How to Speed Up your WordPress Blog?

Speed is the most important thing these days as far as websites performance and optimization is concerned. Do you know how to speed up your website? Read on this blog post on how to speed up your WordPress blog?

Normally it is being considered that WordPress blogs will be better compared to any other blogging platform as far as the performance, speed, SEO, usability, and conversations are concerned. Honestly these are some of the benefits why bloggers loves WordPress and select it for their blogging needs.

But due to some other factors like outdated plugins, outdated WordPress software, hosting performance, media sizes, etc. your blog might become a bit slow. As I’ve already explained that many a times to get the SEO benefits your blog should load as quickly as possible. You can also read my blog on the importance of page loading time on your blog to understand it.

It’s a fact that if your website loads faster, people will prefer spending more time on it and this will decrease the bounce rate of your site and give you boost in search engine rankings as well.

How to Speed Up your WordPress Blog?

So here are the ways to increase the speed of your WordPress blog:

Choose Theme Wisely

Properly optimized theme or WordPress template plays a crucial role in optimizing the speed of your WordPress blog. To be very frank there are themes which have so many complicated codes which make your website bulky, thus we should ignore using such themes.

There was a time when I was having a thought that premium themes or paid WordPress templates are a waste of money. That was the time when I was having a mindset that I can customize any basic theme and provide all the required features with the help of different plugins. To be very frank, I was not even wrong.

The normal perception is that themes are meant to display the style and content of your blog, while plugins plays a role in providing different functionalities to the blog. Honestly it’s true, so a normal blogger can chose any basic theme and customize it as per their need as well.

But then since the day I found My Theme Shop themes, and I started using them I realized the real difference. My personal recommendations are My Theme Shop themes only, if you are planning to use a SEO friendly and well optimized, cost effective, powerful, premium theme for your blog.

To be very frank, if my readers like my blog on I News India and Tech Acid as well, the credit goes to the same themes.

So to speed up your blog, you should come up with a fast, sleek, and good quality theme, no matters if it is free or a premium one.

WordPress Updates

Ask me and I will tell you the most common reason to ignore updating the blogging platform of the software which is the backbone of your blog. To be very frank it is the fear of losing the data of your blog, which somehow compels a blogger to stop clicking on that Update Now button.

Honestly if you want to speed up your blog, you should always remain updated with the WordPress software. Though make sure to take a copy of your database and some major files and folders of your blog before clicking on it.

For the better performance and improved security of your blog, you must need to update the blogging platform of it.

Plugins Update

You all know the fact that plugins plays a major role in the functionalities of your blog. To be very frank, you should always update them, as an updated plugin will leave no loophole in the security of your WordPress blog. I still remember how I lost a few websites in the year 2007-08 when I was a newbie in the field of blogging.

On the other hand many bloggers install so many plugins and sometimes deactivate some of them too. My suggestion to all those bloggers is to get rid of all the unwanted plugins from your blog. Many a times an unused and inactive plugins becomes a threat for the safety of your blog.

Also as the functionalities of your blog is managed by those plugins only, it plays a crucial role in the uploading of your blog. A poorly coded plugin might ruin all the reputation of blog.

Optimized Images

Honestly, images play a crucial role in making your blog a bulky one. If you are uploading heavy size images, it will surely slow down your blog. To make sure, your blog faster you should optimize the images to use on blog.

How?

You might ask me this, though I was also not very much aware about how to optimize images of my blog. Thanks to my blogger friend Vinay Nagaraju who suggested me to use a plugin Smush.it to do so.

My dear friend WP Smush.it is a powerful plugin to optimize your images. You can also use this plugin to reduce the image size so that your blog should not become bulky. You just need to download the plugin and install it and then activate it.

Once activated; this plugin will automatically start compressing all the images which you will upload on your blog. Then you might ask me what to do with pictures which you already have on your blog. You can also compress them one by one or together with the help of the Bulk Smush.it link on your Media section.

Though other than WP Smush.it I can also recommend you one more plugin for optimizing the image size, and it is Imsanity, as suggested by my blogger friend Payal Pandya. As per her:

Imsanity is also a very good image optimize plugin, I am using it from 2 years! You can specify the image size you want without compromising the image quality.

So as per my suggestion you can use any of the plugin, either WP Smush.it or Imsanity for image optimization purposes to speed up your WordPress Blog.

Cache Plugins

The last and the best way to speed up your WordPress blog is to install a cache plugin for your blog. It is the best way to optimize the resources of your blog and clean them time to time.

There are two most popular caching plugins available in the world of net and those are WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache but I would recommend everyone using W3 Total Cache on their blog.

Always remember the fact that using these plugins is dangerous for your blog, if you did clicked on some wrong settings. As far as the ideal basic settings for W3 Total Cache plugin is concerned, stay tuned over here, I will come up with a blog on that very soon.

So these are some of the ways to maintain the loading speed of your WordPress blog. Though despite implementing all these things if the speed of your blog did not improve then I will recommend you to change your web hosting. Thought always remember that whatever you implement on your blog will not impact much on the speed of your blog if you are having a poor quality web hosting provider.

My regular visitors are already aware that I recommend using HostGator for hosting your WordPress blogs. They are the best as far as my own personal experience is concerned.

Do leave your feedback about this blog post of mine. Please don’t hesitate in sharing whatever you feel about this blog post of mine. I would be glad to read your comments about this and any more idea or ways to speed up WordPress blogs, if I missed one.