It's boring. You have better content than your competition and a really well-designed blog, but you still don't have the traffic you want. You start to have second thoughts, thinking that your content is the problem, when most of the time it isn't. Maybe the theme is not as attractive as it looks, which could lead you to make various changes without any results.
You spend countless hours writing better content and others to promote an article, but in the end, those visitors who come always leave. And Google punishes you by reducing your ranking.
And the reason is surprisingly boring… Your blog is probably slow.
Why speed is so important? And why should you care?
According to several reports, you only have 5 seconds to convince a user that he has to continue reading or he is leaving (In the SEO we talk about bouncing), where they left. Every second lost, makes you lose 7% chance of conversion, 11% loss in page views, and a decrease in 16% as for customer satisfaction.
And that's why Google uses speed as a determining factor in the ranking of websites. So, not only are you losing your rankings on Google and missing out on new visits, but you will also lose those who used to come back to your blog. This is a great loss altogether, especially when you can optimize your site once and for all, and never have to worry about this problem again.
So how can you speed up your WordPress blog? That's what you'll learn in this guide.
Start with an optimized theme
This is an important point. If your base is fragile, not everything else will be strong. If you can look for an optimized theme that will save you time. But what is a good theme?
I really like the Total theme. We use it here on BlogPasCher and on several other sites. But choosing a theme will depend on the features you consider important. Make sure you find a theme that is optimized for SEO also.
Use a Cache plugin to reduce the server load
When your blog becomes popular and receives a lot of traffic, it is led to generate dynamic pages that do not tend to change much. This imposes a pace of work that can often make it crash and make your blog unavailable.
To put a blog in cache, it is to allow him to propose quickly a content which does not change regularly, which he will have previously saved somewhere.
We offered you a tutorial that explains how to put your WordPress blog cached using the W3 Total Cache plugin.
Optimize images
Most of the time the loading of pages also depends on the loading of images. Not only the images of your article, but also those that are integrated into your theme, which is why an optimized theme is a good solution. But being able to optimize the images that you will continue to post regularly to your blog is a whole different story.
Here are some steps you can take to deal with the situation:
- Add WPSmash it optimizes the images you send.
- Upload your images and resize them to " gspace image resizer ».
- You can also learn how to process images with PhotoShop.
If you do not want to edit your images online, you can do this by using PhotoShop, and saving images for the web.
Optimize the database
Another important area that also needs to be considered is database optimization. There are things like article reviews, spam comments, and other things that you need to remove from time to time. I suggest you use " WP-Optimize ».
Use a CDN
If you do not know it yet, Content Delivery Network allows you to quickly serve static content to users around the world. We have already offered you some solutions by introducing the disadvantages and benefits of everyone. You will certainly have a preference for CloudFlare considering that it is free (one of its subscription plans is).
Find images that take a long time to load
In principle, this method can be considered as part of the method Optimize your images Because, after having optimized the images, you will have to test them to see which ones are still heavy at loading. What you need to know is that the format of the images varies according to the colors that are there, so a highly colored image must be saved in JPEG format, when the opposite is true, the PNG format will be sufficient.
Load images gradually
One of the great ways to keep your visitors engaged is to read content on your blog and add images to it. But as you know, this is also probably the main reason behind the delay in loading your blog.
That's where the concept of " Lazy Loading " join the game . In other words, only the images at the top will be downloaded as a priority, and the others will be downloaded when the user scrolls down. For this you can use the plugin " Lazy Loading ».
That's it for this tutorial. I hope you will come to make your blog faster.
