Website Loading Speed – Quick & Easy Steps To Increase The Speed

Have you considered to increase your website loading speed? Creating and building a website, whether it is personal or for business, is not that hard anymore. You just need to find a good and reliable web hosting services and from its CPanel, you can choose your desired CMS such as WordPress. Afterwards you can redesign the whole appearance to your likings and then you can start adding new high-quality and unique posts. However, this is not the last step of building a successful website. There are countless works that needs to be done to make your blog site or website get a good ranking on most popular search engines. One of those things that you need to do first is to work on how to increase your website loading speed. And to make everything realistic and easier for my readers I will be using my own blog site, TechGazine, as an example.

The following screenshots are data of how my tech-related blog site loads and frankly speaking it is not satisfying at all. Techgazine website loading speed is not so satisfying at all. For the tests below I have used 2 of the most popular and reliable online speed test – GTmetrix and Google Page Speed Insights.

BEFORE: TechGazine Speed Test Scores

As you can see, the website loading speed results are low than average and as an effect not only my blog site’s bounce rate is high but also the traffic is not satisfying at all. And now I am going to share with you how I was able to improve my website loading speed with some tweaking tricks and with the help of some WordPress plugins. There’s no coding involve on how to increase website loading speed. And I wanted to emphasize that the following tips are NOT the only way to increase your website loading speed. There are many resources out there to boost your blog site’s loading speed.

Increase Your Website Loading Speed – Quick Steps

1. Optimize post’s images

Previously, I made a post on how to reduce your post’s images file size by using a popular plugin tool called Bulk Smush.it. This tool can remove all the unnecessary codes or information embedded within an image. There’s an option within this plugin where you can set it to automatically fix your images before it is saved unto your Media folders or do it manually. And you can also aid your Bulk Smush.it WordPress plugin with Resize images before upload plugin. These two plugins can work pretty well together especially when WP-Smush.it fails (most of the time due to Yahoo API problems).  After you install these plugins, there’s no need to configure them since they are pre-configured already. This plugin will reduce the burden on your hosting and improve your website loading speed.

2. Minify CSS, Javascript, and HTML

If the CMS you are using is WordPress and you are using a custom theme with a couple of WordPress plugins then you will surely hit this issue one day – having an unorganized CSS and Javascript codes. This problem can also affect the loading time of your website. If you don’t know how to fix this manually which I wouldn’t recommend since WordPress plugins often times changes and updates overtime then you can rely on with WP Minify plugin. What this plugin does is to combine all the JS and CSS from your blog site and then compress them. This will surely help to increase website loading speed. As an additional option, you can also minify HTML along with CSS and JS.

A quick configuration of WP Minify is by using the same recommended configuration below.

3. Use Caching plugins

I’ve been using either one of the two popular WordPress caching plugin for most of my blog sites. Both of them actually helped me to increase my blog website loading speed, one way or another. One of which is W3 Total Cache which I am using more specifically for TechGazine. You can use the steps and W3 Total Cache configuration recommended by GTmetrix as for starters. And from there, you can customize the configuration little by little in the future. Just remember to clear or flush the cache for every change you make.

4. Use KeepAlive On

Keeping TCP alive, this is the main purpose of KeepAlive on. In its simplest explanation, this helps the communication between the browser and the web server by enabling to reuse the same connection to transfer multiple files. This is really efficient if your website or blog site is filled with multiple media files such as images. It improves the website loading speed because it reduce the latency associated with HTTP transfers. To enable the “KeepAlive On” on WordPress website, you can add the following on your .httaccess file.

Before you do add this setting, it will be worth reading this article about turning on or off KeepAlive On.

5. Optimize Database

You also need to do a little clean-up on your back-end and more specifically with your database. And you can refer to my previous post on how you can optimize your WordPress database. This will help your website loading speed time since it will clean up old draft revisions, spam, and other unwanted data from your database.

6. Avoid RSS or Feed streaming

Though some website does it, it does not mean it is good for your website. Adding a widget that will scrape posts from other blog site’s RSS is a big NO! NO! This will add an extra baggage to your web hosting resources and will affect your website loading speed because it will need to check constantly the feeds from the specified website or blog site. So just don’t do it!

7. Use CDN (Optional)

We’re almost done. Content Delivery Network or also known as Content Distribution Network (CDN) is the most popular way to boost or increase your website loading speed. There are so many CDN companies out there offering almost the same services. And you can choose any of them depending on your needs. You can refer to the posted article by Radu Tyrsina about the top six reliable CDN services.

But a little advise from me. Although it seems that using CDN services to increase website loading speed looks very helpful I would rather not implement it on a blog site with low traffic. It will be just a waste of money especially if the return of investment (ROI) doesn’t really compensate with the monthly or annual fees you have to pay for the services you have acquired.

There you have it, all of the methods I used to optimize and increase the website loading speed of TechGazine. I am proud to show you the results after the tweaks I made.

And the results, my website loading speed…

 

I am not claiming to be an expert here and I am only using my own personal experience to help. Please let me know if these settings works for you or if you have any other recommendations to improve the loading speed of a website, feel free to comment.

How about you? What are you doing to increase your website loading speed?

Happy Blogging!

 

Tags: HowTo, Increase Website Loading Speed, Optimize, Wordpress