While WordPress is an excellent platform, it can be pretty slow. Without taking proper precautions during installation, you can end up having a sluggish site. Search Engines rank fast-loading sites higher than slow loading ones. Slow load speeds are also crippling, especially for eCommerce sites. Research suggests that customers dissatisfied with performance have less possibility to visit the site again. Here are five methods to speed up WordPress installation.

1. Select a Good Host

For a start up, a shared host may seem like a great deal promising “Unlimited Page Views!”However, it has its shortcomings, including frequent downtime and slow site speed during the periods of high traffic. Be sure to invest in a proper host. The right host will ensure your site is amazingly fast without downtime during huge mentions. Go for a host with top-notch customer support and highly experienced. In case of any problem, you will be safe.

2. Initialize with a Solid Theme

A solid framework is light and speedy. This is due to the simple ‘guts’ as compared to the bloated frameworks that have too many features that you don’t need which slow your site. You may use basic themes available on WordPress or purchase a framework that is easy to customize.

3. Use Effective Caching Plugin

Caching involves storage of, so they are loaded once rather than every time a visitor uses your site. Caching helps return visitors and other users who go to various pages on your site. WordPress has useful Plugins, some of which fall under a caching category such as W3 Total Cache which boasts a 10-times site performance improvement when properly configured.

4. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

It is no surprise that big blogs utilize a CDN to increase the speed of their websites. A content delivery network saves all your files on a network that is geographically distributed. The content is then served from the location closes to the user’s geographical location. Reduction in distance results in increased site speed

5. Optimize Images

Images make the largest website files. When left uncompressed, they could take too long to load. It can be tedious and time-consuming to compress every image. Fortunately, there are numerous useful tools to reduce the image file without compromising quality automatically. WP-SmushIt is an amazing free plugin that will do all the work for you before you upload your images.

Conclusion

These quick, simple measures can incredibly optimize your WordPress installation. Even better, they don’t take much of your effort and time to put in place.

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Image: Hans van Dijk