The reason why you choose WordPress to build your website is because it is easy to use and you do not need any HTML background knowledge to create your website. So, when your website is done and completed, you work very hard to create more posts and content everyday. Your website traffic picks up and it starts to grow. To enhance your readers browsing experiences, you start using more WordPress plugins so that your website can have a few extra features (i.e. Social Media Share button, different language translators, etc). However, you start to realize that the more plugins and posts you make, the longer load time your website experiences. What should you do now? Nobody likes slow websites. Nobody likes to wait around for websites to load every minute. Your (potential) readers will leave your website when it does not load for 10 seconds which means it is very important to optimize the load time of your WordPress website. Therefore, we have prepared a list with 10 easy tips to speed up your website. 1. Caching Plugin Caching plugin helps your website improve its load speed because the plugin caches every aspect of your website. As a result, this will significantly reduce the download time. Among the different caching plugins available online, we recommend W3 Total Cache because it is very simple to use (and it’s FREE)! 2. Optimizing Image Image file sizes are much larger than text files. If your website is image-oriented, it will take a much longer time to load your website. There is a free plugin called WP-Smushlt which can automatically help you reduce the file sizes of your website but does not reduce the quality of the image. Definitely check this out! 3. Another Image-related plugin: LazyLoad This plugin will not only speed up your website load time but will also help your website lower the bandwidth by loading less data for your viewers who do not scroll down your website. For example, if your website is vertically long and requires readers to scroll down in order to view your entire page, with LazyLoad, the images on the lower side on your website will NOT load until your readers scroll down. 4. Optimizing databases There are three plugins that we would like to recommend for optimizing your WordPress databases. The first one is WP-Optimize. This plugin, as the name suggests, optimizes your database by reducing the overhead of spams, drafts, tables, etc. Second, you can also consider installing WP-DBManger to help you schedule dates for database optimization. Last, Revision Control is another great tool that can help you optimize your database. This plugin enables you to set the numbers of revisions you make for each post. WordPress, by default, stores all of your drafts indefinitely. By installing this powerful plugin, your database will be very lightweight compared to other websites without this plugin. 5. Removing unused plugins The title says it all. If there are plugins that you do not use, simply delete them. Give it a try! Your site will load faster for sure! 6. Optimizing your home page Your home page is the most important part that requires a quick load speed among all of your other pages because this is where your readers normally enter first. Here are a few tips to optimize your home page

- Show excerpts of your posts.
- Set fewer number of posts displayed on your home page (we recommend 5 posts)
- Set the Social Media Share plugins to only display on the actual post page instead of the home page.

Remember the key: less is MORE!! 7. Enabling hotlink protection Hotlinking happens when external websites direct a link to the images on your websites making your server load increase. In cPanel, there is a function called “HotLink Protection”. Once you enable the protection, you can eliminate this form of “bandwidth theft”. 8. cPanel “Optimize Website” Feature Another great feature of cPanel! There is a feature under “Software/Services” in cPanel which is called “Optimize Website”. By enabling this feature, cPanel tweaks the way Apache will handle requests and will compress content before sending it to the visitor’s browsers. 9. Making use of Google PageSpeed Insights PageSpeed Insights, developed by Google, is a tool that analyzes the content of a web page and provides suggestions to make that page load faster. Check out their official page for full details. 10. Good web hosting service company A good web host can provide not only stable uptime and connection but also professional solutions and support when needed. At Doteasy, our in-house Customer Support agents are resourceful web technicians and experts. We can provide speedy solutions for WordPress and other website builder programs. It’s our goal to keep our customers up-to-date with the latest web hosting trends through our blog, our Scripts Library, and our how-to video tutorials on the YouTube channel. Lack of time to complete all these tips? It takes a great amount of time to secure a website and maintain a quick load time. Therefore, we strongly recommend our customers to perform all of the above tips on your own. But, we understand that many of you do not have the time to do these tasks on your website. In this case, we can suggest to you our Managed Hosting plan which is an ideal solution for customers who need some extra help in maintaining their websites. Our Managed Hosting plan includes automated website backup as well as import, export, and optimization of your MySQL databases. To learn more, check out our Managed Hosting service feature page.

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