4 Ways to Make Your Website Faster

Speed is essential these days.

You’ve probably heard the saying, that time is money, and you probably already know that speed has a lot to do with time.

The faster your website is, the more your chances of succeeding because you’re likely to end up having more satisfied visitors.

The purpose of this article is to share with you 4 ways to make your website faster, but I believe it will be a smart idea to share a few advantages of having a fast website before we start.

Advantages of Having a Fast Website

1. It keeps visitors coming, and it makes them spend more time on your website: To get your readers hooked to your website, and to get them to take action you need them to really understand your website, and that takes time. In other words, the more time readers spend on your website the more hooked they are, and the better their understanding of what you do.

Making your website faster will let your readers spend a lot of time on your website before they know it, and they won’t even have reasons to consider the time spent on your website since they aren’t interrupted.

2. It Increases Your Chances of being Promoted: There have been more than one situation where I planned to link to an article on a particular website, only to wait for several minutes before the article finished loading. I didn’t have that much time, and in the time that it took that one article to load I had searched in Google and found similar content from a particular website.

Those are just 2 benefits of having a fast website, and you know there are more. Without wasting much of your time, here are 4 ways to make your website faster below.

Reduce Your Use of Plugins

One major step you can take to cut down on your site loading speed is to reduce how you use plugins on your blog.

Plugins use a huge part of your server resources, and as a result affect your website load time.

I was able to reduce the load time of my website by up to 200% just by reducing how much plugins I have, and by coding some important things into my site.

Some major plugins you can uninstall is your social media plugins, your comment plugins and the likes, and then look for a way to code those functionalities into your blog design.

This will help cut down on your blog load speed, and you can be sure of getting more readers as a result.

Install a Caching Plugin

Another approach to take to make your blog faster is to install a caching plugin.

The purpose of the caching plugin is to serve a cached version of your website to repeat visitors, and to serve a unique version to new visitors; this will help improve the speed of your website significantly, and it will also ensure repeat visitors aren’t affected in the case of high server load.

There are a lot of caching plugins out there, but my favorite one so far is the W3 Total Cache.

Reduce the Size of Your Images

Images contribute a lot to how fast a website is, but the reality is that your website won’t be the same without images.

So the question is, if you can’t do without images, how do you get the best from them?

The answer is very simple; use software like Gimp or Photoshop to resize your image to make it smaller; convert your images to png to make it even smaller, and install the WP Smush It plugin to compress your images and make them smaller.

Host all of Your Files on Your Server

The final thing you can do to make your website even faster is to host all your files on your own server.

Don’t host your files on file sharing sites, and don’t host your images on Flickr or other photo sharing sites. Make sure any file you want to use on your website is hosted on your server, as that will prevent the browsers of those visiting your website from connecting to other servers, which can end up increasing the load time of your site.

I am Paul, a cable and broadband expert, and I help people find what cable providers are in my area.