Speed up your Wordpress site

On shared hosting environments Wordpress can see poor performance when it comes to page loading times.

Here are a few easy plugins you can install to help speed up your load times and improve engagement with your users.

Caching

Caching involves storing elements to your website so they only load once instead of every time a user visits your site. For websites with a high level of returning visitors this is an essential optimisation. Currently I would recommend either W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache for a more simplified integration.

Image Compression

Images are generally the largest files loaded on a web page and it is important to optimise these where possible. WP Smush.it is a great plugin which when activated will optimise all uploaded images automatically!

Minify your HTML, CSS & JavaScript

WP Minify is a great plugin that will remove all white space from your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, and can also combine your stylesheets and JavaScript files into just one file for each. When your code is combined the amount of browser requests being made on your web page is lowered which will instantly increase your page's loading speed. This is one of my favourite techniques to use.