This is part 2 of our quick two-part series on how to speed up your WordPress site.<\/p>\n
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- 5 Quick Wins to Speed Up WordPress Load Times (Part 1)<\/a><\/li>\n
- 5 MORE Quick Wins to Speed Up Your WordPress (Part 2)<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div><\/div>\n
In isolation, all of these strategies will positively impact your load times. When you stack these quick wins on top of each other, though; well, that’s when the real magic happens.<\/p>\n
(To avoid intimidating and overloading you, we’re going to skip most of the technical details, instead focusing on the actions<\/strong> you need to take to get results.)<\/p>\n
Just like in the first part of this quick series, before you start, I recommend you to test your website speed using the free Pingdom tool<\/a>. Then, when you’re done going through the modifications described here, go ahead and test your site again to see how much faster it is!<\/p>\n
Speed up your WordPress points 1-5? See part 1 here.<\/a><\/h2>\n
6. Use smaller images<\/h2>\n
As amazing as your holiday photo taken using your brand new digital camera is, do you really<\/em> need to upload a monstrous 4000×3000 pixel image? Unless you’re a professional photographer, the answer is no<\/em>.<\/p>\n
This is an extreme example, but it raises an important point: the larger the image, the bigger the file size. Images are an important<\/a> part of any successful website, but they’re also the heaviest element on any webpage.<\/p>\n
If your image is, say, 2MB, every time someone visits your website, that’s 2MB of bandwidth you’re asking them to use. With today’s super-fast internet speeds, this is less of a problem then the 56k dial-up days, but when every second \u2013 every split<\/em> second \u2013 counts, it’s time you can ill afford.<\/p>\n
You can use a free online tool to crop and resize your images \u2013 I recommend Pixlr<\/a> \u2013 or an image compression plugin for WordPress<\/a>.<\/p>\n
![\"Pixlr\"](\"https:\/\/mllj2j8xvfl0.i.optimole.com\/cb:c5QE.37290\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/f:best\/https:\/\/themeisle.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Pixlr.png\")
<\/p>\nFor example, one 1920×1200 pixel image started life at 1.1MB. Halve it in size to 960×600 pixels, and it’s just 338KB. That’s 70% of the weight, gone.<\/p>\n
Ideally, you want your images to be displayed at full-size on your website. So, if you want an image to display at 800 pixels wide, crop or resize it to 800 pixels \u2013 this isn’t rocket science! This keeps file size to a minimum, while also saving your server the resizing job, and ultimately letting you speed up your WordPress.<\/p>\n
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- Time taken: 2 minutes to crop or resize an image before uploading.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
7. Smush it!<\/h2>\n
Sticking with the topic of image file size, you can trim a few more KB off your images using the Optimole plugin.<\/p>\n
- 5 MORE Quick Wins to Speed Up Your WordPress (Part 2)<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div><\/div>\n
![\"Optimole](\"https:\/\/ps.w.org\/optimole-wp\/assets\/banner-772x250.jpg?rev=3019688\")
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