16 Tips to Speed Up Your WordPress Blog – Infographic

36 Comments / Blogging Tutorials, Guest Posts / By /

What does the word speed remind you? It reminds me of 4 things.

1 – Speed the movie,
2 – An athlete who is super-fast,
3 – Some form of racing or car; Nascar or F1 (some people like speed boating and that’s fine too!) and
4 – A dog on a leash who is about to pounce.

I am scared of the 4th one on the list by the way. Why aren’t most websites known for speed?

Because we need to load things first, buffer and cache if we have to. Did you know that Google penalizes slow sites and ranks them lower in search?

Speed truly matters especially in the digital world where everyone wants everything quick and easy; fast food, fast checkout at a super market and a fast lane on the free way.Wordpress-perfomance-improvement-tips

Bad performance of your site is like an unwanted gift that you received on your birthday. You don’t want to even know about it! How do you define bad performance? This is quite subjective after all. Experts say anything over 5 seconds is a cause for concern. So how do you go about finding out your site’s performance? How do you fine tune it? Here are 16 tips to Speed up your WordPress Blog, some of the tips are applicable to any website.

16_Tips_to_Improve_WordPress_Site_Performance-image

16 Tips to Improve WordPress Site Performance – An Infographic from YourEscapeFrom9to5.com

“I believe that everyone chooses how to approach life. If you’re proactive, you focus on preparing. If you’re reactive, you end up focusing on repairing.” ~ John C. Maxwell, Today Matters.

Remember not all plugins are created equal, similarly, not all images are optimized when you download them. If you don’t know what to look out for from a performance perspective then your website or blog will pay the price.

Looking at performance of your site now is like going for a dental check-up before your tooth starts aching; it’s a proactive measure. Do you think kings built castles and traps after the enemy started the invasion? So look under the hood now and take note of what type of things have a performance impact. Go forth and conquer all you proactive bloggers before the castle comes down.

36 thoughts on “16 Tips to Speed Up Your WordPress Blog – Infographic”

  1. Deepak Rana

    Cent, very useful infographic.By speeding up our WordPress blog we can deliver the best things to our audience * that what’s exactly I & pro bloggers do.
    Here are few tips from me
    1. Avoid too much Ads
    2. Use W3 super cache plugin.
    3. use CDN
    4. Minify jss/http files
    5. use cache headers.
    Loading time under 3sec is always good.Cheers 🙂

  2. Cent

    Hi Deepak,

    Glad you liked the Infographic & thanks for the additional tips. I have also started using CDN have seen significant improvement in load time and performance.

    Cheers,
    Cent

    1. Claire Greenhow

      I’n trying to speed my site up too. I have smush, minify and a cache plugin installed. Do you recommend any other plugins?

      1. Cent

        Hi Claire,

        Seems like you have covered all the plugins. If you are still not happy with the performance of your blog you can use a CDN. CloudFlare – is free and easy to set-up. Thanks for the question.

        Cheers,
        Cent

  3. Raj Mitra

    I am using Zen cache and Image smush it plugin still I am seeing a certain delay on page load time. I am also using the Cloudflare CDN. Can you also suggest some good web hosts?

      1. Raj Mitra

        Hi Cent,
        Thanks. Yes things seem to be working good right now. I moved over to Bluehost Cloud from namecheap shared hosting and it helped speed up my site.

        Also I have to migrate another website now to Bluehost Cloud so I m scared a bit on that – I hope i dont break the website in question D:

  4. Nhick

    Checking my installed plugins now and see if I have to uninstall some.. Need to keep it below 20.. Thanks for the tips..

    1. Cent

      Hi Nhick,

      There is no hard and fast rule about 20 plugins but that’s what is recommended for new bloggers as some tend to go overboard with plugins and features. It is all about the performance. Hope that helps.

      Cheers,
      Cent

  5. Raj Mitra

    Thanks Cent! Will take a look on that and let you know. Also I am using namecheap.com as my host. It can perhaps be a reason why my site gets slow. Idk though

  6. John Sammy

    To use CDN and WP cache . how to become more maximum setting . Sometimes smush it too makes the image more opaque, is there any suggestion from you besides smush it ?

    1. Cent

      Hi John,

      You can follow these steps:

      1) Always try to minimize the image size before uploading. Max 100kb is a good limit. Of course Infographics will be exceptions.

      2) Use exact image size. If you are displaying a thumbnail there is no point in uploading a high-res image that is 1080 px wide.

      3) Use a CDN & Cache plugin which you have mentioned.

      As far as an alternative to Smush.it you can use EWWW Image Optimizer – I haven’t tried this plugin though.

      Hope that helps.

      Cheers,
      Cent

  7. Hamim

    Hi Cent,
    Awesome Infographic.
    Currently I’m using W3 Total Cache, EWWW image optimizer and cloudflare CDN.
    Above three plugin help me to bring my blog load time below 3 s.

    I remember your points for further optimization.

    One Query- Can you help me how to Remove query strings from static resources ??

    Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

    Regards,
    Hamim

  8. Shamsudeen

    Hi Cent,

    Thanks for the Infographic; is important now than ever to consider the average time our pages load or respond to users request, because everyone seems to be in a hurry and want it done now and fast.

    I believe web host has a lot of responsibility to take in this has I have experience better changes in the average time a page load on my blog since I switch host about three months ago.

    Even without taking away something or adding to the blog (images, plugins, ads etc) I experience better response time and the effect on my search traffic has been better too.

    I would like to point out one issue though, I believe amount of plugins is not really the issue, but the compatibility and quality of the plugin matter most. Even just having 1 “bad” plugin among total of five could cause a terrible damages to a blog average load time.

    My opinion though.

    Thanks Cent, nice reading.

    1. Cent

      Hi Shamsudeen,

      Thanks for the comment. I agree with you – the number of plugins doesn’t matter too much as much as plugins that perform poorly. The number is a good indication for new bloggers who tend to go overboard with functionality and plugins. Appreciate your thought.

      Cheers,
      Cent

  9. Brent Jones

    Hi Cent,

    This is a great infographic. Thanks for sharing. I know I need to put a little time into speeding up my WordPress website, but I haven’t done much about it…

    Thanks for the reminder. 😉

    Have a great weekend,

    Brent

    1. Cent

      Hi Brent,

      Glad you liked the infographic. I try to check my blog’s performance once a month – doesn’t always happen but I try. Thanks for the comment. Have a good weekend.

      Cheers,
      Cent

        1. Cent

          Nice to connect Brent and thanks for providing music to my ears – follow, share…

          Cheers,
          Cent

  10. Rahul Zajari

    As blogger always we want that our site performance is greater than usual. The main fact is the our blog speed we have to optimise the blog speed for fast loading. For optimising it we have to reduce some of javascript in your blog theme, use equal sized jpg images and try to make font small and medium this will increases the speed of your blog thanks cent for giving us optimizing tips.

    Cheers,
    Rahul

  11. Raphael

    Hello Cent,
    Thanks for this infographic. I have some pictures on my site that are over 100kb, i should check on using images with lesser size. And yes, i must remember to keep my plugins under 20.

    1. Cent

      Hi Raphael,

      Glad you got something out of the infographic post. Good to hear you will be taking action.

      Good luck,
      Cent

  12. Babanature

    Hello Cent,

    Optimizing our site is the best way to get good attention and more sales.

    Too many ads display can also slow a blog down. On my images, I do use photoshop to reduces the size of the images and also I use smush it on my blog to optimize the image even more.

    One of the best ways to make your blog as fast as possible is to reduce the amount of your plugin. Then higher the plugin, the heavier your blog gets.

    Nice infograph if I may say… Have a pleasant week ahead.

    1. Cent

      Hi Babanature,

      Absolutely agree regarding ads and number of plugins can affect speed. Glad you like the infographic and thanks for the comment. Hope you have a nice week ahead as well.

      Cheers,
      Cent

  13. Meraj Akhtar

    Thanks for sharing this info. Speed of a Website improves it’s ranking i SERP as well. And in this fast moving world No One wants to Waste their time at slow loading websites.

    Question: Could you please tell us in your next post that how to minify css and js in wordpress? Thanks in Advance

    1. Cent

      Hi Meraj,

      One tip I intentionally left out was to use a CDN. Since creating this Infographic some time ago I have now started using a CDN. I use CloudFlare – it is free and easy to set-up. I use CloudFlare’s minify css and js feature. Some people may use a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache to do the same.

      Thanks for the comment and question. Let us know how you go. Good luck.

      Cheers,
      Cent

  14. John

    I use W3 total cache and it works great for me. Are there any other WP plugins that are good at speeding up blogs?

    1. Cent

      Hi John,

      A caching plugin along with CDN is all you need. Try CloudFlare – a free CDN that helped me improve site performance drastically.

      Cheers,
      Cent

  15. Andy

    Awesome tips, thank you, Cent. To keep images under 100 KB, you can use Photoshop, TinyPNG.com, ResizeImage.net or similar tools to compress them without losing quality 😀

  16. Harsh S.

    Hello Cent, I couldn’t resist myself to leave a comment for the excellent work you’ve put in on the infographic and the content of this wonderful post. The way you showcased the need to implement the site optimization is itself quite tempting. Thanks for the great efforts.

    1. Cent M

      Hi Harsh,

      When someone leaves a comment almost after 2 months from the date of the original post – you normally don’t get a reply but your comment was so motivational that I had to reply.

      Thanks for the awesome feedback.

      Cheers, Cent

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