Tips On How To Speed Up WordPress Website

As great a hosting platform wordpress is, it still suffers from some serious drawbacks, slow speed is one of the prime ones among them. If not taken seriously, your site can become sluggish and can have you lose subscribers in no time.

These days with millions of websites, typically a few seconds to hold his / her attention and to be able to attract them to keep their visit on. According to Microsoft Bing search team’s research, a 2 second delay in page responsiveness tended to reduce the user satisfaction level by almost 4% which is quite significant.

In addition to that slow site speeds also affect the SEO functionality hence making the site more and more difficult to find on search engines. Let us find out some ways in which we can quicken up the wordpress experience consistently and easily. If you have hired a wordpress website development company, you should ask them to follow the below points.

1. Solid Framework – The framework should be sleek and relevant to the features of the website. Many frameworks are sluggish and have features that are not regularly required or used. The Twenty Fifteen "framework" or the default wordpress theme is quite speedy and lightweight. The Thesis Theme framework has been found out by many to be a solid framework with no excess plugins or custom edits and is quite fast loading too.
2. Automatically Optimize the Images –There are a lot of image optimizers that can drastically reduce the file size of an image while maintaining the quality and richness of the same larger image. Smush it by Yahoo is quite a popular such optimizer. Also known as lossless image compression, this attribute is of prime importance in speeding up your wordpress since typically, on an average, more than half of the website’s page weight is made of images.
3. Use a Content Delivery Network – A content delivery network is an interconnected system of cache servers that use geographical proximity as a criterion for delivery of relevant web content. It also replicates the static assets of a particular website and serves those to the visitors from the closest POP CDN’s are among the most effective ways to fasten the speed of the sites in conjunction with the other areas of optimizations. CDN integration can do multiple things to speed up the website including dramatically decreasing load times, increasing the number of concurrent users, lowering hosting costs, lightening the load on the servers, eventually leading to better search engine rankings.
4. Disable Hot linking – Hot linking is an often used form of bandwidth theft which happens when other sites link directly to the images on your site making your server load high, hence decreasing your speed and leeching the content as well. If you create custom images on your site, this can increase further and further. One of the ways to do that is to add hot link protection to the Key CDN account by creating a Zone Referrer. This will prevent people from embedding the CDN assets of your site. After this implementation the images on external sites will appear as broken images with an error 403 message.
5. Choose a Trustworthy Web Host –Choosing a reliable and fast web host is of prime importance to speed up wordpress. Cheap shared hosting that crowd their servers and share resource among multiple sites should not be considered in the interest of speed and reliability. A VPS or managed wordpress host is recommended depending on the requirement configuration. Although slightly expensive, these are investments worth the money. Digital Ocean is a great cloud VPS provider featuring SSDs, 1gbps network and a dedicated IP address. They even feature a simple 1 click installer for wordpress which is great and saves a lot of time and hassle.

Any professional SEO company or wordpress developer can take care of these issues easily and get your website speed up like never before.

Atul Chaudhary is the founder and director at 1Solutions, a New Delhi based digital marketing company. He specializes in web consultancy for Sme's and start ups.