Does anyone remember the AOL dial up sound? If not, here is a lovely reminder. I had dial-up internet until college, so I’m well acquainted with sitting and waiting forever for pages to load. I’m so glad those days are over! Nowadays if I come across a slow website, it’s more likely a problem with the site itself than it is with my own internet connection.
Recently, Angela and I noticed that TBM was running slower than usual. Then some of my clients reached out to me to see if I could help speed up their sites as well. After researching a bit, I learned that there are TONS of ways to speed up your WordPress site. Such a relief! Below are 5 easy ways to speed up your WordPress site. Some methods are really obvious and others are a little technical. Try them out and let us know if you notice a different in your website’s speed!
1. Run a page speed test
This is the first thing you should do in order to find out if your website is running slowly for your audience of if it’s just an issue with your internet connection. PageSpeed Insights and Page Speed Grader have been the most helpful tools for me. Both will rate your website’s speed and give you lots of recommended actions to make it run faster.
2. Enable Caching
WordPress caching is such a quick and effective way to speed up your site. Caching means that your pages are saved as static files, so when they’re delivered to your audience, they don’t have to completely load all over again. Our favorite WordPress-recommended caching plugin is WP Super Cache. This saves readers so much time on our site!
3. Compress Your Images
We all want the highest quality images for our websites, but uploading several huge hi-res photos will definitely slow down any website. Find a good plugin that will compress your images without losing any of the quality. Our favorite is WP Smush – Image Optimization.
4. Delete Unused Images
I have a bad habit of uploading blog graphics, changing them in Photoshop, re-uploading them, and then never deleting the unused images. I’ve learned the hard way that it’s smart to delete unused images as soon as possible, before your Media Library keeps growing and you can’t remember whether or not the images are attached to blog posts or pages.
5. Stop WordPress from Storing your Post Revisions
We mentioned this the other week in our resources roundup, but WordPress actually stores all of your post revisions in your database. I always go back and edit small details of my posts before publishing, so saving all the revisions seems like a waste of space. Thankfully there is a handy plugin called WP-Optimize that gives you the option of cleaning all of your post revisions. Problem solved!
Try these out and let us know if they work for you! And share any other helpful tips in the comments. :)
Sara says
Wow, the PageSpeed Insights help a lot! My images are killing my site speed. I always load photos that are the same size as my column width, so I thought they were as small as they could be. I’m thinking about saving them at 80% quality (in Lightroom) from now on to reduce the size even more. What settings do you use to save your photos?
Also, do you know, if I use WP Smush, can I bulk smush the older images and then disable the plugin? I’d rather save them right the first time and avoid using too many plugins…
Marc says
Great suggestions! I’ll be sure to run through them periodically.
Somewhat related: As the campaign drags on, some of the blogs I read have been embedding tweets from Twitter — little active boxes that are a snapshot of the tweet (and included pictures) — and wow are they SLOW. A bit of text will load leaving a lot of white space, and then after 10 or more seconds, the tweet boxes will start to fill in. It reminds me of the old days of dial-up…
Cheryl Forziati says
Great List! The faster your site the less likelihood of a high bounce rate too! No one wants to have to wait for images and content to load. I love tools.pingdom.com for checking how your site is performing.