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Speed Up WordPress with MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING
If you are blogger or developer you will surly agree on my opinion that WordPress is one of fastest growing and great platform to build your own website. You will find lots of tutorial on how to boost or increase the loading speed of your website. I have been working on WordPress from many years and narrow down my experience while working on WordPress to make it faster than normal. Some of elements on this post might be discussed on the forums before but still wanted to get all points which I personally implemented and got massive response which helped my blog boost.
1st I want you to categories your website in 2 sections.
One is “Is your website got Lots of traffic ?”
Two is “Is your website has good amount of Pictures/Video?”
When we talk about planting a tree , we should also think seriously about the soil type we going to plant it. In same way when we want to build a WordPress website we should also seriously think of the hosting provider we going to choose.
Some of cheap hosting provider may give you attraction of cost but they will cheat you on server resources where your website will not get enough resources to serve your visitors properly. And as a website owner I will still try to balance between the cost of web-hosting and website loading speed and uptime (MOST IMPORTANT).
Above I have asked you to categories your website in 2 section so why is that ? , simple answer as in both cases you will need to use good amount of server resources (memory_limit,CPU usage,Bandwidth limit, Server port speed, visitors limit etc..) I will again come back on the resources point which is important part of the website loading factor, will now cover the application base support to boos/speed up your website.
Get ready to lose sleep at night: according to a report by the Microsoft Bing search team, a 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and a reduced clicks by 4.3%. You must know that Google now includes site speed in it’s ranking algorithm , means that your site’s speed effects SEO !
How To Speed Up WordPress
1. Start using Best framework/ Theme.
While building the website you should use the light wait framework or theme which is the 1st steps towards the faster website page. I would suggest you to use Twenty Fifteen “framework” (aka the default WP theme) is lightweight and quite speedy. According to my personal experience you can use Thesis Theme Framework , its easy to customize and build for faster loading purpose.
2. Use trusted Caching WordPress plugins
Using the caching wordpress plugins are useful as it allow you to cache your content and reduce the loading time. The list goes on but the best I feel is w3 Total Cache, it has all features you needed to boost your website. Its easy to install and use.
3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
When possible use the CDN and its gives you another level of caching the web-pages of your website. Its goes viral when the pages loads from the nearest CDN server and the speed it deliver is dazzling fast.
4. Optimize your pages specially home page.
Things that you can do include:
- Show excerpts instead of full posts
- Reduce the number of posts on the page (I like showing between 5-7)
- Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (include them only in posts)
- Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need
- Keep in minimal! Readers are here for content, not 8,000 widgets on the homepage
5. Optimize your Images.
Images are main factors of website as its showcase your website and give a stylish look and more on meaning to your website. In another hand it add extra page size on your website to reduce it we can use the image optimized (automatic) while not to compromise the quality of the images. I suggest you to use the WP-Smush to reduce the images size by keeping the quality.
6. Optimize Database time to time.
You will find some good plugins to keep clean and optimize your database/posts on internet, the one I use and recommend is the WP-optimize this will allow you to optimize your post/database/drafts/spam/tables to reduce the overheads.
7. Disable the Image hack(Hotlink protection) and leeching of content.
Why hotlink protection enable ? Simply to stop bandwidth theft and your contents It occurs when other sites direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your server load increasingly high. You can use your cPanel to enable it or ask your hosting provider to enable it for you.
8. Use .htaccess to enable expires header to Static resources.
You will lots of examples of enabling the expires headers to static resources on Google. You can use the htaccess files to enable it. Make sure your webhosting provider does allow it via htaccess before choosing it.
9. Add LazyLoad to your images.
This is the technique you can use to reduce the images load time on home page by allowing the images load only on the scroll down even of images which are not covered in the browsers sections. Example only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window , then, when reader scrolls down, the other images begin to load, just before they come into view. Again you can easily do it with the help of the plugin such as Jquery Image Lazy load plugin.
10. Control the post on your home page and archives.
Normally we do save post while writing it to avoid lost of contents. WordPress would store every single one of these drafts, indefinitely.Now, when this post is done and published, why would I need all of those drafts stored?
That’s why I use the Revision Control plugin to make sure I keep post revisions to a minimum, set it to 2 or 3 so you have something to fall back on in case you make a mistake, but not too high that you clutter your back-end with unnecessary amounts of drafted posts.
11. Disable Trackbacks and pingbacks.
WordPress default interact with the others posts/blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.Every time another blog mentions you, it notifies your site, which in turn updates data on the post. Turning this off will not destroy the backlinks to your site, just the setting that generates a lot of work for your site.
12. Use CloudFlare .
CloudFlare is some what smellier with the CDN concept but its again good to have it on your website. This will not only increase your website speed but also the security and avoid the bad traffic from your website.
13. Get Static HTML instead of PHP when possible.
This one is a little bit advanced, but can drastically cut down your load time if you are desperate to include page load speeds, if you know how to do it get the static HTML instead of the php code when possible on your website.
14. Use Attracta SEO tool to get guide on SEO.
Use of the attracta SEO tools will help you to find the problems on your website and guide you to build your website faster and SEO ranking too. Before purchasing the webhosting provider make sure they provide it with cpanel.
15. Enable Compression.
Enabling the compress from your cpanel is great help to reduce the page size and the loading time of your website.
16. Choose a Best WebHost.
I have purposefully kept this point in last as when you understand all above points then only you will get the “choosing Best hosting provider” seriously. As all above points directly or indirectly suggest you to choose the hosting provider which support all these features. So till here you understand all and how you need to know how to find such hosting providers as lost of false promises can be done while purchasing it. I have also gone through lots of hosting provider and used them as try and error basis. Lots of provider do claim to serve with the MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING but they don’t, some of them don’t even know what is managed wordpress and how to deal with wordpress issues.
Its all matter of choice whether to follow the guide line or not, the reader may have their own opinion on it . All i have to list down my own experience and try to help to the new comers and stragglers.
