Load time of a website is a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A site with a little load time is fine, but the one with a greater load time, must be improved to rank good on Search Engines. This may take reducing the size of the files used on the website, removing code bloats, minify code, enabling cache, optimize CSS etc. Well, WordPress users need not to worry about increased load time, as they can make WordPress blog faster by implementing simple things listed below:

Basic yet important tips to make WordPress Blog fast loading

make wordpress blog faster

  1. Use a light-weight theme: Always choose a light-weight theme for your WordPress blog. A light theme takes less time to load in the browser. Some things that you should consider while choosing light themes are low number of graphics with less styles and scripts.
  2. Use less plugins: Of course, plugins have been powering WordPress from the beginning and they have their own importance, using a lot of plugins may slow down your blog. Each WordPress plugin completes a particular task for you, which requires making requests to the WordPress Database on the server. There will be more requests with more plugins which may slow down the blog. So you should pick the very important ones only and should not stack useless plugins in your WordPress at all.
  3. Use a Cache Plugin: A WordPress Cache plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog on your web server and serves those files instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts on further requests. You may try W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache to make your WordPress blog Cache enabled.
  4. Use a Minify Plugin: By Minify, we mean compressing files. Most of the Cache plugins, especially the two I mentioned above, provide the Minify feature already, but for those who haven’t planned to install a Cache plugin but still want to minify their JS and CSS files, should use WP Minify plugin which uses Minify engine to combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

    Also see: Some best tools to optimize CSS online

  5. Update WordPress regularly: Every new version of WordPress comes with the new improved features and bug-fixes. If you are not updating your WordPress, you might be missing some new and improved features, which may help you make your website more fast and efficient. So, keep updating WordPress, plugins as well as the themes you use.
  6. Optimize images: You should optimize your images for web before using them on your blog posts, as well-optimized images for web load faster than normal images.

    Must reads: Tools to optimize images online and SEO tips for images

  7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A Content Delivery Network or CDN provides you different server nodes around the globe where it makes a dump of your WordPress blog. Now, each time when your website will be requested, the content will be fetched from the nearest CDN node, not from the actual Server location. This will result in a fast loading website. This is a big level thing, so you have to decide whether you need a CDN right now or not. If you are looking for a good CDN service, I will recommend you MaxCDN.

Implementing above tips will give you a blazing fast WordPress blog without much hassle. Also read some more tips to moving from Blogger to self hosted WordPress.