How to improve your website’s page speed

March 24, 2014

I really enjoy building WordPress websites, but there is one large WordPress development flaw that can lose you potential customers.

The average website visitor will abandon your website if it doesn’t load within 6 second. For every additional second your visitor has to wait, your conversion will decrease by 7%. You may have an appealing website, but it’s load speed will hinder your success.

WordPress is a powerful tool that puts the control of the internet in your very hands. You will have to make some sacrifices when working with such a robust framework, and with WordPress it’s speed.

There are two solutions I highly recommend that will help you improve your WordPress website’s speed.

CloudFlare:

CloudFlare is a free CDN (Content Delivery Network), which means they have servers all over the world. CloudFlare will grab your website’s data and place it on all their servers, so your website’s visitors will be loading your website from a local location. If the server your website is hosted on goes down, your website’s visitors will still be able to access your website from a CloudFlare server. With additional security and optimization features, CloudFlare is a must-have service for every WordPress website. Did I mention it was free?

W3 Total Cache:

W3 Total Cache is a free WordPress plugin that optimizes your website with a two nifty tools:

Minify: Your WordPress files contain a lot of empty white spaces and lines that make your code human readable – but web browsers just skip these white spaces. By completely cutting out these unnecessary spaces and lines, you will drastically decrease your page size. Minifying will also combine many separate files into just one, greatly cutting down on the amount of files your visitors automatically download when visiting your website.

Caching: When a user visits your website, they are downloading files from your server to view each webpage. Caching your website’s files allows users to load old files they’ve already downloaded from your website. This greatly improves your website load time since users don’t need to re-download your website’s files every time they access your website.

With just two tools, you can greatly improve the speed of your website.

Wondering how fast your website really is? Do a website speed test by visiting http://www.gtmetrix.com