You want visitors to your blog or site to have as quality an experience as possible. Part of this is ensuring that your site is able to load as quickly as possible. Search engines also take load time into consideration as one of their ranking factors. There are quite a few things which you can and should do to improve website load time. Let’s get into em’ now.
How to Improve Website Load Time
Get Rid of What You Don’t Need
You can accumulate a lot of files, plugins, themes, etc. on your site over time and if you take a glance right now you’d probably be surprised at the amount of stuff you don’t use or need anymore.
Plugins especially can be coded like a mess and these files have a direct impact on how long it takes to load your site so delete any plugins which are not active or which you don’t use.
Eliminate things on the front page, as well, if you don’t need them. This includes things in your widget which you may not need, showing summaries/teasers of posts as opposed to the full text of it, etc.
Stay away from wallpaper if possible, as well, as this can take a few seconds to appear for a first time visitor to your site, and it looks pretty tacky when you arrive at the site then a second later a background appears over the solid color.
Caching
One plugin I recommend keeping or getting if you don’t already have it is the free W3 Total Cache. It caches the first page which someone comes to so that when they go on to visit a second page on your site it loads immediately. If you have a lot of content on your site then this is a must. The plugin itself offers a lot of options for tweaking though it’s also fine just out of the box so you don’t have to mess with any of its options if you don’t know what you’re looking at; just know that it significantly improves website load time.
Combine CSS
A lot of plugins have their own CSS files. OIO Publisher, for example, has its own CSS file which affects the look of the banners. You can combine this with your theme’s CSS file to save time and improve website load time.
Use a Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network or CDN for short will improve your website load time because unlike your typical hosting where your content is all kept in a single server, a CDN takes all of the static content of your site and replicates it across hundreds and thousands of servers around the world so your site loads in part from a location which is much closer to your visitor.
This works on the idea that the closer you are to the web host on which the site you’re trying to access is stored, the faster it will load up for you, so you’re physically bringing your site closer to your visitor.
I recommend MaxCDN as they are one of the most trusted and largest CDN providers online. They are the content delivery provider for BuySellAds, UserVoice, Mashable, and BrokersWeb. Additionally, they are very affordable, offering rates as low as under 3 cents per GB of data.
You can also create a makeshift CDN for free using DropBox. This is a service which is primarily meant for storing large amounts of data and sharing it with your friends, up to 2GB to be exact. You can get an extra 250MB to bring it up to 2.25GB using my link. You’ll need to use the specific free DropBox CDN Plugin to gain the CDN functionality out of it and even then it’s not a true CDN, but it’s a free way to offload these static files for quicker website load time which brings me to my next point.
Offload Resources When Applicable
You can offline images to Flickr and use a plugin to connect your site with your Flickr account. This way all of your images are kept and hosted off site but you have easy access to them whenever you like.
The same goes for your newsletter which I recommend outsourcing to Aweber to save these files from having to be kept on your site, thus improving website load time because again there’s less clutter.
Choose a Good Hosting Company
Unreliable hosts can lead to unnecessary downtime on your site which not only annoys anyone trying to reach your site but it can cause you rankings by annoying Google or webmasters with links to your site who decide that your crappy site doesn’t deserve their links if you can’t even keep it online.
I use GoDaddy without issue but I know a lot of webmasters like HostGator, as well. Use this link to get $1.99 a month hosting from GoDaddy or this link with the coupon code “1cent” to get a discount at HostGator.
How to Check Website Load Time
Before you’ve made any of these changes, pop on over to http://tools.pingdom.com/ and plug in your URL to test the load time of the various elements of your site. Make note of these times.
After you’ve made a number of these changes, retest your site and note the wonderful difference, though you’ll probably notice the change just from interacting with your site which is a great feeling.