Google has now included site speed in its ranking algorithm. Affecting your SEO, so if your site is slow, you are not only losing visitors out of impatience, but you could also be losing them by having reduced rankings in search engines.

If it’s not enabled you can use this WordPress GZIP Compression plugin or talk with your web hosting provider about enabling it for you.

Once you’ve streamlined your plugins run your site through the Google Page Speed test again.

4. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

But not if your visitors don’t ever see it! Be sure you are not uploading the HUGE RAW images your camera took or the high quality images you bought for print advertising. Those files will slow your site down immensely.

Yahoo’s image optimizer called Smush.it will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality. However, if you are like me, doing this to every image is not efficient. Thankfully, there is a free plugin called WP-SmushIt that optimizes your uploaded images automatically. It’s well worth installing.

5. Make Some Simple Adjustments to Optimize Your Pages

• Show excerpts instead of full posts.
• Reduce the number of posts on the page (between 5-7).
• Remove unnecessary sharing widgets.
• Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need.
• Keep in simple!

6. Optimize WordPress Databases

If you are updating your WordPress website on a regular basis, your database is growing. Over time, just like your home computer, the data gets jumbled up and disorganized. This slows performance when it takes longer to sort through and find the data a visitor is requesting. Optimizing removes unnecessary data and increases the speed of retrieval.

Database Optimization Plugin: WP-Optimize – Removes all the trash and unused post revisions, and can be set to automatically do its job.

7. Minifying Your Code

Minification is the process of removing unnecessary white space and comments out of your code. In this case, we’re talking about CSS and JavaScript files. It is not unusual to be able to reduce these files by as much as 10 – 15%! Don’t worry, you don’t need to know how to write code. There are some great plugins for this as well.

Check these out: WP-Minify or Minit

8. Consider Using a Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network, or CDN, is essentially a network of servers geographically dispersed to make it easier and faster for visitors to your site to access information. This would be especially helpful if your site is hosted in the US and most of your visitors are accessing the site from, say, Europe. Having a server site in Europe will allow the information to be accessed much more quickly by your European visitors.

Now, it may seem that a CDN would be difficult and expensive to implement. But not true! Consider a couple of solutions: MaxCDN (starts at $9/month) and CloudFlare (free and paid plans). Both are easy to configure and you can use CloudFlare for free, so, there’s not a big risk in trying a CDN to see if it improves your site’s speed. Be sure to measure speed before and after configuration and of course, it’s a good idea to use all the free techniques before resorting to premium plugins.

Finally, there are many more things that go into speed optimization, but simply put, don’t overload each page with unnecessary information, images or video. If page speed is a problem, addressing the issue first with your hosting company (if you have a shared account, you need to consider an upgrade) then with your site.

This handful of items will increase your website performance. Be sure to run the checker FIRST before applying any changes. Consider running it after each step. Document the amount of speed you gain with each tactic. Doing so may enlighten you and help when building your next great website or expanding the current one.