How to speed up your blog in WordPress

“I have a blog on WordPress platform, but it is very slow. I have heard that the speed of loading pages affect the ranking in Google. How do I increase the speed of my blog and then improve my ranking? “

Uhm … the question the reader posed is somewhat confused. First, we address the speech “best speed = better ranking”. Then we will see how to speed up WordPress.

Speed of the blog and positioning in Google

The theme is recurrent, and once again Matt Cutts told his opinion in a recent video:

In summary: if a site takes 20-30 seconds to respond to requests, it could be a problem.
But if it takes one rather than two seconds, this does not affect the ranking. Google wants a faster Web for the future, with more efficient sites, but for now these parameters have no effect on ranking.

How can you check the speed of your site in the eyes of Google? Personally I suggest you use Google Webmaster Tools (under Statistics-> Crawl stats): at a glance you can see Googlebot activity on your site and looking under “Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds) you will have an idea of possible problems:

google-download-time

And now, let’s talk about WordPress …

1. Keep an eye on the hosting

The first choice should be a good hosting. My advice is to ask friends / acquaintances, with a pretty busy site / blog, how and where they are, and how much they pay. If you do not have this kind of knowledge, you can read some advice in a few specific forum (like Web Hosting Talk Australia) or consult one of the many hosting compare services on the web.

2. Upgrade WordPress to the latest version

Apart from that modernisation is always useful (and recommended) to solve the recurring problems of security, each new version of WordPress has even small improvements in terms of performance. Also, newer versions allow an “auto-upgrade” of installed plugin, which helps to improve performances (old plugins on new releases of WordPress can cause several headaches and unexplained delays indeed).

3. “Heavy” content

Downloading hundreds of lines of text is not a problem. But downloading a few dozen images, it is (especially for the poor unlucky ones who still do not have broadband). Do not fill your posts with too many photos, logos, designs … and if you do so, optimise them using a good graphics program (to protect quality while reducing their size).

About the text content in the video above, Matt Cutts made reference to the use of GZIP to compress the code of the pages. The advantages are mainly 2: on one hand, it makes browsing faster for the user; on the other, it saves bandwidth. See if your hosting supports GZIP (mine does) and try to turn it on: then check the results with PipeBoost and you’ll see how many valuable KB you will save! GZIP saves 3 / 4 of space!

4. Plugins
Talking about plugins, WP Super Cache is one of the most famous. It lets you turn into static the pages dynamically generated by WordPress, thus easing the load on the database: even if not active, it can be useful if your blog receives a huge and sudden surge of traffic. For example, if you do not see any problem doing an average of 100 pages a day, you will have several problems when they become 10,000 (perhaps due to a link / mention on some great site): in this eventuality, the use of WP Super cache may help to avoid (or at least limit) the so-called “Slashdot effect”.
For the fanatics, there are plugins to optimise everything, from the databases to the CSS, but quite frankly I think that you should only install the ones you really need and not too many.

5. Widgets
On this site I am using some widgets. There are lots of other widgets that might interest me, but I do not like the effect “Christmas Tree”, and do not want to overload the blog with a ton of useless code

If you still can not help but hanging another colourful piece of code, the consider installing WP Widget Cache.

Conclusion

A fast site is probably more for users than for search engines.
Think of how many times you close your browser (or you click the “Back” button) when you are facing a page that takes ages to open … then do so that your page is not one of them!