Site Speed

If your goal is escape velocity, you have to build a ship. It’s true that some enterprise-level websites are so fast that they literally push the limits of the laws of physics. But for the rest of us who don’t have an enterprise-level operating budget, there are still plenty of effective and affordable ways to a faster-loading WordPress website. In this article, we’ll look at some tools that you and/or your web developer can utilize to speed up your site without breaking the bank. Ground Control to Major SEO Every time a visitor loads a page on your website, the data gets prepared by a computer (called a server) that is operated by your hosting company. For the purposes of illustration, let’s call this “Mission Control” and let’s suppose that it’s located in Houston, TX. Once the website data is prepared by Mission Control, it then has to take a voyage from Houston to wherever the visitor is physically located (let’s say Asheville, NC). As you can see from the example, there are two key things happening when you get a page view on your site: 1) Your hosting company’s computer (or server) generates the data 2) Your site’s data makes a trip (possibly across the world) to reach the visitor’s computer Decreasing the time it takes to complete either of these tasks will be a big win for you and your visitors. However, for almost all sites, the larger factor in page...