Optimize the speed of your Wordpress site

★ Performance Unleashed ★

I’ll admit it: I’m addicted to speed. No, not the psychostimulant; I’m talking about website speed.

I’m not alone, either. Google recently announced that they consider website speed when determining search engine rankings.

Oh, did I mention that a slow website can literally kill your revenue stream? Check out what the experts have to say about the topic:

Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks.

It’s quite clear. Everyone hates slow websites. The question is, how can you make your WordPress website faster? Easy, buy my hourlie.

Here is how I will accomplish this:

✔ Minimize the number of HTTP requests by merging CSS and JS files.

✔ Minify HTML, CSS, and JS.

✔ Optimize and correctly display images by losslessly compressing them and "lazy loading" them only when the user needs them.

✔ Set up and configure a CDN to lighten the load on your server and turbocharge its performance. I recommend CloudFlare, a free one.

✔ Gzip and compress files at the server level before sending them to your users and their browsers.

✔ Add an expires header to static resources as a way to specify a time far enough in the future so that the clients (browsers) don’t have to re-fetch any static content.

✔ Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content. Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft.” It occurs when other sites direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your server load increasingly high.

✔ Optimize your WordPress database.

✔ Install and configure a caching plugin, less database lookups per page load.

Are you in? If so, great! You’re well on your way to a much faster website.