If you really want to control the speed of your site you need to develop your own site. Then you are the owner, you control the data, you control the speed and you control what goes in and out of your site.

As these systems get larger and larger, which they will, in that one-size-fits-all-mentality, they are only going to get worse as far speed goes.

And we have not even talked about the biggest issue with them, security. Because as the popularity increases on those systems, which it probably will, there will be more and more attacks on those systems. And as the attacks continue to increase soon you will see the payment Gateways move away from supporting them, because those systems will open to many wholes into their payment systems.

It is the old hamster and the wheel mentality. And you can blow off this conversation if you like, but as a college professor in web engineering, I bring in many high level computer engineers from around the country to speak with our classes. The last couple of years, this is all they have been talking about and steering our students way from this systems. Explaining to them the benefits of developing their own systems.

Just something to think about....

 

[virtubox]

virtubox

You are right about plugins. Each plugins added to WordPress make your website slower. But there are two category of plugins :
- Some are free only to make you buy the premium version
- Some are available on github and made by users, and most of them doesn't ask anything for their work and provide support at wordpress.org

About creating your own website, that's not always a good solution, because nobody will check if you have made errors and it could include some security issues.
But there are some other CMS, which include free plugins and themes, and you will never have to think about optimizing them ... My favorite currently : [URLnf="https://getgrav.org"]Grav[/URLnf]

 

[Mike001]

There are a few good CMS systems that have not acquired the audience of the WordPress's and the Joomla's of the world but they too have bloat issues. Not near as bad as WordPress but bloat just the same.

Let me make something clear that may not have been understood from my original post, WordPress and Joomla and many of the other major players in the CMS systems arena, they are good CMS system. They just have limitations. They are designed and developed with a very large audience in mind. When you are trying to reach such a large audience you put many features and functions into a system that a vast majority of your users will never use. When those features become part of the core functionality of the system, they cannot be removed without breaking the system. Even though many people don't use them. As those systems grow and they get enhancements and updates many of those features develop security issues as they are not updated as often due to their lack of use by the majority of users.

That is where the security issues come into play. When your dealing with 100's of thousands of lines of code, you can never catch everything. As a developer we have to be right all the time, the bad guys only have to be right once. Once a weakness is found it is exploited until it is caught by the developers and they find a way to correct it.

What can be very frustrating is that many of the corrections or updates to plug-ins, or SEO fixes are written by the same authors that implemented the problem to begin with, and yet they charge for the corrections. There are times when it almost seems like they planned the progression.

I would always be very cautious of plug-ins, free or paid, many of those plug-ins have back-doors that allow the author to track your site, capture user information, IP's, emails, etc. I have been writing code for many years and have located quite a few of those myself as I have looked through the code. That is one reason why I stay away from 3rd party web applications for my customer sites.

That said, there is nothing wrong with them doing that, and in fact many of the authors actually disclose that in their license agreements, the types of information they capture. As long as you, the site owner, does not have a problem with that then it is not an issue.

Myself, I teach my students to always develop their own material, especially when they are implementing customer sites, or working as a free lance developer. Can you imagine the liability that you would have if you deployed a customer system, and the customer was unaware of a plugin or an application that was part of the system capturing their customer data, and then that data was compromised. That could become a very difficult conversation to have with a client.

I hope this better explains what I was trying to explain.

Creating your own website or CMS is not really that difficult. I have 100's of FREE videos on my site that I have put up for my students to use in their review of our course material. They have been viewed 1000's of times by students around the world.

I also have a complete course on developing your own CMS Blog system, it runs a little over 17 hours. It covers all the important aspects of writing a CMS and was developed based on a 3rd year college class that I taught.

You should check it our you may be surprised at just how simple it is once you understand the concepts. And by the way, it is very fast.

 

[virtubox]

If you are talking about that kind of Terms of use (WordPress.com Plugins ...) :



You are totally right, JetPack plugins is one of the most use plugin with WordPress, and it take more than a year for them to fix their API security breach and by reading their TOS, they are just making money with your website.
I have already create my own blog system in the past, but 17 hours is a huge amount of learning time for someone who only want to publish some content. If bootstrap is really easy to learn, understanding MySQL relationship is less easy for people who have no web knowledge.
Adding the fact technologies are changing quickly (php5 / php7), I prefer to use a light CMS where I have some manual editing to do, or to contribute to a good project. That's why I will migrate some of my website to Grav, because a light NoSQL CMS, with only Free Github plugins is most complete than I can do.

 

[Mike001]

Whatever works best for you is the best way for you to go.

Your example of the JetPack plug in is just one of thousands that do that and much more, at least they are very up front with their advertising model, many of the plug in manufacturers put their collection techniques inside the small print of the Terms of Use, which many of us seldom if ever read.

Your comment on the amount of time is kind of funny. 17 Hours being a huge amount of time. When I was learning the Laravel Framework, Laravel is a framework that is used by many developers for developing web applications that are dynamic and very secure, I was told to set aside about 300 hours to get comfortable with the many features available. I thought that was a lot of time to spend on a Framework.

I consider myself pretty good in programming, I have a Masters Degree in Computer Science Engineering and a group of Bachelor's Degrees in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Software Engineering, it still took me over about 500 hours to really get comfortable with all the features in the framework and implementing the security aspects. I guess it is all perspective.

Let me know if there is anything that I can do to help you out. It sounds like you have found a good solution for what you are trying to do. That is what is important.

What works best for you....

 

[virtubox]

I'm not saying 17 hours is a huge amount of time for me, but I have some knowledge in development, and also I'm learning on the web for several years now.
But for most of users, it may require more than 17 hours to learn how to create their own CMS, or to understand totally each step of the tutorial.

But I have always create my own site, and learn what I need to do it. But I prefer to manage servers than to making code, and that's why I will not try to make my own CMS. (That's also because having knowledge in server setup, any WordPress website I have is loading fast enough ^^)

But I totally agree with you about the security issue and the abusive TOS of most of Free WordPress Plugins. But it's also because WordPress is now a real business, and I can only recommend to users who use WordPress to not use too much plugins, and if they need some, to pay few $ at codecanyon to have something properly coded, without hidden TOS