How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site In 5 Steps

How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site In 5 Steps

It is probably no surprise that speeding up your website or blog can drastically improve the user’s experience. Speed is a highly rated variable in the usability of a website. Site speed also affects your SEO.

You do not need to be a WordPress guru or a web developer to make positive changes to your site speed. By implementing the tactics below, I was able to reduce page load speeds by 310%! That is a HUGE and noticeable difference.

Every website is different. I cannot guarantee these results for your site. On TOTS Family, we reduced site speeds by 37%. Still impressive.

To check out your site speed go to Pingdom and enter in your url.

Step 1

Back up your site right now. Do not proceed without this step as we will be making some changes to your databases and in case anything goes wrong you want to make sure you have a backup available. We use BackUp Buddy to backup the TOTS Network. Regardless of what backup system you use, you should be backing up your website on a regular basis.

Step 2

Now that you have backed up your site, let’s start some clean up. Did you know that every time you save a revision of a post (or it auto-saves) the revision stays there forever, well until you delete it. When I deleted old revisions off of this site, I freed up 14.034 MB of space – almost half. That is an amazing result. TOTS opened in 2011 so we had a lot of revisions of older posts.

I used the RVG Optimize Database plugin. I installed the plugin and deleted it right afterwards as I will not be doing this type of cleanup on a daily basis.

Step 3

Now that we have cleaned up your past revisions, it is time to focus on your images. Unless your site is brand new, you probably have images saved to your site that you do not use. For example, you may have changed branding or you thought you would use a certain image in a post but decided against it in the end. If you use a regenerate thumbnails plugin you probably have multiples of the same images in all different sizes – some that you will never use. When I cleaned out the unused images on this site, I deleted over 11,000 total images. That may seem like a lot (and it is), but we will have over 5000 images being used.

To do our image cleanup, I used the Clean Images plugin. Like in Step 2, I deleted it right afterwards as I will not be doing this type of cleanup on a daily basis.

[ctt title=”Reduce WordPress Speed” tweet=”You do not need to be a WordPress guru or a web developer to make positive changes to your site speed. By implementing the tactics below, I was able to reduce page load speeds by 310%!” coverup=”tyKLU”]

Step 4

Let’s talk about tags. If you have created tags and have never used them it is time to get rid of them. There is no reason why you should have unused tags on your site.

To delete unused tags from your dashboard go to posts then tags. I then sorted my tags in order of use and deleted all of the ones that only had one use.

Step 5

Comment clean up. You should be cleaning out your comments on a regular basis. Keep the ones that are relevant and you want on your blog but delete spam comments and any in pending that you do not want to show.

To delete comments just go to the comments section off of the dashboard. You will be able to see at a quick glance how many comments you have under each category. When you click on spam there will be an empty all button – easy, peasy.

There you go. These are easy steps you can take to clean and speed up your wordpress site. There are a few more things you can do but will be trickier for someone who is not very techy. In case you want to go more in-depth check out 10 Quick Ways to Clean Up and Optimize Your WordPress Site.

I would love it if you could share your results below. Let me know how much you were able to speed up your site in the comments.

One Response

  1. Anne

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