5 Tips to Speed up WordPress Blog

Website speed is now an important factor that Google consider for ranking your pages for top keywords. Visitors hate slow sites and they never visit it again in normal situations. WordPress is a great CMS it is already lightweight and fast but if you make any changes in default things it gets heavier and takes more time to load. It happens when you work on theme design to make its look better. But your blog becomes slow. So what you should do? I think you have to make a choice, if you need speed you have to give away your unique and beautiful design and graphics. However in this article I have come with 50-50 solution.

(1) Use speed testing tools to check your website speed:
Read my post on website speed testing tools here.
It is highly recommended to check your website speed after making any changes in your theme. You can use speed testing tools to check a post or pages loading time. I use pingdom tools for me, that is best.

(2) Install caching plugins:
Read my post on caching plugins here.
I am using W3-Total cache plugin. It is working very well. My blog’s homepage takes 5 to 8 seconds when this plugin is inactive. And when this plugin is active it takes only to load my homepage only 2 to 3 seconds.
(3) Do not install unnecessary plugins and remove if any:
Plugin makes your blog slow down because it installs extra HTML, CSS file, graphic images etc. Sometimes it makes changes in your theme. So keep only most useful and necessary plugins and remove the rest of. Which plugins are important you can define it easily, just think if you are better without a plugin you may remove that. And if you can’t live without a plugin keep that. If you try you will be able to do so many things without plugins that will save your important space.

(4) Optimize image downloads and use fewer images:
Read my post on image optimization here.
Mostly images make your blog slow because an image takes more time in loading comparing to any other object. So do not use large size images in theme design or in blog posts if it is not so necessary. And if it is not necessary do not use images.

(5) Compress CSS file:
Read my post on CSS compression tools here.
If your CSS file is 25KB you can reduce it to 17 KB after compression. It is much recommended to use compressed CSS file.