5 Top Tips To Improve Your WordPress Business Website Load Speed

We all spend loads of time making our business website look great and adding great content to it. However how long have you spent on improving the speed of your business website. A lot of small business owners I know have built their own website but not spent any time on improving the speed of the website.

There are two reasons that you should spend time improving the speed of your business website. The first is because that when people visit your website they do not want to spend time waiting around for your content to know and people often tend to click off a website if the content does not load after a few seconds. This is especially important for you if your business website operates world-wide as for people in countries further away it is going to take even longer to load your website. The second reason is for search engine rankings. The speed of your website is one of the things that search engines such as Google take into account when ranking your website so if you want to get the best ranking then speed is something that you will need to take into account.

I have tried a lot of different ways to improve the speed of my website and even though some of them do not make a lot of difference on their own, when you use them all together you will see a noticeable improvement. In this post I am going to share five of my top tips to improve your WordPress business website load speed.

Use a caching plugin

If you are like me then you probably have a load of content on your website that it being loaded from a load of different places every time someone clicks on your website. Furthermore a lot of content on your website is probably large in size and this can make your website very slow loading, especially from far away. WordPress caching plugins work by  creating static HTML files that load much faster than the PHP scripts that WordPress uses. I personally use WP Super Cache and can say I have noticed a considerable different in the load speed of pages on my website and this blog that you are reading also uses this plugin.

Disable and delete plugins that you do not use

Plugins are one of the biggest benefits of using WordPress and we all use them add a whole range of new features to our websites and blogs. However most of us do not bother disabling the ones that we do not use and instead just leave them enabled even though we are not actually using them. Well each time your web page loads, the plugins that you have installed are adding additional load onto the server when it does not need to actually load these plugins if you are not using them.

I use a load of different WordPress plugins all the time and I am always experimenting with them and therefore every few months I spend time going through my plugins and removing all the plugins that I do not use so that they will not have any effect on the load speed of my blogs.

Choose a web host with fast servers

When it comes to choosing web hosting we can often be tempted by the cheap prices that some web hosts offer. But the reason that they can afford to offer these cheap prices is because they are most likely using out-dated servers that are not giving you the best speed. I personally use Evo Hosting to host all of my website. They are a little more expensive than some other web hosting companies but for me it is worth it for the speed and reliability.

Decrease the size of your images

When I first started creating websites I wanted it to look the highest quality possible and thought that all of the picture that i uploaded had to be massive images that took up a load of space on my server and extra time to load on my web pages. however on the internet there is no need to do this. As  long as the picture is clear then people are not that likely to notice or pay much attention to the extra quality of your images as they just want your content to load fast.

I compress all my images on my website and use the JPEG format as it takes up the least space. You can lower the size of a JPEG image using Photoshop or there are a load of tools online that will do this for you.

Use a CDN (Content Delivery network)

Having your website hosted on one server is great for people who live in the same country as where your website is hosted as they will be able to load it quickly and without any problems. However what about from other countries. You might not have been aware of this but in other countries your website load speed could be a lot slower as your data has to be sent all the way to the readers computer in seconds when they click on your website.  A content delivery network puts your websites data on a network of servers worldwide and then when someone clicks on your website the data will be loaded from the nearest server for optimum speed. Using a CDN can be good for your search engine rankings as well as when they crawl your website it will always load fast.

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