Internet visitors can easy pop onto a site and then pop off if they don’t like the site.  That’s why the look and the load time of your home page and the overall site is so important.  Follow these tips to ensure your pages are the best they can be.

Disable or delete unused plugins
This is probably one of the biggest issues that causes WordPress sites to slow down. Depending on the plugin, they can have tons of scripts and code. So if you’re not using a plugin disable it and maybe even delete it. This may sound a bit confusing as we are about to recommend more plugins in the next sections. The key is that plugins you are using are just fine!  Decide which plugins are necessary for your site to run and then do-away with the ones that aren’t needed.

Staying up to date with releases
Staying up to date with the latest version of WordPress is critical. In every update, there are usually a lot of performance enhancements. The same advise holds true for WordPress plugins.

Clean up the code
Since your code is what runs your site behind the scenes, optimizing it can do wonders for your load time. CSS compress will go through your CSS files and trim them down to a smaller size so that your webpages load up faster. It does this by removing whitespace and comments within the CSS files. This plugin can lead to a 10 to 15 kb shrinkage of a stylesheet. During a heavy traffic load anything helps, and this does make a sizable impact on the loading of a webpage and the bandwidth usage. The installation is uploading the plugin and activating it, that’s all there is to it.

Advanced WordPress administrators might like PHP Speedy a bit more.  This plugin cleans up and compresses your code so that it can load faster. You have much more control over the caching, but that also means that there are few technical configurations that you need to make.

Shrink Your Images
“A picture says a thousand words” but all too often a picture can weigh a thousand bytes or just a 100 bytes and human eyes won’t see the difference.  Where possible use files save in the JPG format as they will almost always be smaller than GIF or PNG files.

Caching

Every time somebody visits your site, WordPress generates the home page.  Now, for the majority of your visitors the home page display will be identical so the server spending the time to re-generate the pages over and over is a waste of resources and slows down the server. Using a cache 99% of your visitors will be served static HTML files. Those users who don’t see the static files, those who are logged in to the system, will still benefit because they will see regular WP-Cache cached files and your server won’t be as busy as before.

Caching means that a display, HTML, version of the home page (or any page, we are just using the home page as an example) is built.  Thus the page can be displayed without your sever having to process any of the script files.  By caching your files you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

Some of the best Caching modules are:

• WP Super Cache
• Hyper Cache
• WP-Cache

For smaller sites, these features may not make a big difference - but the best way to become a big site is to think like a big site!

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