There are literally hundreds of possible ways a user can speed up their website and increase pageviews. From buying traffic (not suggested) to updating your websites server for maximum speed (highly recommended), ensuring that you use proper methods is the best way to increase traffic. I won’t promise you a million visitors a month using these methods, but they will at least ensure you are using “best practices.”
Unlike other lists this article isn’t going to tell you how to write Search Engine Optimized content, instead it should work as the foundation for your new or existing site before you decide to create new or more content. Using these methods you can speed up your sites performance, which in turn SHOULD lead to more traffic.
1) Use Caching
You can cache all of your WordPress pages. When you cache, it saves a copy of each page and serves that copy up instead of running all of the php code each time someone requests a page. This can be really helpful. I use WP Super Cache plugin and really like it.
- Must watch reading: http://netcrunched.com/10-essential-wordpress-resources-you-may-have-missed/
The only down side of caching is that it takes a little while to set up, and it can also make updating your site more confusing because sometimes you are looking at a cached version of your site when you think you are looking at a live version. But once you work through those kinks, caching is great.
Suggested Plugins:
2) Minify Your Sites CSS, JS
With websites, I believe less is more. This is undeniably true of loading times. Your sites stylesheets and other CSS forms have a lot of blank white space, the more space you have the more system resources your server uses to search your sites CSS. I recommend downloading WP-Minify which will help compress that white space, freeing up system resources.
3) Choose a Good Web Host
This might seem like a very obvious one, but a lot of the times people try to save a few bucks and compromise quality. It is not worth it. Pay the extra few dollars and get a better web host. One that is reliable and have strong servers.
4) Optimize Your MySQL Database
Plugin: Clean Options. When you delete unused plugins they don’t necessarily disappear from your sites database, by using this plugin you can find those unneeded tables and delete them, freeing up database space that didn’t need to be used. The less database tables you have, the faster your site will run. Here’s the clean options plugin.
5) Do a Plugin Check and Remove Inactive Plugins
If you are using more than 15 plugins on your blog then you need to check to see if you really need all of those. If you don’t then you need to delete them. Also remove the inactivate plugins from the site. While checking for plugins, make sure that you use the proper format when including the plugin in your template files. Instead of including the code like this:
<?php wp_page_navi(); ?>
<?php if (function_exists(‘wp_page_navi’)) { wp_page_navi(); } ?>
