More than 22.8% of all websites on the Web use WordPress, with this number growing each day. We’re seeing more and more of our hosting clients installing WordPress, so spending time optimizing the platform is worthwhile.<\/p>\n
There are of course a few\u00a0common-sense ways to improve the speed of your WordPress website, such as making sure that if the majority of the visitors to your website are based in the US, you have a web server located in the US, rather than in the UK or Europe. Whilst this may be a fairly obvious speed improvement, there are also a few other things which you may not have considered.<\/p>\n
Before making any changes, you may find it interesting to run and screenshot a few speed tests on sites such as Pingdom Tools<\/a>, Google PageSpeed Insights<\/a>, and GTMetrix<\/a>.\u00a0Then run the tests again after you’ve implemented the\u00a0changes\u00a0to see if there’s a noticeable improvement.<\/p>\n Have a quick look over the plugins you have installed on your WordPress site. How many of these do you actually use or need?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are many WordPress plugins which may seem to make life easier for you, but they can actually contribute to slower page load time.<\/p>\n For example, if you’ve got a plugin that inserts your Google Analytics code into the headers of your pages, why not just add the script directly into the theme template headers, and have one less plugin.<\/p>\n Image files\u00a0are responsible for most of the disk space usage for a typical website, and are also major contributors to slow page load time.<\/p>\n There’s software available which can compress images with minimal or no visible reduction in quality, but get the best compression ratio, you should\u00a0ideally\u00a0use a different compression software for each type of image.<\/p>\n For JPEG\u00a0images, I’d recommend\u00a0JPEGmini<\/a>.\u00a0In the below example, JPEGmini managed to compress the image from 9.24MB to just 1.02MB! An incredible 9.1x reduction in filesize, with no visible reduction in quality!<\/p>\n1.) Remove any unnecessary plugins<\/h2>\n
2.) Optimize\/compress images<\/h2>\n
Compressing JPEG images<\/h3>\n