10 tips to speed your WordPress Website

Do you want to get more traffic to your website and gain more sales???? Then your website should speed up.

Speed is now of the major indicator that has a huge impact in web search rankings. Google in 2010 confirmed that speed is one of the 200 indicators in rankings of the site. Speed level of website is not only important to the site owners but also to all the internet users. It is known fact that users would feel happy and stay on to the site for much time, if your website responds faster, rather if it is very slow, and then visitors could stay less on to your site, which would return less traffic to your website.

The maximum load time of your website should be 3 seconds and the page should be less than 2MB. Instead if it exceeds more than 3 seconds of load time and size, then that would create a problem – costs much money, low sales and so low money.

Making small adjustments to the speed triggers of your website, designed using WordPress is unfavorable.

There are many tools available on the internet like WebPageTest, Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and many more. These tools help you to detect the problem causing slow loading time and worst user experience of your website.

Here are few tips to improve the performance of your website,

1. Compression:

Compress the CSS and Javascript files, which would help browsers to download those files speedier. The Gzip software application, used for compressing and decompressing the files should be used to compress those files, which can easily reduce the size from more than 200 KB(decompressed file) to less than 40 KB( compressed file). Use this method till your server allows enabling the compression. You should be strong enough that visitors could experience the speed of your website on all devices.

Include the below snippet code to your .htaccess file to start enabling the compression.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php text/php text/html text/plain text/css text/xml application/x-javascript text/javascript application/javascript text/x-js

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent

2. Optimization of images:

Images are the main source for reducing the speed of your site. The only solution is to optimize those images. The images which has size- more than 50KB should be optimized and then place in your website. The most used platform for optimization is “Photoshop”. And of course there are many available tools on the internet. Another solution is to use the progressive pictures for JPG files, as it enables a good user experience.

Look at these two images, the left one is the non -optimized image and the other one is optimized image,

Non-optimized Image                                                 Optimized image

 3. Javascript files in footer:

Javascipt files like jQuery, Prototype improves the functionality of a site, and also there is a disadvantage that it can block the execution of the pages. Website content cannot be loaded till the Javascript files placed on page header downloaded. There is a solution to this issue, i.e shift the javascript files to the footer of the respected page. Website designed using WordPress can change the script calls from header.php to footer.php.

4. Enable KeepAlive:

Apache, the server used for sharing the hosting plans to companies that costs low hosting plans. Apache has an awesome feature by default called KeepAlive also called HTTP persistence connection that helps making connections for a HTTP request. Make sure KeepAlive is activated at your hosting company. This feature should kept enabled every time by your hosting company or else if you credentials to httpd.conf file, you just enable the keepAlive . or else you can add the code below to your httpd.conf file.

<ifModule mod_headers.c>

Header set Connection keep-alive

</ifModule>

5. HTTP requests minimization:

The loading of your site would get more slower if you have too many HTTP requests. This should be reduced to every page of your site. Simply combine the CSS files, next join Javascript files, and combine pictures in data sprites in order to allow only few HTTP requests.

6. Choose the right format for the pictures:

• The small and speediest loading file format is JPG.
• Use PNG for the text pictures.
• Remove the GIF files, as they slow down you website loading speed.

7. Limit page size:

Adding more content, images to your website makes your site looks great. But each page in your site, the size should be less than 2MB. Every visitor who visits your site may get upset (especially the users who use mobile phones to browse) if your loading time is more. The less the size of your page, the more traffic you would get. So it’s better to add only the necessary images and content.

8. Choose the right Hosting company:

Select the hosting plan that your website need. Many of the hosting companies allow limited plans and host thousands of websites in a server, and make fees low. You have to get for what you pay. If you wanted to host an e-Commerce website or any large CMS, your site may face heavy traffic and traffic spikes.

WPengine is the best hosting company to host your e-Commerce wordpress site.

9. Use CDN Content Delivery Network:

CDN is a distributed network of networks. Based on the geographical locations, CDN delivers the webpage content to the user. Any CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Jumla or a HTML site, CDN is highly recommended. Whenever a user visits your site, images and CSS files are served from the server, which is geographically closer to them so they are executed much speedier.

10. Check for 404 errors:

• Website loading speed could get slower if any of your web page is missing.
• Check for 404 errors while executing the web page

In the web search rankings, if your site ranks higher, automatically your visitors feel happy and so they land on your site for much time, getting wide range of traffic to site. This in turn gets you more sales and profit.