Give Your WordPress Blog a Performance Tune-up!

The Importance of WordPress Performance!

With Google taking your blog’s download speed into consideration, you can’t afford to not have your WordPress blog running at its peak performance.

As of April 2010, Google is using your site’s loading speed in their Search Engine Ranking Algorithm which will be used to determine your site’s placement on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s).

Here are a few words from Google:

• “You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed… At Google, we’ve gathered hard data to reinforce our intuition that “speed matters” on the Internet.”
• “Users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings… Faster sites create happy users!”
• “Speed as perceived by the end user is driven by multiple factors, including how fast results are returned and how long it takes a browser to display the content.”

According to a number of studies, slow loading websites and difficult navigation have been the most popular complaints of website users today. Optimizing your WordPress blog for faster performance is a vital part for user interaction. If your site takes more than a few seconds to load, the INTERNET USER may lose interest and move on to your competitor’s site.

Even though the WordPress blog is the most widely used Content Management System (CMS) platform (used by over 25 million users), it is known for loading slowly for the following reason. Adding too many plug-ins or widgets to your blog can bring your blog performance to a crawl.

There are additional reasons, but here are a few steps you can take to insure that your WordPress performance is running at its peak.

1. Reduce Plug-ins and Widgets: Only have the absolute necessary plug-ins and widgets on your site, remove the rest.

2. Too Many Images Reduce Blog Performance: Having too many images, or large images for that matter, on any given page, can decrease the performance of your WordPress blog by precious loading seconds.

3. Optimize Images for the Web: Make sure that the images you do have on your site are optimized for the Internet, known as image compression. Photoshop is a great image editing program, giving you an option called “Save for the Web”, but due to the expense, not many people own the software.

If you don’t have image editing software, you can use the FREE online image optimizer.

4. Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests: Each time a web page is called for, it goes through a process of loading all the necessary scripts and files required for that page. These can include, but are not limited to: standard HTML scripting, images, javascript (including the scripts required by the WordPress blog), CSS files, Opt-in-Boxes, Facebook/Twitter social buttons, and other plug-in scripts (including their CSS files).

The more scripts and files that you have, that are required for your site to perform, the more crucial seconds are added to your blog’s loading time.

If you would like to find out the down loading time of your site and what might be causing your blog’s performance to run at the speed of molasses, run a Site Speed Analysis test with PingDom!

If You Found This Article About WordPress Performance Helpful, Please Share This Post with Your Friends by Clicking on the Facebook, Twitter and Other Share Buttons, Thank You!

Is Your WordPress Blog in Need of a Performance Boost, or Is Yours Running at a Acceptable Speed? Please Leave Feedback and Comments Below, I’d Love to Hear From YOU!