Speed Up WordPress Sites Faster
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Learn to Speed Up WordPress Sites and How to Make WordPress Faster

Speeding up WordPress Sites:  The elements that can be optimized and tweaked to speed up WordPress or to make WordPress faster are very simple to identify and optimize to increase the performance of your WordPress site for load speed.  In so doing you will improve the user experience of the site and ultimately that leads to more phone calls, form fills or sales.

The major cores of WordPress speed and performance are:

  1. Server Performance
    1. Enable gzip compression,
  2. Page Load Speed
  3. Images
  4. HTML Code
  5. Plugins ( JavaScript, HTML Bloat(CSS and White Space)

There are 4 factors that determine the Page Load Speed

Improve WordPress Performance with Hosting Server Speed

  • DNS Response
    • 301 Redirects (Minimize)
  • File Size
    • CSS Combine or minimize
    • JavaScript (JS,.js) Combine or minimize
    • Excess HTML and White Space Code bloat – Delete White Space
    • Although the actual coded bytes of image size all play apart in file size we are going to focus on the actual bits of CSS and HTML code for this section and separate the pictures as their own category.
  • Images
    • Quantity
    • Size
    • Location

The response your server has to a specific user’s browser is often not the area to locate the biggest gains in speed performance.  However, there are a few things that can slow down the functioning communication of the two.

Lessen 301 Redirects

Whether you use a 301 redirect plugin, the Yoast editor or you modify your won .htaccess files…301 redirects can bog down a server handling many concurrent browser connections.  This is because each user’s browser will need to test the URL they are attempting to reach against all of the redirects a website has to make sure it is not redirected before rendering the blog content copywriting faster.

The best way to avoid this is to leverage as few redirects as possible on any CMS driven site like WordPress.  This will make your WordPress fast but can also improve the speed of any site online.

Avoid numerous redirects

In addition to the above tactic you may also want to make sure your redirects are only 1 level deep.  You don’t want one let alone many redirects, redirecting if that makes sense.  For example the following is an example of too many redirects:

Redirect Layer Example:

Let’s assume a user is trying to visit our website via a WordPress SEO plugin forum like Yoast.  We have http:// wordlead.com linked to from a user on the forum asking for some similar functionality of their plugin as WordLead offers all its users (download the WordLead WordPress SEO plugin today) as the main sites website.

However, what if that link is 10 years old?

WordLead’s main indexed domain has been switched to SSL from non SSL and then swapped again from non www to a www URLs.  If we did not have our redirects set up correctly for SEO a WordPress speed the users request might hit the server like this:

  1. https://wordlead.com/
  2. https://wordlead.com/
  3. https://www.wordlead.com/

That is 2 redirects at best and could be 2 times the amount of redirects we have in the .htaccess file as the server checks all the https:// redirects then all of the https://www.  If you have several hundred or thousands of pages that adds up to seconds of page load speed.

To fix this issue you can down these .htaccess modifier plugins or you can open up your .htaccess file in a text editor and upload it to your ftp server usually in the public html folder

 

Page File Size in Bytes

You want your page to load in less than 3 seconds.  If you are serious…You need a sub 2 second page load speed.  This is without question on of the top SEO tactics that is under utilized and should be focused on more than just Links and content matched with high engagement rates.

For a quick look into page load speed check out the online page load speed tool at https://gtmetrix.com

. Our WordPress SEO expert strategists use the online tool page load speed is quick and accurate.  In addition it lists the exact files with tips on how to improve them.  However the tip is always “make it smaller”.

Below is an example of our home page with a sub 2 second rankings.  Some of our competitors have 27 second load times and holy smokes what a waste that is.

Speed Up WordPress Site

Make WordPress Faster

 

WordPress Cache Plugins ?

The best way to speed up your page is to site is to utlize a cache the other is using a Content Delivery network(CDN).

 

How to Make WordPress go faster with pictures and image files.

To make WordPress faster you can optimize your sites images to assist in speeding up the visitors experience and Google spider’s ability to crawl your site.  Both are beneficial to rankings and delivering conversions

Less is more

When speed and faster performance is the primary goal there is no way to get around the fact that pictures hurt the most.  Reduce the actual amount of pictures that load the screen.  Do you really need to separate logo .gifs for the header and the footer?  Try to use the same one for both.

Reduce Image sizes with both Quality and Size Reductions

When you save your picture files or “assets” try to save them as medium or low quality.  That large picture often has a ton of data and can be lessened while still providing a great visual experience for your users.

 

Sliders and Large hero Imagers in the header

As a rule of thumb skip the JavaScript heavy sliders and slider plugins in favor of a reduced size and quality hero image.  We have yet to find a quality slider that was designed from the ground up to focus on either benefiting SEO or atleast not harming it.  The multiple JS files and poor coding practices that do help funtionailty often kill performance.

Specify Picture Dimensions

Image(s) quantity, quality and size but so do things like data information especially the width and height of the image needs to be specified.  This is because when the page is rendering it will stop until the each image downloads before continuing on to new html code if the width and height vales are not filled in.  This is because it must then calculate this to render the page appropriately across all browsers.  So this could actually be called browser speed optimization instead of “How to s”.

 

How to reduce the raw HTML code size

Reduce excess file sizes with deleting the extra whitespace in your PHP, HTML, JS and CSS files and code.  There are many plugins that perform this function for you and many cache systems have built in features like and …

The WordLead whitespace removal plugin will perform this function for you.  You can download this white space eliminator plugin or you can also manually perform this procedure.  The best place to start is your theme templates.  You can access them via FTP or you can use the “editor” function available to admin and owners, and power users on the WordPress install.

Either way you edit these files the same steps should be taken.  You can either highlight large sections of blank space or hit delete on your keyboard or you can perform a replace all function which is in option if you hit CTRL F and select replace all.  Place space or 6 in find what and make sure nothing is in the replace with

Minify HTML and CSS files

remove HTMl white space

List of PageSpeed Elements You can Optimize to Speed Up WordPress Sites

Meta Tag character
Remove bad requests
Remove CSS @import
Remove landing page redirects
Combine images using CSS sprites
Defer parsing of JavaScript
Enable gzip compression
Enable Keep-Alive
Inline small CSS
Inline small JavaScript
Leverage browser caching
Minify CSS
Minify HTML
Minify JavaScript
Minimize redirects
Minimize request size
Optimize images
Optimize the order of styles and scripts
Prefer asynchronous resources
Put CSS in the document head
Remove query strings from static resources
Serve resources from a consistent URL
Serve scaled images
Specify a cache validator
Specify a character set early
Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header
Specify image dimensions
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