5 Ways to Speed Up Your Wordpress Blog

It is a common fact that if your blog is slow it’s likely that people won’t wait. Nobody likes a slow loading blog.

If you are experiencing slow download times here are some tips to increase the speed of your WordPress blog.

1. Conduct A Website Speed Test

A website speed test is a great way of seeing how fast your blog will load. The speed test will determine the average download speed for your blog. Aim to have your page load of fast as possible, in my opinion no more than 5 seconds. The iweb speed test is good a tool to use.

2. Have You Got A Good Web Host?

I can’t emphasise enough the importance of choosing a good web host. Your success depends on a good host. Avoid over sellers on hosting that provides unlimited TB’s of download space and bandwidth.

Over sellers, are undercutting their prices to attract more potential customers. You need a reliable hosting server that is not overloaded with countless sites. Do some research into a good webhost. Look for a web host that provides realistic bandwidth if you’re new to blogging it is highly unlikely you’ll need any more than 20GB to begin with.

How to test if your hosting server is slow?

If you blog is slow, on your hosting, install a new Wordpress blog, on the server and test the upload speed. This is to test if the hosting server is slow, if it is then it is time to find a new host. One of my previous blogs taken one minute to download then decided that if I want to have a successful blog, I must change web hosts.

3. Optimise Your WordPress Blog Theme

For those who aren’t aware of PHP, think of it as the person who needs to find the answers to the questions. PHP isn’t sure so it needs to refer to a reference, which in this case is a database. The database is the library that has all answers.

PHP takes longer to find out the answers to our questions rather HTML that knows the answers. Therefore, by replacing PHP with HTML you’re going to increase the speed of your blog.

If you load your blog in the web browser and view source (usually Ctrl + U), you’ll notice that it the code is HTML. All the PHP code is translated into HTML. What we can do is copy and replace all the code from the first line and down to the tag from the view source and replace it into our theme.

A word of warning and disclaimer: Make sure you have a back up of your blog first in case anything goes wrong. I am not accountable for any issues due to not backing up your own blog.

9 Basic Steps

1: Open your blog in a web browser
2: Go to view source (or Ctrl + U)
3: Copy the code from the first line right down to </head>
4: Go into WordPress admin panel and locate the theme editor
5: Open header.php
6: Remove the code from the first line down to the </head> tag
7: Paste the new code into the theme editor
8: Click save
9: Test in new browser

You shouldn’t notice any difference in layout if done correctly. Here we’ve removed the PHP and added static HTML. This technique has removed several unnecessary queries to the database.

4. Remove Any Unused Plugins – Unused plugins can slow down your blog. The best thing to do is remove these plugins and deactivate them.

5. Optimise Your Images – Do you use images in your blog? Most people do. Make sure that they are optimised to a decent file size. I aim to keep most of my images below 50K. Not everyone has super high speed connections, optimise your image files accordingly.

Bonus tip

6. Install the WP Super Cache – The WP Super Cache increases the speed of our blog by creating static HTML pages instead of PHP pages. If the same page is read often, it makes sense to create a HTML version of this page. This is an automated plugin increases the speed of your WordPress blog.

There are 6 useful tips to increase the download speed of your WordPress blog. If you are noticing any slow download times on your blog. Please check your hosting first, by installing a fresh WordPress blog located somewhere on your server.

This may be the source of the problem.

Remember you’ve only got 10 seconds.

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