3 seconds. That’s how long an average person will wait for your web-page to load before leaving. 47% of your viewers expect your webpage to load before 2 seconds. 40% of your viewers will leave if your blog doesn’t open by 3 seconds. These facts and numbers have been well researched and established by organizations like the Nielson Group, Amazon Web Services, etc. So what do you do to ensure your blog is loading well within time? Well here are 10 easy ways to go about it
USE GOOGLE’S PAGESPEED INSIGHTS
Using PageSpeed Insights to figure out what is going on your blog is the first task to make a good step by step plan to start improving your loading speed. PageSpeed Insights has a variety of tools and performance indices, letting you know in a detailed but contained manner about what on your webpage is causing it to slow down and where you can improve the loading speed.
ASK YOUR HOSTING SERVICE PROVIDER
The next step to take is to contact your hosting service provider and show them the quantifiable data from PageSpeed Insights and ask them for advice and methods unique to their service that will lead to faster loading times. If you’re using managed wp, you’d have your blog already optimized for speed. This will lead to less time that you spend figuring out how to optimize your blog page.
LEARN ABOUT NEW INTERNET PROTOCOLS AND STANDARDS
There is always progress being made to make the internet more efficient and faster. One way to achieve these goals is the development of new Internet Protocols and Standards (HTTPS and HTTP being examples of old internet protocols). For example, there is the new WEBP image format for uploading images on your blog that provides better lossless compression than JPEG does.
INSTALL A CACHING PLUGIN
Using a caching plugin (a process that generates a lighter HTML version of your blog page instead of loading up the entire WordPress site which is filled with scripts and such) is one of the most popular and effective ways to fasten uploading speeds for your webpage. There are countless such Caching Plugins on the market, both free and premium services, for you to peruse.
There are tons of companies that offer blog management under which they do everything for your blog, from content creation, to link building. If you have a subscription, you can ask them to tweak your blog as well.
DISABLE PINGBACKS AND TRACKBACKS
An old legacy feature that doesn’t see much use these days is pingbacks/trackbacks, a method of communication between websites when someone mentions or links an article to your website can sometimes lead to increased loading times on your blog. Considering that most pingbacks/trackbacks are usually spammed like in nature, it is probably prudent for you to completely disable this feature.
CHANGE YOUR THEME
A feature-rich theme, in general, will have a lot of lines of code in order to provide those features, and while it is possible to optimize those lines of codes there is only so much you can do when the starting product is so large. So instead of a heavy feature rich, beautiful UI based theme, which might not even load in time, take a theme which gets the work done while still looking simple and aesthetic.
DELETE UNUSED THEMES AND PLUGINS
You should always, as a general rule, be updating your themes and plugins regularly in order to get the benefits of any improvements made in their scripts. But keep in mind that all the plugins that you aren’t using or the themes that you’ve moved on from aren’t cluttering up your database. Plugins and themes that you don’t use don’t automatically get deleted from your database but instead get archived, taking up precious space. Deleting a plugin is a simple task, simply deactivate it from your settings and then delete it. Deleting a theme has a similar procedure, simply go to your website’s appearance setting and delete the unused themes from the theme tab.
REMOVE OTHER UNUSED MEDIA
Over the lifetime of your website, you’ll start accumulating media which you’re no longer using, whether they are pictures, audio files, or self-uploaded videos, which take a significant drain on the size of your database. To free up this wasted space in your database, consider deleting these unused media from your media library.
REDUCE POST REVISION AND COMMENTS PER PAGE
The way WordPress keeps backups of your content is by saving multiple versions of your pages, posts, comments and more. These multiple revisions, while great for keeping a secure backup, slowly start to accumulate and clutter up your database and begin to slow it down. Especially, since there is no default limit to the number of revision for each of them, creating redundant and unnecessary copies of your content. To speed up the loading times for your site, consider limiting the number of revision per post or page. In order to limit the number of revisions per post, simply go to the wp-config.php file and a line of code:
define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 2 );
This will limit the number of revisions of your posts to be two each per post. You can change this number as you wish or even set it to 0 and thus, turning of the post revision feature.
MOVE TO A DEDICATED SERVER
The final step in order to make your website load faster is to simply get a dedicated server. This is especially true if your website receives a lot of traffic. A shared server might be slowing down the loading speeds as even though it is much more affordable than a dedicated server hosting service, the server’s RAM and CPU is getting split amongst various other websites. And if one of those many websites is also experiencing heavy traffic, then it’ll be draining the server capabilities quite a lot, leaving you with slow loading time and possibly an unresponsive website.
A dedicated server takes out that problem by making sure the server that your website is being hosted on is solely dedicated to your website. It also removes the potential risk of sharing a server with a spammer or a malicious blog. A managed wp host will lead to massively increased loading speed and website uptime but could be an expensive proposition.
And there we are, 10 different ways that you can apply to start decreasing the loading time of your websites and make it more attractive to your potential viewers.
