Speed Up Your WordPress Blog By Improving Page Load Time

If you have started your blog recently and have not any previous experience then you must concentrate on your page load time. The page load time depends on your page content, number of images in a page and obviously on the theme used for your blog design. If your site takes more time to load then you can face a big traffic loss. Not only that,  Google may sometime stop crawling your site for the late response of your site. Check your page load time.

Learn how to improve the page load time of your blog. The page load time of your blog depends on many factors. By optimizing those you can improve your page load  time. The facts are described below.

1. Optimize the Images: The images of your site participate actively in slowing down the page load time. Mainly two types of images are used in the site.

• The images that are used in theme: Most of all themes use images for designing purpose. Those images consume a big amount of bandwidth. So optimize those images reducing the size as so as possible. Also combine all images in a single one and  use “background-position” rule in style sheet to show the particular part of the image.
• The images that are used in your post: If you use screen shots in your post article then the page load time increases. So always try to reduce the size of the screen shots by compressing them. Using the GIF format of image you can reduce the image size. Here is two useful online image compressing services- online image optimizer and JPEGWizard.

2. Split up long posts: If the posts of your site is too long then split them into small part and use <!–Continue-> tag. This not only improve your page load time, it does help your reader to understand easily.

3. Uninstall Contact Form 7 plugin: If you are using the Contact Form 7 plugin in your site then your page load time increases unnecessarily. Because some codes are loaded on each page at the time of opening. Try to edit that plugin such that the codes only execute when the contact page is loaded but do it in your own risk. You can test your page load time removing the Contact Form 7 plugin. My site takes 0.9 sec lesser to load without the plugin. It is better to uninstall the plugin and create a contact page manually. Stay tuned, I’ll come back with this matter shortly.

Update: Learn how to create a contact page manually for WordPress blog.

4. Upgrade WordPress and Plugins to their new version: Every time when a new version of WordPress or plugins are released, some bugs are fixed. This a great way to reduce the page load time because the WordPress team is working hard to give the user a better performance.

5. Uninstall useless plugins: Most of the plugins use javascript and extra CSS. So there is a big chance to mess up your site by those extra things. Uninstalling the useless plugins you can get rid from some messy build of your site.

6. Add Expires header to static resources in .htaccess: Adding an Expires to static resources of your site you can gain a big amount of page load improvement. Doing so, actually you are specifying time for the client side so that they wont have to re-fetch any static content in future. Download the .htaccess file from the root directory in your server. Add the following lines of code:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png AA2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg AA2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg AA2592000

[ source ]

Save and upload the .htacess file.

7. Install Wp Minify and PHP Speedy plugins: These two plugins Wp Minify and PHP Speedy are so much useful to speed up your page loading. They compress the css, javascript and minify them to optimize the performance.

8. Install Wp-SuperCache: Install Wp-SuperCache and serve your reader a static version of your page instead of the actual page. This increase the page load performace. Enable the Compress feature ( Be confirm of that your web server supports compression ).

Do you think you can add more to the above list? Then let me know.