Fixing Slow Page Loading Times & Increasing Site Speed

Website speed is important to keep an eye on especially if you use WordPress.

WordPress offers over 20,000 free plugins which can get you penalized by the search engines (unless its wp super cache). This is not a myth, it is reality and i experienced the penalty from Google which reduced my traffic by over 1,000 visitors a week.

Plugins add a heap of load as you’ll see in these screen shots. Plugins aren’t the only culprit however they make up most of the extra load which is increases page loading times.

Once you get over 5 seconds Google slaps you with a penalty for going to slow. Not a great user experience for the search engine traffic they are sending to your site.

Once you get over 5 seconds Google slaps you with a penalty

Go to Pingdom and enter your sites URL to find the best way to reduce page loading times and increase your sites speed

How To Speed Up WordPress

This is the result after removing an image as my background and deactivating a shopping cart plugin. I also have a caching plugin installed and wp minify.

Here’s the culprits which remain. The image below shows Flowplayer video plugin (Not the flowplayer software itself) and  custom CSS with a mailchimp signup form are the worst performers.

I love my videos and need a bit of styling and decoration so i won’t be removing these at the moment.

What i could do is remove the video plugin and add the code manually. Nothing i can do about the CSS as i’ve installed WP Minify which joins the files together which won’t work with the signup form and that’s as far as i can go with CSS.

Using a caching plugin is also a great start.

I’m gradually reducing my plugins and only plan on keeping the most popular free plugins and premium plugins. All the others will go as i add code directly in the Thesis file editor to replace them.

In July i went on VPS hosting for a month then switched to a standard shared hosting plan then to a Pro shared hosting plan. Plus its probably taken me 6 months to fully understand everything involved in relation to site speed and reducing page loading times.

Not only will Google slap you with a penalty when you get over 5 seconds your site visitors will start to surf away. If you’ve installed more than 20-30 plugins its a good idea to test and see if you have a problem.

Here’s a few more tools to help fix slow sites and narrow down any problem areas.

1. www.webpagetest.org/
2. www.yottaa.com/
3. www.yslow.com