6 Ways To Speed Up Your Blog

There are a million or more posts out there about SEO. SEO for your site and for your blog is important but, it’s only half the battle. Page load speed is of major importance these days. As pages get bigger and have more content, they load slower. So here are 6 ways you can speed up your WordPress blog.

1. Use WP Super Cache

One of the better known techniques for speeding up WordPress is to install the WP Super Cache plugin. It caches your site for super-quick loading. It’s as simple as that. Install it and forget about it (and then promptly remember it when you wonder why your design changes aren’t showing next time you edit your theme files!).

2. Disable Unwanted Plugins

If your site is loading slowly, look at how many plugins you’re using. If the answer is more than ten, look at the plugins you’re using and ask yourself whether you can integrate them directly into your theme.

While you’re at it, also ask yourself whether you really need the plugin. If you can do without it, do.

3. Optimize Your Images

One of the reason for slow loading site is images, therefore every image should be optimized for web. Simply said, if you’re using Photoshop, there is an option to ‘Save for Web’ which you can use to reduce the image size.

If you don’t have Photoshop or haven’t been using the ‘Save For Web’ option you can improve performance using the Smush.it plugin for WordPress. This plugin will run every image you upload through the Smush.it API which strips all unnecessary data (not quality) out of your images.

4. Optimize Your Database

The best option is to use a plugin: the Optimize DB plugin does what it says on the box. It will optimize your database and remove all post revisions with a one click interface.

5. Remove Flash Plugins

Image rotators or slideshows that use flash slow the load time of your blog. Instead of using these flash plugins, try using the WP-Cycle plugin instead. It does the same thing as other flash versions, but with substantially faster load times.

6. Display Fewer Posts Per Page

I know that most of us want as much info on each page as we can get. But if you want your blog to load faster (especially photo blogs), more posts slow your page load time. Trying changing your posts per page setting to 3-5 or use post exerpts. You can change your posts per page in your wordpress settings panel under ‘read’.