The benefits of having a faster wordpress blog are numerous, however, the primary two are quite simple. For one, if your visitors can arrive at your content faster, this is going to provide a great overall experience for the user. On the other hand, it is very well documented by now that Google does in fact take into account web page load times when ranking a site in their index. As such, fast load times will increase the chance that you will rank higher.

The first thing that most people would want to asses is your hosting, and the speed at which it will deliver content. Is it powerful enough for your needs? There are plenty of hosting options available these days, however it is worth mentioning that most shared hosting environments that are available at the moment simply do not meet the needs of most website owners. This varies of course depending on the kind of website you have built, and how many visitor numbers you have. If this number is high, then you may want to consider a VPS, or maybe even cluster or cloud based hosting.

In the case that you are receiving large volume of traffic, I do recommend using a combination of a VPS for static file loading and processing, plus a CDN or cloud solution to load larger files, and even, your databases if needed. As mentioned earlier, there is also what is known as cluster hosting, which is a service that will provide several data locations, so that regardless of where your visitors are, they will always be pulling data from the fastest location possible. This offers a huge increase in load times, and is not as complex as most people would like to believe.

It is worth noting however that using the above configuration can make doing regular backups hard, however, there are plenty of solutions available that will make very light work of this. If you are using WordPress, the easiest way to do this is to use a script that produces clone wordpress files, as this will pull data from the multiple locations, making it very easy to backup an entire site rather than going through multiple locatons.

Another great tip is to use a plugin that caches your website as a set of physical HTML files, meaning that processing becomes browser based rather than server side based. This is extremely useful if you have limites resources on your host as well, and can limit the amount of 404 errors that you receive when getting a spike in traffic.

Correct use of image formats is key to load times. If you are using GIF images for photos, and visa versa, your load times are going to suffer. Consider using GIF for graphics, and JPG for photos only. Reasoning for this is that each format is optimized for those image types, and will keep file sizes down as minimal as possible.This is a huge key to keeping load times down, and not used my enough people.

This should not be taken with a grain of salt. Load time is a big factor in not just visitor experience, but also how well your website ranks in the search engines. Using just the above methods should see some massive improvements, however, this is something that should be focused on long term. That way, you can continuously please both your visitors and the search engines. And last but not least, remember to make sure that you can back your site up using a script to clone wordpress installations. This will save you a huge amount of work in the long run.

Tags: clone wordpress, wordpress blog, wordpress load time

This entry was posted on Friday, February 11th, 2011 at 10:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.