By Max Emelianov
Where your website’s concerned, performance is critical. Every little thing you can do improve it puts you ahead of your competition.
40% of people abandon a website that takes 3 seconds to load – and that number only increases as load times do.
It sort of goes without saying that you want to do everything in your power to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible. And luckily, that’s actually pretty easy when you’re using WordPress. It’s the largest content management system on the web for a reason, after all.
Here are just a few little tweaks you can apply to both your blog and your hosting platform to help things run just a little smoother.
Utilize Caching
Whenever someone visits a page on your WordPress blog, the server must deliver to them resources such as JavaScript files, text, images, CSS files, and more. Every single one of those items increases the amount of time it takes to load – and virtually every single one of those components is static. What that means is that they’re generally unchanging; one user will see the exact same thing another does
Install a caching plugin to optimize your site and reduce load time for these elements.By storing frequently-accessed elements in the browser cache of site visitors, you can ensure faster load times across the board. As an added benefit, you can also cache certain dynamic element, as well.
Use a Content Delivery Network
It’s sort of common sense – the closer you are to a particular server, the lower the bandwidth and the faster the load time. That’s precisely why using a content distribution network is so important. By serving content to your users through a global distribution network, you can ensure your visitors will almost always download data from a server that’s close to them. End result? Lower latency and a faster load time.
Optimize Your Files
The lion’s share of a site’s load time is due to images – menus, photographs, and other graphics. And while there’s certainly something to be said for a snappy, dazzlingly-beautiful visual experience, the higher your image quality, the greater their impact on bandwidth. You can minimize that impact by using an external photo editor to reduce image size and quality.
Ideally, you want your quality to be around 60%, and the image to be no larger than it needs to for its intended use. For example, don’t use a 2000 pixel image for a thumbnail.
As for videos and other rich media, ideally you want to host them on YouTube. The reason for this is simple – hosting media costs bandwidth and ups load time. External videos, on the other hand, put no strain on your server.
High Performance
Performance is everything. The advice outlined in this piece will go a long way towards helping your WordPress site run better and faster, but it’s not all you can do. There’s a whole lot more involved in load time – site layout, hosting plan, and more.
As long as you optimize it all, you’re golden.
Max Emelianov started HostForWeb in 2001. In his role as HostForWeb’s CEO, he focuses on teamwork and providing the best support for his customers while delivering cutting-edge web hosting services.