How do you speed your website?

by antis
17 replies
Hi guys, right now I am working on speeding my wordpress website a little bit, because it is sluggish. I wanted to ask what techniques did you all use to speed your site? I mean there are many of them, but I cannot decide what's worth trying and what's not. Help will be appreciated, thanks.

P.S I've tried to remove unnecessary html (one of the articles said that it will speed your site), and by accident I messed up my website. Now I have to pay to my hosting service to restore it. So basically I don't want to get my hands in anything that is related with that.
#speed #website
  • Profile picture of the author Ivar1990
    You should use caching. There are several plugins for Wordpress available.
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  • Profile picture of the author robw
    A caching plugin like W3 Total Cache will work wonders - that's because it removes the overhead of WordPress creating the page every time on the fly.

    Also, take as much javascript out of the head as possible, or ensure it is asynchronously loaded.

    Also ensure images are optimised.

    A great tool to check your site is Google Analytics - if you browse into the site speed section, you can get individual pages analysed to find the issues.
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    Do. Or Do Not. There is no try...

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  • Profile picture of the author antis
    I use wp super cache, and I've delivered all the javascript to the bottom.
    Google insight results show that my website speed on mobile devices is 86/100 and on computers 92/100. Is that good enough?
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  • Profile picture of the author RevaxMedia
    I downloaded Firebug for Firefox then use Google Page Speed, it gives really good tips on how to improve speed but it can be really fussy. It picks up things like AdSense, a Google service, to be optimised, it's mad.

    I can also vouch for w3 Total Cache, WP-Optimize and some features in Yoast SEO which can reduce code (rsd links etc...)
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  • Profile picture of the author thatjc
    The above advice is excellent.

    I also use a WordPress plugin called "Use Google Libraries". It lets you use Google's fast Content Distribution Network to load javascript faster.

    I test page load speeds on Pingdom. Be sure to set the city the test comes from in "settings". I usually do 5 tests and take the average. Pingdom shows each element which is sent. So you can see which images have the longest load time, etc.

    Anyone building any type of website must understand how to resize images and do image file compression and strive to keep all image files under 30KB - 40KB in size, or as small as possible for large images.
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  • Profile picture of the author Big Kahuna SEO
    In addition to the recommendation on using a cache plugin, don't forget your host. Are they jamming their servers with 1000's of sites all competing for resources? Make sure you find hosting that doesn't oversell (easier said than done), and consider SSD hosting if you can afford it - although SSD hosting isn't the complete answer, i have transferred many of my sites to SSD and have seen good speed increases.
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  • Profile picture of the author actionplanbiz
    one experience i had was updating my php version for my wordpress blog theme. it helped out a lot
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  • Profile picture of the author vishwa
    You Can use Content delivery networks like cloudflare, Maxcdn etc. It will drastically increase your website loading time and performance. In mean while I also suggest you to use very less amount of plugins, and optimize your image with the help of smush.it plugin. I hope that this will help you.
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  • Profile picture of the author onlineleben
    A good post describing how to convert a sluggish website into a fast, reactive and satisfying user-experience you can find here:
    All About Website Speed | AdwordsExplained.com
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  • Profile picture of the author Tamalkrishna
    Originally Posted by antis View Post

    Hi guys, right now I am working on speeding my wordpress website a little bit, because it is sluggish. I wanted to ask what techniques did you all use to speed your site? I mean there are many of them, but I cannot decide what's worth trying and what's not. Help will be appreciated, thanks.

    P.S I've tried to remove unnecessary html (one of the articles said that it will speed your site), and by accident I messed up my website. Now I have to pay to my hosting service to restore it. So basically I don't want to get my hands in anything that is related with that.
    You should use WordPress Super Cache. I use it on my blog and it works quite well. It works great in terms of reducing the load time. For the right settings, check this blog post i have found in Google : How to Install and Setup WP Super Cache for Beginners
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  • Profile picture of the author cybercyborg
    You should try using cleaner themes that don't use much javascript and heavy images. As others have suggested here, you should use a caching plugin, use hyper cache(if your server resources aren't that good) or super cache.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jtraits
    W3 total cache plugin. i suggest it for sure.
    also -i am not sure if i`m allowed to use code in here so i won't risk it- , search the web on how to reduce the size of wp-options file. Trust me, when you see how many unnecessary mb's there are in there, you'll thank me
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  • Profile picture of the author onlineleben
    Before you use try caching plugins, clean up the basics as described further above
    http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post9047705

    It doesn't help to cache sh...
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  • Profile picture of the author vikash_kumar
    Analyse first with what actually causing the slow loading and that can be done via various analysis tools like Google PageSpeed Analyser.

    And After getting the root cause of the issues behind slow load you can take appropriate actions to enhance page speed of your wordpress website.
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