9 Useful Tips To Boost Speed of Your WordPress Blog

It is strictly not advisable to keep the visitors waiting for your blog to load as it may force them to make an exit. This loss of potential users is something a blog cannot afford to have as it directly affects its popularity. One can find a large number of blogs which have excellent design and quality content but are still not able to enjoy the benefits because of their slow loading speed.
Prevent your WordPress Blog from meeting the same fate; here are a few effective ways that will help to maintain the speed to an optimum level.

Tips to Speed up a WordPress Blog

Keep only the useful Plugins

There is no point making your Blog a storehouse of unnecessary Plugins, rather it is wiser to keep only those which are currently in use. One should check whether Plugin is actually required or not and if not, it should be deleted or disabled. The reason behind doing so is that some plugins come with large script and code lowering the page load speed.

Reduce PHP queries by replacing them with static HTML

Every time a PHP query is made, it takes more time for a page to load as the browser has to carry out its execution. However if the browser just has to read the static HTML, it will be done faster increasing the speed of the blog. Thus it is worthwhile to replace PHP queries with static HTML.

Utilize Caching Plugins

It is another effective way of speeding up a WordPress Blog. Two of the popular WP Plugins that can be utilized for this purpose are:

• WP Super Cache – The Plugin enables fast speed by generating and caching static HTML files for the blog and as mentioned above, it will take less loading time for the browser to process HTML file than a PHP one.
• WP Total Cache – By caching of pages, feeds, CSS/Java Script, database and objects in memory or on disk as well as enabling Browser caching, this plugin is of great help in enhancing the speed.

Undertake Image Optimization

Images form an important part of a blog and in order to make them fit so that they take less time to load, it is vital to optimize them. Ways of Image Optimization:
• Reduce the image sizes, smaller ones are easier to load
• Save the image in .jpg or .png format as they help reduce the size
• Attach height and width tags to all images
• CSS sprites can be used for static images
• Use an Image only when it is necessary to do so

Compress CSS and JavaScript files

To increase the blog speed, compressing CSS and JavaScript is another effective way. CSS files can be compressed by using the WordPress plugin named CSS Compress. There are also online tools available to carry out the process. Similarly JavaScript files can be reduced in size by using Gzip compression and online tools.

Optimize the database of your WordPress Blog

By doing this, the load time of the blog can be significantly reduced. DB – Optimize is a useful plugin for quick database optimization.

Post Revisions: Turn them off

The major drawback of Post Revisions feature is that it creates a new row in the database every time a post is updated or saved. As it makes the database bulky and increases the load time, turning off Post Revisions is an apt solution.

Say No to FLASH

The only reason behind recommending so is that FLASH consumes considerable time to load and thus lowers the speed.

Carefully select the web host

It is a crucial thing as a quality blog can suffer because of the bad hosting service. Make sure that the hosting provider is capable and offers trouble free service.

Make your WordPress Blog faster with the help of these tips and offer a friendly experience to your readers and importantly loading speed is a ranking factor now.