August 28, 2013 by akhilendra

How To Improve Page Speed of WordPress Site

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If you are running a website or a blog (wordpress, blogger or any other), you should carefully monitor your webpage’s page speed or load time. A slow website is pain for the webmaster and it often yield nothing for its owner.

If you are a blogger then no matter what you write or how well you promote your blog, you won’t get better results with low page speed.

WordPress load time or page speed has become an extremely important factor in Google ranking factors. And also, your visitors are not going to love a slow loading blog. In fact, that’s precisely why google has made it an important factor in deciding ranks in its search results. Google want to serve well its customers and if it is routing its customers to slow websites or blogs, then they are not going to like it. Therefore google prefer faster websites and blogs over sites with slow page speed.

It is imperative for your blog and website to load faster.

Let’s look at some of the most common and important factors which affect your blog’s page speed.

Website speed test tools which you can use for your blogs and website speed test

Google Page Speed Test

Pingdom Tool

How To Improve Page Speed of WordPress Site

Good Webhost– a web host is the first and most crucial part of your wordpress page speed. There is not much you can do about it as you don’t know about the infrastructure quality of your web host. You need better quality hardware with good specifications collaborated with high quality software. Now as we can’t know much about them it’s better to stick to most trusted name in web hosting industry.

Web host directly impact your server response time and if your web host is not good enough then your blog will take longer to load if everything else is fine.

Based on my personal experience and feedback from friends, I will suggest;

1. Hostgator
2. Godaddy
3. WPEngine
4. Inmotion
5. Myhosting

To know better about wordpress hosting, click here. For hosting discount coupons, click here.

High quality website template or wordpress theme

If you are not using wordpress, then you should carefully choose a well coded website templates. Html5 website templates are futuristic in current world and try to stick with them. If you are using wordpress, then studiopress themes are best coded themes. They support html5 and well coded which is extremely helpful in better page speed. If a theme is not well coded then it will have several scripts and CSS issues which will result in slower page speed.

Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content

There are javascripts and css resources in the above the fold content in your web page which may hinder the page load. You should move these javascripts to footer in order to improve page speed. But you should first try it on a test site because it may impact certain scripts which may adversely affect your site or blog. Therefore it is better to test it before implementing it.

To move your scripts to footer, you can simply paste below mention codes in function.php of your theme;

/**

* Automatically move JavaScript code to page footer, speeding up page loading time.

*/

remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_print_scripts’);

remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_print_head_scripts’, 9);

remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_enqueue_scripts’, 1);

add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘wp_print_scripts’, 5);

add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘wp_enqueue_scripts’, 5);

add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘wp_print_head_scripts’, 5);

Levarege browser caching

You should use caching to improve user experience and wordpress loading time. Best part about wordpress is the abundance of high quality free plugins. You can use wp super cache and w3 total cache to leverage browser caching. These plugins are free, easy to install and effective. They also offer additional benefits like integration of CDN along with features like minifying which is of additional help.

Asynchronous Loading of Scripts

Asynchronous scripts help in improving page speed of wordpress and other sites by allowing web page to load even if these elements are not downloaded completely.

In simpler term, your web page tries to load all kind of codes present on it before rendering it to the user. If there are certain codes which are slower than others then your webpage will wait for them to download and once they are downloaded, it will render the final web page to your users. When you use asynchronous scripts, your webpage will not wait for these slower codes and hence, will load faster.

Some of the most common type of additional html code found on most of the blogs and website is adsense code and social media sharing icons.

You can use asynchronous scripts of these codes, if possible to eliminate this issue. Google adsense provides synchronous and asynchronous codes for their ad units. Just select asynchronous in code type and you are good to use that.

Usage of Content delivery network

Content delivery network is one of the easiest method of achieving high page speed. CDN like MaxCDN provide whole lot of features which are extremely helpful in maintaining better page speed like gzip compression, caching and many more.

MaxCDN is must for your websites. It is economical at $39 for 1tb. You can use maxcdn discount coupon “akhilendramaxcdn” to further reduce the cost.

To read maxcdn review and why it is so good, click here.

Optimize Images

You should only use jpg images and compress them before uploading them to your wordpress blog in order to have a efficient page speed. You can use wpsmush.it plugin to do it. It is free and pretty efficient in compressing images.

How To Improve Page Speed of WordPress Site Summary

Wordpres page speed will vary from one blog to another. It depends upon lot of factors like plugins, themes, size of the page, images present on blog and additional features. Objective is to have best page speed with all the content you have on it.

Whether you use above mentioned techniques or not but maintaining a good page speed is the key to success in a highly competitive online world today.

If you have any question please leave your comments and yes, sharing is caring so don’t forget to share it on Facebook, Google+ or other social networking sites.

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