Page speed, as we know, is very important for user experience and, as we are finding out, also search rankings. Slow websites are just plain undesirable for most audiences; really no one likes a slow-loading website.

Since most of our clients’ websites use WordPress, I will use this platform as a basis for how to improve your page speed. This also mainly applies to shared hosting which is the most popular and appropriate for smaller websites. Depending on which CMS your website is using (WordPress, Joomla, Ruby on Rails, HTML, etc.), you will have different ways to improve speed. In WordPress, there are some quick tricks to get this done with hosting memory limit considerations and caching plugins.

Hosting Page Speed Considerations

If you have shared hosting and are requiring a lot of computing power from the server to load your pages and also make database calls, you will experience slow load times. Make sure your host has a limited number of other websites on your server space and also that you are on fast servers! Godaddy $5/month shared hosting is not fast… Ask your host if you are on a good enough server for your needs and plan accordingly.

You can also include the below code into your .htaccess file to increase your server memory allocation:

php_value memory_limit 128M

Or using your wp-config.php file, add this line to your code:

define(WP_MEMORY_LIMIT, 128M);

Caching Plugins Are Critical

WordPress uses a database to pull information and content about your website into the PHP pages on the fly as the code which isn’t the fastest process. Often if the website has lots of elements and sophisticated pages, dynamically making these database calls and then building the page on the fly can cause slow load time.

What can be done is to install a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache that is designed to improve user experience and page speed. This plugin, among many other speed improvements, will create pre-ready versions of your web pages for very fast serving. Basically, it loads each page using the PHP, regular WordPress page, then creates a copy of it in HTML which can load very fast. The plugin has to keep creating copies as the site changes, then serving these cached pages at a much faster speed.

Hope this helps speed up your WordPress site and best of luck!