Increase your wordpress blog speed!

At the moment, if you are a lot in webmaster forums or following SEO news, people often ask or complain why their websites are loading slow. (related: check blog speed or in the meanwhile, I like to use gtMetrix.com to check my site speed).

This is because big search engine like Google, recommends webmasters to speed up their site. Here is what Google said about site speed in the official blog post.

If you feel and check your site and find it is loading slow, you may want to optimise your pages of the site and try to increase the loading speed. Optimizing wordpress blog speed is certainly a best practice in your blog’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.

As if we had a static HTML website, it would be at least a lot easier than having PHP based wp blog, because we can just compress the files with HTML/CSS compressor and it would reduce the file size, and won’t be too much work like when you want to optimize your wp blog. (related: optimize wordpress images before uploading them to your blog).

WordPress blog speed plugin

There are so many advantage of using wordpress to build your site, one of them is it offers plugins. Using a plugin to increase wordpress blog speed is also not an exception, it can be done by using wp plugin.

In my previous post, w3 total cache vs wp super cache video review, I have actually posted a video how I compared two of them. Both of them are definitely good plugins, but after using all of them, I prefer using W3 total cache plugin.

Since I am using this plugin I have increased my page loading speed and getting 97/100 with pagespeed addon, and 93 with Yslow addon.

There also a few more things apart of using W3 total cache plugin, such as always reduce my image before uploading them to my blog post, and mostly, reducing usage of external javascript, such as using advertisements.

In the past, I have used many ads in this blog, but now, I am only using Adsense ads to minimize using too much external javascripts. (related: Adsense makes blog loading slower?)

Why I prefer W3 Total Cache to help increasing my wordpress blog speed?

Honestly, I have not noticed any page speed improvement with other plugins but this one. (I also choose it as best cache plugin)

Plus, sometimes, if there is something wrong, or small glitch with my blog, I can easily deactivate or deinstall it without going to my cPanel or accessing FTP, simply doing it in my dashboard.

Therefore, I keep using it until today, and it has so much features and settings, that for newbies, it may be confusing.

However I use the configuration settings of the W3 total cache with Yoast video that I also personally use for this blog.

W3 Total Cache video from Yoast

• Is my site loading fast? I use this shared hosting
• Try my theme >

There are so many options, to name some of them, the page cache, object cache, minify, database cache, and Content Delivery Network (CDN).

I use them all except of using CDN, because I don’t think it is necessary for this blog for now. (not sure in the future though!)

If you are already using it, you probably also notice the frequent updates of this plugin, which is very important to fix some bugs which the plugin may still have, and improving the features.

W3 Total Cache plugin is worth trying if you want to increase your wordpress blog speed, but don’t forget to backup your files always before you install it, better be sure than be sorry!