Optimizing Your Custom WordPress Site Load Time

Have you ever visited a website that seems to take forever to load?  I get calls regarding this  from clients that I’ve built custom WordPress sites for as well as others that have built their own WordPress site by themself.

Most of the time when the calls or emails come in, I ask for a link to their website so I can assess the situation.  Many times, the problem isn’t caused by a slow or unresponsive server, but rather one of two things.  The first reason has to do with plugins which I’ve touched on slightly in the past and will share more on down the road.

The second big reason I seem to come across a WordPress site, or any type of website for that matter may run slow has to do with images. As megapixels inside cameras continue to go up, so does the size of the file it creates.  For example, my Canon t3i DSLR creates size that are roughly 6-7 megabytes each.  If I am loading these file sizes onto a server, it is going to put a major strain on the load speed of a site.  Also, the actual dimensions of the site are going to be entirely too big at around 5,000 pixels wide.

Here’s a quick video showing you how to check your images:

If your site is acting like the one I showed in the video, I would take a look at the actual image files on your site.  If your images are too large, try using a program to reduce the file size like smush.it.  If you have a WordPress site, they even have a plugin available that works right within your site.  My suggestion is to reduce the actual size before uploading to around 1,000 pixels wide as a maximum.   If it is a page where you will have several images loaded, I would reduce down to around 650 pixels.

Make this simple change and watch how fast your custom WordPress sites speed up!