5 Handy Ways to Speed up Your WordPress Blog - Finepoint Design
5 Handy Ways To Speed Up Your Wordpress Blog

If the speed of your WordPress site is affecting your search engine ranking, you might want to review this tips to speed it up.

The perks of being a WordPress blogger is unparalleled. You can access numerous interesting features to engage visitors on your site. As the advanced content management system doesn’t restrict you from using exciting tools, you may use tremendous numbers of plugins to enhance the appearance and navigation of your WordPress blog. However, one weak point of this platform is that it can become sluggish.

Although your repeat visitors might not get affected initially due to slowing down of site, your prospective visitors and customers may feel annoyed. Moreover, slow loading and responsiveness can reduce traffic and revenue on your WordPress blog by 4.3%. On that note, here is a list of effective ways that can speed up your site to enhance your traffic.

Choose Your Host Wisely

When you are starting a WordPress blog, shared hosting sounds to be a cost-effective idea. But it can turn out to be a slow poison if you publish popular posts on your blog. This is because a shared hosting offers slow site speed; along with frequent downtime. To sum it up, such hosting can kill your blogging aims.

Investing in proper hosting is of utmost importance. A genuine hosting service has several perks, which enhance your blogging experience. For instance, your site becomes blazing fast and hardly faces a down time. Additionally, you get a user-friendly back end and top notch support group.

Optimize Images Automatically

High definition images is appreciated by every reader. But they come at the cost of your blog’s loading speed – your pages take too much time to load. And with loading speed a part of ranking factors, it is tactical to provide quality experience to visitors without compromising your site’s SEO. But optimizing each of your images is no lesser than a pain.

But like always, WordPress has come up with a plugin to cover up its loophole. The WP-SmushIt plugin optimizes the images without reducing its quality. And what’s more exciting is its operation speed – your images are optimized as soon as you upload them.

Design Your Homepage Smartly

The most important page of your WordPress blog is the Homepage. People land there most often and it decides whether or not they would hang around on your site. With that said, there are several things that you can play with to ensure speedy loading and navigation.

First, keep the appearance of you homepage minimal. As the motive of your visitors is to read content, displaying widgets on homepage is no bliss. Second, use excerpts of posts rather than full posts. Third, remove useless plugins from your site and use sharing widgets in posts only.

Disable Hotlinking

Many times, you may find that other sites are linking to your images directly through their posts. This is a kind of bandwidth theft known as hotlinking, wherein your server load increases as other sites link to your site.

To disable hotlinking, you need to add the following snippet to root .htaccess file:

disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?sparringmind.com [NC]
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/finepoint [NC]
 RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

Remember, you need to change the feed name in the above code for proper appearance of images.

Set Post Revision Restriction

A ‘good’ post requires revision. On an average, every WordPress blog post is revised atleast 3 times. WordPress saves all of these drafts, which consumes space and affects the site’s loading speed. Generally, you may need the drafts until you improve and publish the final post.

Hence, once your post is published, you can remove the dozens of revision drafts and store only a handful; say two or three. You may give this initiative to Revision Control plugin, which deletes unwanted revisions from your site.

Remember, speeding up your WordPress blog can raise your reputation beyond competition and engage more traffic than ever before! Go Fast, Go Furious!