3+1 Ways to Optimize and Speed Up WordPress Blog

All right. Let’s gear up some questions about your blog performance now.. Have you ever thought about your blog’s loading time?

No.. than It’s time to think about it now..

Why?

Because it’s not only essential to maintain a friendly SEO blog but also for your readers engagement. If you want to increase your readership or to decrease your bounce rate, you need to focus on decreasing your blog loading time. The faster it loads the better it is. Following are the few best ways to Speed Up WordPress.

See also. 20 Best WordPress Plugins That I Used In 2011

1. Use WP Cache Plugin:

This is by far the best WP plugin many blogs are using to clear the cache to speed up the blog. You can clean up your cache memory all the time whenever you loading new plugins or deactivating them.

W3 Total Cache Plugin

Installation guide:

1. Download the plugin here
2. Unzip the file
3. Upload the plugin to your Plugins folder via FTP or Admin area
4. Inside the Plugins section of your WordPress control panel activate the plugin
5. Under the Dashboard click on W3 Total Cache and use it..

2. Optimize Image Size:

Decrease the image size by tools like image optimizer, shrink pictures, picresize etc.

Or you can simply use this WP plugin WP Smush.it (This reduces image file sizes and improves your blog’s performance)

And try to use the images in the following 3 formats.

• .PNG
• .JPG or
• .GIF

These are the best extensions to save your images and decreasing your images size means you are decreasing your blog’s loading time.

3. Clean Up Your WP Database:

Use this plugin called WP Database Optimizer (This plugin allows you to make automated scheduled database optimization. You can specify how long in between automated optimization).

Installation guide:

1. Download the plugin here
2. Unzip the file
3. Upload the plugin to your Plugins folder via FTP or Admin area
4. Inside the Plugins section of your WordPress control panel activate the plugin
5. Under the Dashboard click on WP Database Optimizer and use it..

4. Avoid Too Many Plugins:

Last but not least, don’t use unwanted plugins which effects your blog loading time relatively high. Try to use the top plugins which suits your requirements and needs.

You can check your blog loading time using the following tools.

• Pingdom
• whichloadsfaster or
• searchmetricsrapid

And there are several more ways you can speed up your blog loading time by:

• Using free CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Using the better web hosting provider like HostGator
• By reducing the widgets in your sidebar

Advantages of having a faster loading blog:

You can have the following benefits if you use the above methods to speed up your blog.

It essentially improves your blog’s credibility

Your visitors or readers will be happy with your blog performance

Low bounce rate (it effects certainly)

Good PR and Alexa Rank (yeah, of course)

and many more…

Your Turn:

If you know extra tools more than the above to check a blog’s loading time or any more ideas/tips on speeding up a blog in your mind – do share them below.

This is a guest post by Rahul Kuntala who blogs at LearnBlogTips