5 Tips to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

In the business world, more and more sales are influenced via the internet, whether it be via online sales, or even a well constructed website or blog telling the customers everything they need to know, in as little amount of words as possible. Word Press is without question a fantastic platform that is used by companies all over the globe. It is great for generating sales and providing professional looking layouts for websites but the main problem that users tend to complain about, is the fact that Word Press is generally considered very slow. The good news however, is that it can easily be sped up, and here’s a look at 5 examples of how.

Transfer any javascript files to the footer

Though Javscript, and Javascript libraries are very beneficial for word press sites, one problem is that they have been known to block pages rendering on your site. The reason for this is that browsers don’t begin loading all of the content until each Javascript file in the header has been fully downloaded. To rectify this, move any Javascript files you don’t require, to the footer, which will speed things up rapidly.

Get the hosting right

Another great way of speeding up your Word Press site is to ensure you get the hosting right by choosing a dedicated Word Press hosting solution. There are countless web hosts currently available, so finding the right ones can be tricky. The best advice is to search online for recommendations and see what others have to say on the matter.

Test your site’s speed

Another great way of maximising the speed of your site is to first test the speed to get a rough idea of how fast it is currently running at. There are many different services you can use that will easily allow you to test the speed, so again, a quick search online will benefit you greatly. Once you know the speed, you can then make various changes, check the speed again, and hopefully see big improvements.

Optimize images

When it comes to slow websites, images are often mainly to blame so for that reason make sure to optimize your images before they are uploaded onto your site. The best way of doing this is to select the image(s) you require, use image manipulation software such as Photoshop, and then save the image with a quality up to 60%.

Ensure ‘Keep Alive’ is active

The most commonly used and most popular server when it comes to shared hosting plans is Apache, and Apache is equipped with a fantastic feature called Keep Alive, which allows connections to stay open on multiple HTTP requests. For this reason, check with your hosting company and ensure Keep Alive is activated at all times as this will speed things up greatly.