How to Speed up WordPress

Two Great Tools to Speed up WordPress Blogs

If your blog is to slow to load up you will have a higher bounce rate, lower time on page and your rankings in the search engines will suffer! We show you how to use tools like the W3 Cache plugin and the Swift Theme to speed up your WordPress website and we tell you why you HAVE to do this!. Google is placing a greater emphasis on the user experience of a website when considering how to rank the site and if your site takes to long to load Google, and most of your potential readers for that matter, will ignore your site!

how to speed up wordpress

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Must Know Summary: Google is making load time a factor in site ranking. So making your site load faster will not only make your visitors happy, but make Google happy as well.This really can be considered a White Hat SEO tool (you can click on this link to read our article on White hat and Black hat SEO Techniques to learn more about this) And learning how to speed up WordPress is like everything else, its easy once you know how. So lets get started.

NOTE: I have no financial interest in the Swift Theme and the W3 total Cache plugin. they are both FREE.

Speed up your blogs with the Swift Theme

This website runs in the Swift Theme. I had to install it because even with the W3 Total Cache plugin below my website was taking a long time to load.

Swift is advertised as the fastest loading full featured theme there is. I can tell you that it dramatically sped up the speed of this website.

The Swift Theme is available FREE. Just go into the Appearance tab on the left hand side of your Admin panel and click on Themes then once in the Themes section just search for “Swift” and click install. Once it is loaded you will still have to go into the Themes section and make it your current Theme.

Swift is easy to configure with sidebar widgets and menus like you see on this site. It also has a featured post slider that I don’t use.

Optimize your website to make it faster with the  plugin:w3 Total Cache

If you are uncomfortable with installing plugins into your wordpress blog you can click on this link to read our WordPress How To Plugins guide.

So what does the W3 Total Cache Plugin DO do for your website?:

  1. At least 10x improvement in site performance (when fully configured: Grade A in YSlow or great Google Page Speed Improvements)
  2. “Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
  3. Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
  4. Optimized progressive render (pages appear to load instantly)
  5. Improved web server performance (easily sustain high traffic spikes)
  6. Up to 80% Bandwidth savings via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds

How does the w3 total cache plugin do this?:

  1. Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk
  2. Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
  3. Caching of RSS (comments, page and site) feeds in memory or on disk
  4. Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
  5. Caching of database objects in memory
  6. Minification of posts and pages and RSS feeds
  7. Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
  8. Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
  9. Browser caching of CSS, JavaScript and HTML using future expire headers and entity tags (ETag)
  10. JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location management
  11. Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
  12. Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)

 Installing the plugin

1) Go to your Admin Panel.

2) select Plugins.

3) Select Add New

4) In the Search field enter “W3 Total Cache”. When it comes up you should see the following:

W3 Total Cache 0.8.5.2 The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. Trusted by many popular sites like: mashable.com, smashingmagazine.com, makeuseof.com, kiss925.com, lockergnome.com, tutsplus.com, johnchow.com, ilovetypography.com, webdesignerdepot.com, pearsonified.com, css-tricks.com, yoast.com and others — W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your s… By Frederick Townes.

5)  Click “Install”. You should get a second page (if not repeat the first install) that gives you the following information. Click on “Install Now” in red.

Plugin  Facts

  • Version: 0.8.5.2
  • Author: Frederick Townes
  • Last Updated: 89 days ago
  • Requires WordPress Version: 2.6 or higher
  • Compatible up to: 2.9.2
  • Downloaded: 56,896 times
  • Plugin Homepage »

 

You may have the following messages flash on your screen while it installs:

Downloading install package from http://downloads.Wordpress.org/plugin/w3-total-cache.0.8.5.2.zip.

Unpacking the package.

Installing the plugin.

Successfully installed the plugin W3 Total Cache 0.8.5.2.

Actions:Activate Plugin | Return to Plugin Installer

6)  Click on activate Plugin

7) Now click on your “Settings” tab most of the way down the left column in your Admin Panel.

8) You should See “W3 Total cache ” as one of the setting entries. Click on it.

9) You will now be in the configuration screen for W3 Total Cache.

The plugin is in quick setup mode right out of the box, most recommended defaults are set.

10)  You can go as far with this as you want. Stop now and WordPress will be sped up with their preset install. You are done. And that is How to Speed Up WordPress the easy way!

or

11) Read the FAQ’s for starters. For the basics here is what they recommend (from their installation tab):

  • On the “General Settings” tab and select your caching methods for page, database and minify. In most cases, “disk enhanced” mode for page cache, “disk” mode for minify and “disk” mode for database caching are “good” settings.
  • Optional: If you already have a content delivery network (CDN) provider, proceed to the “CDN Settings” tab and populate the fields and set your preferences. If you do not use the Media Library, you will need to import your images etc into the default locations. Use the Media Library Import Tool on the CDN Setting tab to perform this task. If you do not have a CDN provider, you can still improve your site’s performance using the “Self-hosted” method. On your own server, create a sub domain and matching DNS Zone record; e.g. static.domain.com and configure FTP options on the CDN tab accordingly. Be sure to FTP upload the appropriate files, using the available upload buttons.
  • Optional:On the “Minify Settings” tab all of the recommended settings are preset. View your site’s HTMLsource and search for .css and .js files and then specify any CSS and JS files in the respective section. In the case of JSfiles you can (optionally) specify the type and location of the embedding using the drop down menu. See the plugin’s FAQ for more information on usage.
  • Optional: On the “Database Cache Settings” tab the recommended settings are preset. If you’re using a shared hosting account use the “disk” method with caution; in either of these cases the response time of the disk may not be fast enough, so this option is disabled by default.
  • You’re done! Get back to blogging!

You can click on this link to go to our main web page and read more articles like this How to Speed Up WordPress Article!

OK thats it for thisguide to speeding up WordPress!

 

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