How to speed up your WordPress blog

In search engine ranking, page speed may not be the most important ranking factor, but it’s a factor nonetheless. There are several free WordPress plugins that can help speed up your blog. The few that I have tried are W3 Total Cache, WP Smush.it, Vihv Speed Up, and Fast Forward.

W3 Total Cache – W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

WP Smush.it – Yahoo’s excellent Exceptional Performance series recommends optimizing images in several lossless ways: stripping meta data from JPEGs, optimizing JPEG compression, converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs, stripping the un-used colours from indexed images.

Vihv Speed Up – Speed up you site by creating additional database indexes. No configuration needed, just install and activate. To remove additional indexes, just deactivate plugin. Vihv Speed Up is absolutely free.

Fast Forward – Fast Forward works by analyzing which pages are most frequently navigated to from the current page. The page with most traffic is then given as a preload hint to the users browser.

You can get some speed scores at GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights. Here are the before and after results from using the default settings of W3 Total Cache. Somehow W3 Total Cache disabled Google Fonts, you can try disable minify to get the font working again.

Before

before-speed-optimize

The page Some Blog Money got an overall PageSpeed Score of 59 (out of 100).

After

after-speed-optimize

The page Some Blog Money got an overall PageSpeed Score of 94 (out of 100).

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