Let’s face it, WordPress blogs are not the fastest loading websites around and this is due to many different factors such as independent hosting, plugin load times, theme load times, slow response from widgets, improper server response etc.
This makes us bloggers want to get the right plugins to decrease the site load time of our WordPress blogs, so, like you guys I did some research on which plugins I need to install n order to reduce the loading time on my blog.I implemented most of the plugins that I came across and found that a few were a waste of time and money but there were few others which made great improvements to my page load time on this blog – Blogging Help.
But before we get to the actual plugins that helped make my site load faster, we will see why we need to load our blogs faster.
- Why Should We Make Our WordPress Blogs Load Faster?
Good question.Apart from some of the obvious reasons, there are a lot of implications of page load speed.To put it simply, it is impossible to develop and build a great blog when your page load speeds are not optimized.
- User Experience – When someone visits your blog, you need to ensure that they have a very pleasant experience so that they would want to return to your site when they need something else, you do not want them to leave in frustration with the page still half loaded.This is one of the worst things that can happen to a blog, as people are the driving force of a successful blog.
- Advertisers – Advertisers are not going to look forward to making deals with you if your page load time is very slow even if your traffic stats are very high.This is because of what I said earlier in the first point, people leave slow loading blogs quickly, so the ads won’t even have time to get the attention of the visitor.So with a slow loading WordPress blog, you are not going to have much advertising revenue.
- SEO – Google hates, absolutely HATES slow loading blogs.If Google catches a slow loading blog it will automatically drop ranking in search, which in turn reduces your visitors, brand value as well as revenue.
So now that you know the importance of faster loading pages for a WordPress blog, let us see the plugins that load WordPress blogs quicker -
- W3 Total Cache – It is a WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) framework that helps decrease the load speed of your website by caching and it helps in decreases server load, which means your hosting site has a little less to do and hence you have a faster loading website.
- Super Cache – A WordPress plugin that is very similar in design and function as the W3 Total Cache, it does pretty much the same task as the previous mentioned plugin.It is very effective in reducing page load speed of WordPress sites but I would prefer the W3TC over this.
- P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – A brilliant plugin which itself does not improve the page load speeds of your blog but it helps you find out which of your plugins are causing the WordPress blog to load slowly.With its scanning feature, you can easily find and weed out the plugins which are slowing down your blogs page load time and speed.
Clik here to view.
P3 shows a graph of which plugins are slowing your site down.
- WP Database Optimizer – There are a lot of times when we feel that we have outgrown our old posts and plugins and we delete them from our WordPress blogs, but a small trace of these are left behind in the blog, which slows your blogs load time.So to remove these and optimize your WP blog, you can use this plugin.
- jQuery Image Lazy Load WP – When a web page loads, the Java-scripts on the page reduce the speed drastically, java-scripts are one of the most notorious parts of coding when it comes to page speed.What this plugin does is that it does not load jQuery images and java-scripts until it has to.That is, consider a long web page and you are reading the top part of it, it does not load the bottom part of the page until you go there.That is it loads only what it has to load, does not waste time on loading stuff that will not be seen.
- WP Smush.it – This is a really useful plugin especially if you have a lot of images on your blog, this plugin automatically reduces the size of your images, making the web page hosting these images load faster.This is a must use plugin if you are running a photography blog or a gallery blog.
- WP Minify – This is another neat plugin which can dratically reduce the page load time of your WordPress blogs, what this plugin does is that it combines different CSS codes into one so that it can be executed at once as well as removes any unnecessary white spaces and unused code from loading.This plugin also performs gzip encoding.
- Free CDN – CDN is basically like another server, to put in simple terms.It helps load your images, java-scripts and CSS much faster and also reduces the load on your hosting server.You can also reduce your bandwidth usage by using this plugin, which means you can save money too.
These are all the plugins you will ever need when it comes to increasing the speed of loading of your WordPress blog.But there are certain other things that you need to keep in mind while trying to optimize your WordPress blog for maximum speed and least time of load -
Too Many Plugins - Do not install all of these plugins, use only those that you really require, too many plugins running in the background can also slow your WordPress site down.
Hosting – Choose your web host wisely as some hosting services have constant down-times and have improper server responses which are like cancer to a blog.See how you can choose a good web host.
Setting Up WordPress – Please do not make any mistakes while setting up your WordPress blog, as these are really hard to catch later and these mistakes can slow the loading of your WordPress blog.If you are on HostGator, you can see this tutorial on setting up WordPress on HostGator.
So these are some simple tips along with the plugins that you need to follow to ensure that your WordPress blog is loading fast and giving you the best results!
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