This article covers the finer points of improving the speed of your WordPress site. It involves the download and use of a few plugins, plus the use of an online tools.

This article assumes that you are going to download and use the W3 Total cache plug in for WordPress, and gives advice upon how to use W3 Total cache plug in to increase the speed of your website.

Here are few tips to speed up your wordpress site and loading speed to optimize better.

Few simple steps that Speed up your WordPress site

Cache Optimization using plugin

Did you install some sort of caching plugins ? If you are currently using a caching plug-in then switch it off, unless you are using W3 Total cache.

Yeah yeah I know, that caching improves loading speed but it also causes errors sometimes which results in increase of loading time of pages.

It is better to clear cache on your websites. You can download and use W3 Total cache plugin to flush or empty all caches.

WordPress Database Optimization

We have a plugin called “WP-DB manager", which allows you to optimize, repair, backup and restore database’s.

It is a complete database manager plug-in.

Run a diagnostic

You now need to find an online tool that will check your website and figure out why it is slow. You can search on Google for  Google Page Speed Checker.

And you can also use add-ons  for Google Chrome, which will run a diagnostic for you. It is called ySlow.

There are numerous other online tools that you can try, or you can try searching the WordPress plug-in database to see if they have any good ones.

Switch W3 Total Cache ON

We had to run a diagnostic to find out what was wrong with your website. You will need to research into each problem you come across so that you can fix it.

Obviously, we have no way of knowing which problems you have, so we shall continue on with switching on your W3 Total Cache plug-in.

As you can imagine, if we had turned on the plugins prior to running a diagnostic then the diagnostic results would have been incorrect.

Switch on the plug-in and click the “performance" tab. On the “Page Cache" section, you will need to tick the box to enable caching.

You will need to bring the drop down menu to “Disk:Enhanced" and click “Save all settings".

W3 Total cache: Minify

On minify you should make sure that the box to enable “minify" is ticked and turn the minify mode to manual.

If you leave all of the other settings as they are, your CSS, HTML, feeds and JS will compress by about ten percent.

W3 Total cache: Object Cache

On the drop down menu you will need to select “Disk".

This will rapidly increase the performance of your machine if you have a very dynamic site.

Enable HTTP compression

Within the “Browser Cache" option you should enable HTTP compression.

If you add headers too then it will lower the server load time and lower the loading time for files too.

Optimize your images by compressing them

You can use an app called “ImageOptim" to compress your photos and images down to a smaller size prior to uploading.

There is also an app called “Smush.it" which you can use for WordPress. It will also help you to optimize your photos for quicker loading.

Browser Cache

Click on the tab for “Browser Cache" and change the “Expires header lifetime" down to 691200 seconds. This will speed up your website.

If you go to “General Settings" and then click the “empty all caches" button, you will be able to run a new diagnostic and see your improvements. You can leave all of your plugins turned on now.