Having a website is important for many reasons, it gives you a presence online for customers to find you, learn more about your business and interact with you. However if your website doesn’t load properly it defeats the purpose. Most people will click off of the website before they wait for it to load and take their business elsewhere. Here are some things you can do to make your site load faster.
Optimize Images: Reduce image sizes using either GIF, PNG-8. orJPEG as the file formats. Make sure the size matches your usage and set the size for each page with the height and width. Do not make use of scaling, especially from larger to smaller images. The image result might look fine on screen but the file size will be the same. To truly take advantage of the smaller dimensions, use an image editing program and scale the image accordingly. The resulting file size will be smaller.
Good Hosting: Hosting is what matters when it comes to how your site loads up for customers and readers. An incapable hosting company can not only cause security problems for your files, but it can drag down your page load speeds. Always start your website building process by researching hosting companies or consulting with a company that hosts several clients like us!
Caching Plugin: A caching plugin serves as one of those essential plugins, since it delivers ‘snapshots’ of past versions of your website, enabling for a quicker delivery when a user requests it. There are a lot of options for caching plugins. We often use the WP Super Cache. You simply turn it on, indicate that you’d like to cache pages, and it automatically does the work for you in the background.
Optimize Your Database: WordPress saves many versions of your comments, posts, pages and more. This is great for backing up your content, but many of these backup versions are unnecessary. Consider using the WP-Optimize plugin to explore a wide range of options for bringing your database to its full potential. All cleaning happens without the need for manual queries, and some of the tasks that occur include:
- Removing bad comments and post revisions.
- Clearing out auto draft posts.
- Cleaning out the post trash.
If your site has been slow for awhile, we hope these tips help get your site running faster. If you need help getting your site sped up, we can help you by training you on how to add plugins and optimize pictures, or we can do it for you. We offer monthly marketing options that can include website management.
