Speed is power in digital marketing. As one of the
#1. Install Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP
The Mobilegeddon is perhaps one of the reasons why Facebook and Google adopted Instant Articles and AMP, respectively. Both are geared towards providing mobile users a more seamless user experience when viewing content on their devices. The mobile audience is crucial as they helped tip the balance of online consumption to a multi-platform approach in which majority of people use mobile and desktop to connect to the internet.
More importantly, both help reduces the loading time of the page onto their devices so they can view the content faster. If you’re considering to implement both on your WordPress site, you may want to try out PageFrog which allows you to convert your published content into Instant Articles as AMP.
#2. Choose WordPress hosting
Your web host plays a pivotal part in your site’s loading speed. While it’s true that the tools are only as important as the person using them, this is something that you can’t apply regarding web hosting. If you chose a mediocre or substandard web hosting provider, then your WordPress site will bound to fail despite how stellar your content is or how beautifully designed your site is.
Therefore, you need to choose a web hosting provider that offers not only optimum speed for your WordPress site but also minimal downtime, helpful customer support, and better security. All of these are covered by most WordPress hosting providers.
You won’t have to worry about reduced loading speed if your site or blog attracts thousands of traffic at the same time. Your chosen WordPress web host provides you with all the tools and resources to build a high-performing site without compromising on speed.
If you are looking to switch from your old hosting provider to a dedicated one for your site WordPress, then you can’t go wrong with any of the sites featured here at WP Dev Shed.
#3. Use a content delivery network
Even if you chose a good hosting provider to help make your site load faster, there is a way to squeeze more juice out of your loading speed.
The loading speed depends on where your web hosting provider is based on. The farther your visitors are away from the physical web hosting location, the slower your site will load on their end.
To eliminate this issue, you need to use a content delivery network (CDN) which is made up of distribution servers from all over the world. When you set up a CDN onto your WordPress site or blog, the nearest server of your distribution server will deliver the content to your visitors. This will result in faster load times and a more convenient experience for users browsing your site.
A CDN also it does the heavy lifting to make your WordPress site or blog accessible to users and visitors. As a result, it takes away the load that is usually taken over by your web hosting’s servers. By removing the burden of returning HTTP requests from a browser to server and back, your web host can operate more efficiency.
There are lots of content delivery networks to choose from depending on the type of site you have and the volume of visitors you attract to your site on a regular basis. However, if you’re just getting your feet wet with CDN, it’s best to go with MaxCDN.
#4. Prevent hotlinking
Since your web host will be one of your most prized online possessions, you want to benefit from all its resources when running your site or blog. However, there will be times when others will ride the coattails of your content and leverage them on their posts.
For example, if you host an infographic or a striking image on your site, some will feature it on their blog post. However, instead of uploading the image to their respective servers, they will just copy the original link hosted on your servers and paste it on their blog post. As a result, they are borrowing your bandwidth instead of using their own. Whenever someone visits the page, your stolen image loads from your server!
The process is known as hotlinking or “content leeching” can slow down your loading speed because others are using it to feature content on their site. This can be damning especially if the person who stole the link to your image is garnering thousands of traffic on a regular basis.
To prevent this from happening, you can following the simple steps featured in this post at DevilHaX.com. Once you enter the code in your .htaccess file, the image will only load on your site and not others.
#5. Download the best plugins
Plugins are one of the biggest advantages have over other publishing platforms. Its extensive library of useful plugins built by reputable developers to boost your site’s performance and help meet your online goals remains unmatched.
However, this does not give you the privilege to download plugins to your heart’s content. Installing too many plugins can help clog up your WordPress site’s database and can contribute to your site’s slow loading time.
If you want to harness to true power of WordPress plugins, then you need to install the best ones that will not only increase your site’s performance but also speed up your site for the benefit of your target audience. Below are must-install plugins for your WordPress site or blog:
- WP Smush– Compress existing and incoming images in your WordPress database without losing their respective quality. After compression, the file size of each image dramatically decreases to help make your visual content load faster.
- WP Rocket– Arguably the best caching plugin in the market. On top of doing everything that the free popular caching plugins do (WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache), WP Rocket also allows lazy loading of images, database optimization, Google Fonts optimization, and more!
- Plugin Performance Profiler (P3)– If you want to know how much resources it takes to load each of your plugins, then you need to install this. It analyzes all your plugins and shows which ones are eating up most of your web hosting resources. From here, you can decide to uninstall the plugin or find a suitable replacement for it that does not take up as many resources.
How about you – are there other ways not mentioned above that you implement on your WordPress site to help increase its loading speed? Share them with us by commenting below!
