Today I am going to show you how to Speed Up Your Blog by over 200% with just 5 minutes of work.

Speed Up Your Blog – Why

Just how fast your blog loads in a web browser is now a measured factor that can greatly impact your page rank in Google and the other search engines. This of course then impacts just how much traffic you get and keep.

So to Speed Up Your Blog should be a high priority for every blog owner.

The greatest problem with wordpress is that the more “STUFF” you cram on your home page the longer it takes to load. But we can Speed up Your Blog, and here’s what we need to do:

1. Select an optimized theme.
2.Optimize the CSS and any JavaScript files.
3. Cache the local files.
4. Optimize images and file compressions.

Now that all sounds very technical and for most people it’s VERY technical. However thankfully this is WordPress and for that we do have an “Easy Button”. Actually there’s two and as usual these come in the form of FREE Plugins.

Speed Up Your Blog – FREE Plugin 1

WP-Smush it is a plugin that offers an API that performs lossless image optimizations automatically, and this plugin seamlessly integrates this API with WordPress. Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through the plugin behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different. You can also run your existing images through the plugin via the WordPress Media Library. Click on the Smush.it now! link for any image you’d like to optimise.

Speed Up Your Blog – Plugin 2

W3 Total Cache Improves the user experience for your readers without you having to change WordPress, your theme, your plugins or how you produce your content. This is the granddaddy of speed plugins.

See how to configure this plugin to maximise its performance by watching the video below.

So as you can see with just these two plugins and around 5 minutes of work setting them up, you really can Speed Up Your Blog by over 200%. Now this is subject to the usual wordpress caviate in that not all tweaks you make will improve the speed and some may have the opposite effect. there are too many variables at play with every plugin or widget you use on your site and of course every site is unique in some way. However with time and small changes this can dramatically improve your page load speed.