Most blogs run WordPress, and most blogs could run a lot faster, this article will cover how to improve the load speed of your WordPress site!

There are many reasons to improve the load speed on your website, the main one being the ease of use it allows customers and the subsequent lower bounce rate your site will get, as while it may seem quick to you, people on phones or slower internet think anything but that!

Image Optimisation with Smush

Smush Image Compression and Optimisation

One of the easiest things to do to improve the load speed of a website is to optimise the images, this allows for you to have images of the same quality (if it is lossless compression, at least) but at a smaller file size, and since this means the size of the web page is smaller (since as a rule, images are the biggest thing on the page) the load time of the website will be faster.

I personally recommend Smush, since it is the easiest to setup and use, and has no negative effect on image quality. That isn’t to say there are tons more out there, a lot of which can offer far better reductions in image quality, but for lossless compression that is easy to install and use, I always suggest Smush.

Caching and more with WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache

Caching parts of a website means there is less to download on subsequent visits, with many WordPress caching plugins offering more features, all of which can help to improve site load speed.

Out of all of these, I strongly recommend WP Fastest Cache, this is due to how easy this plugin makes the whole caching and optimisation process, with it being as simple as installing, and then checking all of the check boxes, ensuring your content is caches, and resources such as CSS and JS are minified and merged, resulting in faster page load.

Checking the rest with GTMetrix

The above 2 plugins will fill a lot of the gaps, but to truly optimise your site to be as fast as physically possible, I recommend running it through GTMetrix and fixing anything that raises to help to make the site as fast as possible. They also have a handy optimisation guide you can follow to push your site load speeds even further.

With all of these followed, you should now have a much faster WordPress site, leading to more views, better rankings and a lower bounce rate!