3 Ways To Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

Speed is essential for your blog to keep visitors happy! More than 4 or 5 seconds loading time and you will have lost the visitor’s attention already.

So, I’ve put together some tips to help keep your blog ticking over nicely and to improve its speed. Here are 3 of my tips to speed up your WordPress blog. You can find these and more on my blog.

1. Optimize and resize your images

If you resize images before loading them onto WordPress this will speed up the loading time.

Why not try using a free tool such as GIMP to do this, which would also reduce the size of your images at the same time. When you are compressing a JPG I would suggest that you should not lower the quality below 80% otherwise the image quality may start to deteriorate.

There are also alternatives such as a plugin called WP Smush.it. This plugin automatically reduces your image file sizes every time you add an image to a page or post meaning you do not have to do this yourself.

How do I know which file type to use?

Always use GIF files on your website if your image is transparent or has animations. For all other images I would recommend using JPG files, which are supported by 99% of web browsers, are low in file size, handle colours better than a GIF and they also loads quite fast.

2. Make sure you keep WordPress and any plugins up to date

Always remember to keep WordPress and your plugins up to date as newer versions often offer increased speed and also security updates.. Older versions of WordPress and plugins could not only compromise the security of your blog but also slow it down.

You can find the Update section under the Dashboard of your WordPress blog. It should hopefully be self explanatory to use for both WordPress and plugin updates.

3. Remove all inactive plugins to increase the speed of your blog

There are so many plugins around these days and I’m sure, like me, you have downloaded quite a few which you no longer use. I would recommend that you remove all your inactive plugins.

Plugins use code and the more plugins you use, the more your browser can slow down. When someone visits your blog, files are sent to their browser, so cutting down on the amount of plugins can speed up the experience they receive from your blog.