Simple Steps For Faster Load Times

How quickly your WordPress site loads on when a visitor arrives at your site directly affects how likely they are to stay on your website. This is especially true when it comes to mobile devices – which may not be able to pull up a site as quickly as a desktop browser. Whether you use WordPress for a business website, a blog, or as your portfolio, speed definitely matters. To determine if your site is fast enough and to improve the loading time of your site follow these steps for a faster WordPress site.

Determine How Fast Your WordPress Site Loads
The first step in speeding up your WordPress site is determining how quickly it currently loads. There are several websites available that allow you to enter a URL and test the speed of the webpage. Look for Pingdom Tools or other online speed tests, which will let you know how long it takes for your site to load. Your goal should be a load time of 3 seconds or less.

Google has their own site that provides suggestions to speed up your site, which can quickly be found by searching for Google Page Speed Insights. Type the URL of your homepage and follow the suggestions provided.

Find a Light WordPress Theme with Responsive Design
When it comes to optimizing your WordPress site, everything starts with the theme and then trickles down from there. Your WordPress site should use a theme that is light and uses a responsive design. The responsive design allows you to avoid planning for mobile devices. You will have one site that looks great across all devices. It also helps to look at premium WordPress themes. Premium themes with great reviews by other users are more likely to have smoother coding and a lighter design for faster loading.

Cut Down on WordPress Plugins
It can be fun to find WordPress plugins that provide a variety of interesting features, but this can also slow down your site. Whenever possible, avoid installing new plugins unless they are necessary for a specific feature that you absolutely need. If there is a way to accomplish your goal without the plugin then skip it. Try to keep the amount of plugins you install to less than ten.

Use Caching Plugins
Caching plugins are becoming more popular with WordPress users for the vast improvement in speed that they can bring. Instead of visitors needing to wait while WordPress generates the page or post they want to see by accessing the database and running various scripts and plugins, a caching plugin will create a static version of every post and page on your site. These static pages are served to visitors instead of the standard dynamic loading used by WordPress. This can have dramatic effect on your page speed.

The bottom line is that you need to keep it simple. Choose a good theme, limit the use of plugins, and find a caching plugin. If you follow these suggestions, you can help keep the load time of your WordPress site to a minimum and keep your visitors happy. Start speeding up your WordPress site and enjoy the positive results.