Give Your WP Blog Super Speed

Posted by AJ - On April 20th, 2010

As you may have heard Google has implemented a new criteria to that will help determine your rankings on search results, SPEED.  And although it appears that the first wave of implementation is only affecting a few people, increasing the speed of your website is hugely important not just for your search rankings.

Why Loading Speed is so Important?

  1. Visitor Perception
  2. Bounce Rates
  3. Pageviews
  4. Credibility
  5. Rankings/SEO

How To Speed Up WordPress?

There are many ways you can speed up your WordPress Installation, here are a few I have or am currently working on to improve the speed of WPExplorer and hopefully bring you a better experience and of course increase my rankings on the BIG-G.

First I will provide some basic site design tools to help decrease your sites loading time, than I will provide you with some great WP plugins and finally with some extra tips to keep your site BLAAAZING.

Site Design Tips

  • Decrease the size of any images used on your sites design. See Smush.it
  • Use Image Sprites
  • Limit any unnecessary javascript – if you are not using the drop down menu, remove it!
  • Limit the use of scripts such as tweets
  • Remove any code not being used (xhtml, php and css)
  • Keep your design as simple as possible

WordPress Site Speed Plugins

  • Hyper Cache – One of the top cache programs for wordpress
  • WP Smush.it – Reduce the size of all uploaded images
  • jQuery Image Lazy Load WP – Great if your site uses lots of images

Other Web Site/Wordpress Speed Tips

  • Upgrade your WordPress Installation with each new release
  • Remove ALL unwanted and unused plugins
  • Clean and optimize your database
  • Keep post excerpts short
  • Consider removing thumbnail images on category pages and homepage
  • Stick with a good web host
  • Limit social media buttons and other widgets

Is Speed More Important Than Relevance?

Of course ultimately the relevance of your website will always be the most important thing in getting higher rankings in Search Engines, however if you can make your site faster do it! Here  is a short clip of Matt Cutts from Google answering this question better than me.


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