Successful sites are fast sites.
We’re sure everyone can agree with that. The internet audience these days just doesn’t have the time to waste it waiting for a site to load. And even though site speed is not a factor that can guarantee your site’s success, it surely is a required element.
So, here’s how to make your WordPress site insanely fast.
Hosting
The first step is both obvious and crucially important – good web host. Here at CAP, we’ve already covered a number of respected hosting companies, so feel free to review one of our previous publications to find the perfect host for your affiliate site.
Once you’ve selected a quality hosting provider, you can look into the following:
Cleaning Up the Plugins
First of all, delete everything you don’t use. Secondly, delete every slow plugin and find a faster alternative.
The first part is pretty straightforward. You don’t need to clutter your site with some unused plugins.
The second part deserves an explanation … how do you know which plugins are slow?
To make the thing easier install P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – a performance reporting plugin. It will let you know which plugins take the most part of your site’s total load time.
Getting More Plugins!
Even though most plugins only slow your site down, there are some that can make your site operate faster. Here they are:
A plugin for image optimization. Whenever you upload an image you want to use on your site, this plugin processes it and removes some unimportant meta data making the file noticeably smaller, which means that it will also load faster.
Database optimization plugin. Your database is the core of your WordPress site. Every piece of content sits in the database. That is why you need to keep it in top shape at all times. This plugin will help you to handle the clutter and make the database more optimized.
W3 is the best caching plugin around. In short, caching is a method of storing data so that future requests for that data can be done faster. In plain English, instead of executing your site’s source files every time, W3 Total Cache servers the result of the previous execution if it’s still valid.
If you’re only going to install one plugin from this list, it should be W3 Total Cache. This plugin alone will make your site much faster (a difference your visitors will actually notice).