If your site is slow loading, you won’t have an audience no matter how much traffic you have. Therefore, one of the first things you should do is ensure that your site works well. You want it to load quickly, be easy to understand, and if they click, it should load fast whether it’s an image or just a regular text-based page. Here are some ways to speed up your site. When people can use your site quickly, they’ll be back and that will increase your traffic. These are for WordPress based sites.
- Choose the Right Hosting – Not all hosting is created equal. It doesn’t matter how big the name is, the hosting might not be the best to use for your purposes. Look at reviews and look on the WordPress.org site for hosting recommendations based on your uses.
- Pick Your Theme with Speed in Mind – Just like not all hosting is created equal, neither are website themes. Choose a framework that is built for speed. Read the descriptions and look at the reviews of any theme. Consider using paid themes over free to avoid any problems.
- Use a CDN – If you’re delivering a lot of content to your audience, you might want to consider a content delivery network. These lower site loading speed by using data centers in many locations around the world to reduce site speed by sorting copies of your static content on its servers to speed uploading.
- Optimize Your Images – You can use a plugin to help you automatically optimize all the images that you load into your site. A beautiful image can load too slow if you aren’t careful and no one is going to even see it.
- Optimize the WP Database – Keeping your database clean can also help. You can clean it up by uninstalling plugins, and then going in and cleaning up your database manually using phpMyAdmin. If you don’t know how to do this, you may want to hire someone or you can also use a plugin called Advanced Database Cleaner. (https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-database-cleaner/)
- Limit Comments Per Page – While user-generated content is awesome, it can go too far. This is especially true if a flame war has started in comments. The more comments, the larger the page becomes, and the slower it will be to load. You can stop this by limiting how many comments can be made on any given page.
- Keep Everything Up to Date – Your website has a lot of apps and information that needs to stay updated. Keep all the plugins and software updated as much as you possibly can to avoid any problems.
You can test your site’s speed by going to this WPEngine.com speed test area. (https://wpengine.com/speed-tool/) If your site is not loading its pages within two seconds, then you will want to do what you can to improve your site’s performance. This is going to really help not only keep the traffic you send but help people want to come back to the site again and again.
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