The WordPress site speed is basically depend on the template and plugins that you are using. It does take time to execute programs and load the scripts. So what we can do is optimize it! It can be done by adding additional scripts or by installing additional plugins.

Why website speed is important

Page Speed is an important factor in search engine optimization. A slow loading website will frustrate the users and it will be a bad experience for them. Because everybody is busy and they need quick results. Even if you have great and useful contents  in the webpage, your visitors may not interest in waiting to read your content. The another thing is that Search engines can crawl a fast loading site much easier. Mainly the webpage is become slow because of bigger images in size, not optimized images and java-script. Here are 7 simple ways that can make your visitors happy.

How to Speed Up WordPress

1. Choose a good Web Hosting

The most important and first step is choosing a good web hosting. Most of people does not give importance for the hosting. When selecting a hosting, make sure it is popular. Read reviews of other people about that web hosting company. Avoid cheaper and free web hosting services. Also choose best plan which can provide high bandwidth. Here are some best hosting websites that i recommend.

• Hostgator
• BlueHost
• Arvixe

2. Use Cache Plugins

• W3 Total Cache

W3 Total cache is one of the popular cache plugin used on WordPress. The plugin can cache java-script, CSS, images, pages and database objects. WP Super Cache an another top rated WordPress plugin. WP Minify This plugin will minify Java-Script, CSS, and HTML. It will exclude duplicate js and CSS file source to make page faster.

• Install Smush.it

Smush.it is a WordPress plugin that will make image optimize and make it fast in loading. There is also option for bulk smush.it that can optimize all the media images in your WordPress blog in one click.

3. Use Content Delivery Network

The Content Delivery Networks are multiple web servers that are associated in different locations over the world to access data faster. The CDN can deliver web pages to user, based on their location. For example if a user accessing a webpage from India, the CDN will provide the web page content from the Indian server. That way the page speed will increase. MaxCDN and CloudFlare are some of the best CDN.

4. Disable unwanted Plugins

It is a good practice to enable and keep only essential plugin that needed for your blog. Enabling more plugins will slow down your website. Because all of the plugins will contain js and css scripts. When enabling more plugins the scripts takes long time to load and it will slow down your page speed. Stay away from plugins that have more script. You can check page speed after disabling plugin to find which one is slow down your website. To track the performance of the plugins you can use P3 Performance profiler plugin. It is a plugin from Godaddy and by using this plugin you can identify the plugin performance. P3 Performance profiler can also show the number of MySQL Queries, Plugin Load Time etc.

5. Choose a Good WordPress theme

Selecting WordPress theme should be careful. Some of themes may contain unwanted scripts that will slow down your website. Best way is to purchase a premium theme which is faster in loading. If you did not have budget for a premium theme, then download theme only from trusted or popular websites. Here are some premium WordPress Themes that had higher page speed on Google PageSpeed Insights.
Newspaper (Score 98/100)

GoodWork (Score 87/100)

3Clicks (88/100)

6. Enable gzip compression

Gzip compression can increase your page speed dramatically. The compression can raise speed more than 50%. When a user request for a web-page, Gzip will compress scripts and styles in your webpages and send that to the browser . All you need is to add the following code to your .htaccess file on the server.

Gzip compression for Apache webservers

# compress text, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and XML
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

7. Make sure site is Mobile optimized

Yes, It can speed up your site. Because in a mobile friendly site the design is optimized for different devices. It does needs a responsive design. Google have a tool Mobile-Friendly Test to check the site is mobile optimized or not. It can also improve search engine ranking.

Here are few more tips.

• Avoid redirect

Try to stay away from redirect. Because redirection can slow down the page loading speed. Leave hyperlinks as its target itself. Tools such as URL shortener will be great for sharing and easy for the users. But in other hand it may take time to redirect to the actual URL. Better idea is to use actual URLs on your webpages.

• Place Script should be on footer CSS on header

Placing CSS on head tag can make page faster in loading. Moving your Javascript and JS files to the footer area(before closing body tag) can also increase webpage speed.

Finally You can check your page speed on PageSpeed Insights