Creative Themes Design

WordPress Customization Helps Improve Load Time Dramatically

02/04/2011  |  3,178 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

We have written about Tips to Speed Up WordPress Websites a while back. Here are some more compelling reasons & easy tips to ensure that your WordPress business sites are optimized enough for a quick load time.

While many of these techniques described in the  post should be done by technical people, there are a lot of quick modifications, like low hanging fruits, that you can do all by yourself, which can help you improve the WordPress website load time dramatically.

In the above, our customization led to a 50% reduction in a WordPress website’s load time! How did we do it?

Here are some Easy Do It Yourself Tips to Improve WordPress Load Time:

• Clean Up Code – Remove Code Comments, White Spaces, Line Breaks & wasted spaces in all the template files that cause the template file size to increase
• Clean Up CSS Files – CSS files define the styling of the website & determines which images to use as part of the template. We always find a lot of images that are referenced in the CSS are never really used or do not exist. You can safely delete such references or styling information that you do not need
• Use Thumbnail Images – many designers use various sizes of the same large image file to suite various design layouts. A great example is a magazine layout where designers display the same image in different sizes. The best way is to use WordPress’s Thumbnail Sizes that are of smaller sizes, instead of resizing the original image with a “Width=” or “Height=” parameter
• Eliminate Ads that Take Longer to Load – if you are showing advertisements, then this is one place to look at for improving the website load time. Ads, without any doubt, slow down websites
• Avoid IFRAME – IFRAMEs tend to load an external website onto your website. It is like loading multiple web pages inside one. Naturally the loading time increases considerably if you use too many IFRAMEs

In the website that we recently customized, the load time improved from over 16 secs in one scenario to below 3.5 secs in the best case. However, the client felt the need to have an extremely high resolution, large logo image on the website. The final results were still an impressive 4.5 seconds.

These are 5 Easy to Implement DIY Tips that you can implement on your WordPress sites. These are also standard part of our WordPress Customization Services where we try to optimize business websites running on WordPress.

Category: Blog, Creative Solutions