Increase Website Speed : Complete Guide

Do you need some simple tips to increase website speed. If you are getting thousands of visitors every day and your hosting is not able to handle them all. Then your readers, clients and unique visitors must be experiencing very low website loading speed.

In this article you will find some free stuffs and advanced tricks to decrease your total page load time. This optimization will not only affect your income, but will also boost your SEO.

Topics we are going to cover :

• Your Theme Sucks ( Minify, W3C validation and many more )
• You are dependent on plugins : Why not create custom codes ( Editing Custom.php files )
• Don’t know about coludflare ( Free Stuff )
• Love Graphics : Then optimize them ( Free tools )
• Cache

We are going to cover almost each and every of them, and I will explain you how to do so.. ( But please remember to share my article )

Increase Website Speed : Wanna Get “AAAAA”

INCREASE WEBSITE SPEED

Verifying And Optimizing Themes

Its one of the most important step. You might be having a beautifully coded theme for your blog or website. But I am damn sure that it must be having lots and lots of empty spaces and warnings. Follow the steps listed below :

• First is to go to w3c validator and validate you HTML file
• Check out the warning and then try to rectify it.

Move further only if you have knowledge of CSS

• Create a backup of your theme.
• Now create another copy and use it for editing your style-sheet.
• Move to Jigsaw validation
• Check out your errors and warnings ( don’t care for warnings )
• Click on Validated CSS and check out the line numbers and make the rectifications.. ( If any problem ask in comment area )
• You can use free software Notepad++

Minify : It’s the process to remove the blank spaces from the CSS files in-order to make it compact and decrease its size. In this process the color codes are compressed, upper text are converted to lower, the black lines and link breaks are removed.

If you have mobile responsive theme, then remember not to minify its code ( else your responsive feature will be removed . By this method I have reduce 14 percent of my style-sheet size.

Check out the video :

You Are Addicted To Plugins

There are many who just love using plugins. Actually you can also count me among them. But in this month I have controlled the usage of these plugins and have created my one custom code and use them ( It’s really easy with the hooks available in Genesis Theme Framework )

Steps I Followed :

• Instead of using any social sharing plugin ( to show social sites below my content ), I just created a new widget and then added the JavaScript files. : How To Add Widgets In Genesis Theme . You can use the social scripts provided by Add This ( just 1.8 kb file )
• Showing ads in the middle of my posts and pages with the short-codes ( compressed the JavaScript and CSS files for better usability ), so saves the resources and tables used by ad insert and Adsense insert
• Showing the banners in my sidebars : Again created custom widget, used my personal script to track the clicks ( hosted on CDN ). So I am not using 125ADS
• Adding the ” import font function ” in my style-sheet instead of using Google web fonts WordPress plugin.
• Using Google Library as CDN to deliver the essential Java files ( It’s a plugin but saves the header requests )
• Using One SEO plugin which can handle every thing ( adding nofollow to external links, on-page optimization and many more ). Saved me from using ultimate nofollow, SEO Smart links and SEOPressor, Sitemap Generator

So finally saved my self from using 8 different plugins ( – 2 ). It means this method saved my resources, tables and my bandwidth. Use these tips, and you can surely save your one second.

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Cloudflare Rocks : Fast – Free – Secured

I think you will be amazed to know that, the total number of the cloudflare users is more than the total number of users combining ( MaxCDN, Amazon and finally Akamai ). I think the service which you get from cloudflare is just uncomparable. They are giving 1000 dollars worth service for free..

Few of their important Features :

• Your files are hosted on 15 different servers all around the world
• They protect your from DDos attacks
• They accelerate your website speed
• They protect you from any kind of hackers or malicious activities ( They have browser integrated Check, huge database of spammers IP, Honeypot etc )
• You can activate IPv4 to IPv6 with just a click
• Very easy and secured SSL ( can be activated with just one click )
• Rocket Loading
• Your website will be online, even if your hosting account is down

Remember that they are not like traditional CDN which ask you to create any cname. Cloudflare is completely different, since it ask you to change your name-server. You don’t need to upload anything. Actually they act like a proxy server between your website and your visitor.

Check Out This Post : Cloudflare Review

Love Graphics : Free Stuffs To Optimize Them

I know that by adding the images and graphics you can make you post more attractive. But you have to make sure that they don’t hinder your total page-load time. It’s common to use jpg or JPEG format images, but when we go for high quality we have to use png formats And I am not going to stop using them.

But what if I say that your images can be compressed to almost 30 percent without affecting their quality. Yes its possible. You can use trial version of File minimizer Picture 3.0 and One free tool called PNGGauntlet-3.1.2 ( only for PNG files )

You can also use the advanced settings of GIMP. In Photoshop you can save your JPEG images by lowering their quality level. For better control on the size you can use GIF formats. In this way your images will be in their lowest size ( not good when lens flare or bevel settings are used )

Now there are many wordpress plugins which can perform the same task. But why to use them if we can do them on our system. After all we will save little bit of more resources.

Increase Website Speed : Comment And User Management

I think you all are doing this work everyday, but then its a part of my article ( actually an extra part ). Make sure that you remove each and every spam comments. Also keep your trash empty. Remove all those spam commentators in your blog. ( They actually register to your site and then without any barrier they keep posting those crappy comments ). I just hate them. Every day among 20 to 25 subscribers which I get, more than 8 to 11 are spammers.

Cache : Really Important

I think you already know that WordPress generates the dynamic contents. Whenever any new visitor or readers comes to you site or any webpage, it checks it database for the content, loads the comment, loads the layouts from the theme directory, add the functionality of plugins.

But there is one methods called caching. With cache plugins, you can generate the static files of each and every webpage. Not instead of generating the contents every time, these static HTML files are served to your visitors. This not only saves the precious time, but also saves your bandwidth and system resources.

Check Out These Posts :

• W3Total Cache Setup Guide
• WPSuper Cache Setup Guide

I wish my article will be able to help you in increasing your website speed. If you have any questions you can ask it in the comment area. Please leave your suggestions.

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