Other Ways to Reduce Site Load Time

Have you noticed your site taking a while to load completely? This can hurt your page views and your Google PageRank. Here are a few tips to help your site load faster, for your readers and for Google.

1. Caching

The first thing you’ll want to do is install the W3 Total Cache plugin. This plugin easily optimizes the speed and user experience of your site with caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support. Once you install the plugin, you’ll have to configure it to see the greatest results. See my post for my recommended settings.

2. Use a CDN

CDN stands for content delivery network. Utilizing a CDN will allow your visitors’ computers to download content from both your site and the CDN at the same time, speeding up your page load time. I use Amazon S3 as my CDN. It offers a free tier that will get you started. If you go over the limits of the free tier, you’ll pay only for what you use.

3. Remove Unused CSS and JavaScript

Take a look through your theme’s style.css or custom.css file and see if there’s anything you can remove. Each bit of information increases the file size, and the bigger the file size, the longer your site will take to load.

Also, see if you can remove any JavaScript from your site. Check in the header.php and footer.php files within your theme’s folder, or custom_functions.php if you use Thesis. Removing JavaScript can significantly improve page load times. For example, I had a tabbed widget installed in my sidebar. Before removing this, my page load time was 8 seconds. After removing the widget, the load time went down to just 5 seconds.

4. Place JavaScript in the Footer

If you’re calling any custom JavaScript files, be sure to place the code in the footer, right before the tag. This allows your main content to load first, then the customizations.

5. Install and Run YSlow and Google Page Speed for Firefox

These tools run a speed analysis on your site and will pinpoint where any slowdowns are coming from. They also provide an explanation and, in some cases, instructions on how you can fix the problem.

6. Don’t Load Kontera on the Front Page

If you use Kontera text-based ads on your site, consider loading those on every page except the front page. This greatly decreased page load time on my site, and I didn’t see any noticeable decrease in earnings.

To see the code to implement this tip, go here.

7. Disable Hotlinking

Hotlinking is when someone steals bandwidth from you by calling the image from your site. Disabling hotlinking reduces the load on your server, and also saves on your hosting costs. To disable hotlinking, you can head over to my site for the code.

8. Prune Your Plugins

Take a look through your plugins list and delete any you aren’t using. WordPress loads all plugins when a page loads, so the fewer plugins you have installed, the faster your site will be.

9. Specify Image Dimensions

If possible, always specify the dimensions of your image in your HTML code, like this:

<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”" width=”125″ height=”125″ />

Specifying a width and height for all images allows for faster rendering by eliminating the need for unnecessary reflows and repaints.

10. Install WP-Smush.it

This plugin will automatically compress new images added to your posts. Compressing images not only helps your site load faster, but it can also lead to decreased hosting costs.

11. Optimize Your Database

This will speed up queries to get your posts. The easiest way to optimize your database is to install a plugin called WP-Optimize. You can then optimize your database directly from the WordPress dashboard.

12. Stay Up to Date

You should always stay updated with the latest stable version of WordPress in order to boost the performance of your site. If you don’t do this, you’re also putting your site in security risks.

Mitchell Wischmann blogs at Frugal Finders, helping Minnesota families get the most bang for their buck.