How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

WordPress certainly provides a large assortment of features, plugins, and options that allow you to create a unique website. While all of this customization can be a good thing, you run the risk of having a slow loading website. The longer it takes for your WordPress website to load, the more likely your visitors will quickly abandon your site, especially for visitors that are using mobile devices. If you have a WordPress website and are worried about how sluggish your site may appear to users, then be sure to learn how to speed up your WordPress site.

Site speed will directly impact how well your site can capture the attention of new visitors. To make a good first impression, do everything in your power to limit the load time of your site. This can include making sure that WordPress and all of your plugins are up to date, finding adequate website hosting, limiting your blog roll, removing plugins, and various other techniques.

Keep Everything Updated

First and foremost, make sure that you always keep your installation of WordPress updated. This is easy to do, as WordPress will remind you that there are available updates as they are released. While updating your installation of WordPress, also update any plugins that you use. These updates will fix bugs and may help with the overall performance of your website.

Find a Good Website Host

Where you choose to host your WordPress site can affect the speed of your site. A simple search will provide you with dozens of hosting sites with incredibly low rates; however, many of these end up being shared hosting. Shared hosting sites will limit the bandwidth available for your site and can also result in downtime. If you plan on providing a service on your site or want to ensure visitors are always able to access your site, find a solid hosting plan that does not use shared hosting.

Limit Your Use of WordPress Plugins

One of the ways that WordPress provides customization is through the use of plugins. There are many useful plugins out there, and you should never completely rule out the use of plugins. Go through the plugins that you are using and determine which ones are completely necessary. Try to limit the number of plugins that you use on your WordPress site and disable any plugins that you no longer use. The more plugins you that your WordPress site uses, the longing it will take for your pages to load. Additionally, plugins can occasionally conflict with each other, leading to unresponsive plugins.

Advanced Options

For further speed increases, consider using browser caching, reducing the number and size of images that you use, and limiting the number of posts displayed on your homepage. By paying attention to which features of WordPress you employ, you can maintain a fast WordPress site and provide a pleasurable user experience.  To ensure that your that your edits run smooth, try loading the site using various internet connectivity speeds to see how the load times differ.  Other testing you can do to is by adding more, or less images, and see how this impacts the load times.

The more you play with it, the more you will understand about how it works, so be adventurous and have a little fun, and remember that with a SoloStream theme package you will have a wonderful bundle of themes to create an exceptional site.  These tips are a good starting point for those wanting to speed up their WordPress site, so go ahead and get started with one of our theme packs today!