Substance and Style

    5 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

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    We’re living in an age of unprecedented impatience. The last thing you want your website to be is slow. If you’re visiting your own site frequently, it probably seems very fast to you, but it’s important to check from other computers and devices that have never visited your site before. The more times you visit a site from any one browser, the faster it works because of cacheing. This means that your browser has saved a version of this site and pulls up that saved version immediately. For new users, the site may load more slowly, resulting in frustrated visitors or people who leave altogether. Fortunately, there are simple things you can do to improve your site’s performance without a lot of technical expertise or effort:

    1. Optimize your photos for the web. If you’re uploading pictures straight from your phone or camera, you’re taking up a lot of space unnecessarily. The default settings on most phones and cameras optimize pictures for print. Your website is displaying at a resolution of 72 dots per inch; you’re uploading photos that have a resolution of at least 300 dots per inch. This takes up way too much space. If your pictures are photographs, save them as lower resolution .jpg files. If you’ve created graphics that requires an alpha channel (transparency), save those as .png files. 
    2. Don’t host your videos yourself. Video files are huge. Uploading them on WordPress eats up your available bandwidth. Host them on YouTube or Vimeo instead, and embed them on your page. Insert a video block as you normally would, but instead of choosing “Upload,” choose “Insert from URL.” If you’re inserting a YouTube video, don’t simply copy the URL of the video. Instead, click share and choose “embed code.” Copy that code and paste it in the WordPress “embed from URL” field. This will ensure that the video plays on your page instead of redirecting to YouTube, and it will avoid the black padding bars that sometimes display on a page when you link to a YouTube video directly. 
    3. Update often. Go into your WordPress control panel often and keep everything up to date: WordPress itself, your theme, and any plugins you are using. Set things to update automatically if you are likely to forget. These updates are important because they fix bugs, increase security,  and improve performance. There is almost never an advantage to using previous versions.
    4. Set your blog page to show summary instead of full text. Display less information per page by visiting Settings -> “for each article in a feed, show…”
      This has the added advantage of giving visitors a better idea of your overall content without having to scroll for a long time. 
    5. Choose a simple theme. It can be tempting when you’re starting out to choose a complicated theme with lots of bells and whistles. The reasoning is that you’ll be able to add any kind of content you want. However, this is always true. It’s much better for your site performance if you choose a simple theme and add things as you need them. A lot of themes are poorly coded; it is much more beneficial to you to go with a proven and simple theme and add whatever functionality you need as you go along.