Hey everybody, Mike Linville here with Black Dog Education with this week's
installment of Office Hours where we answer your questions about web design web development
and online marketing. This week's question comes Dean, and Dean writes, Mike I've been
working with WordPress for quite some time and the more I play with the site the slower
my site seems to get what can I do to speed my site back up? Great question actually because
page load times are important and we should be paying attention the them. Slow sites not
only aggravate your visitors but are also bad for search engine because search engines
page load times as part of their search engine rank algorithms so you know when we talk about
slow page load time really what we' re talking about - inefficiencies in an inefficiency
at the server level or an efficiency at your website level so with the server level especially
if you're on a shared hosting environment which most people are, BlueHost, Go Daddy
or HostGator, one of those are more difficult to troubleshoot you really need somebody who's
got a decent level of experience as a programmer. Those types of issues are usually more expensive
so we're not going to talk about those right now what we're really going to talk about
or talk about page efficiency and the reason we're going to talk about page efficiencies
or page inefficiencies, is because they're easy to find. Relatively easiest to fix and
simple to take care without any extra tools or experiences okay. So there are a lot of
different places your website can become start leaking performance is your Plugins. Now whenever
you load a plugin, you know and these are these fantastic little program that help to
extend WordPress right. We love them. But when you load a plug-in what is happening
is not just the script itself is loaded there's also template files, images there could be
JavaScript calls and sorts of other resources so the more that you have of those the more
it takes away from your server's page load time. So if you've got plugins on your website
which are not actually using not only do you want to deactivate, you want to deactivate
them and delete. The second thing we want to talk about is the images. When we talk
about images we want to do is make sure they're properly sized, saved, and scaled. So when
we say properly sized what that means we want to use images for the web that are 72 dpi
dot per inch. Let's say for example you have a logo that you got from your printer. Printers
use files that are at high resolution 300 dpi or above if you're using something like
that make sure you get a saved down version of it okay? Now properly saved, we want to
make sure we're using the proper format. Whether it's a Gif, whether it's a JPEG, whether it's
a PNG those are typically going to be your top 3. But you want to make sure that you're
saving it out properly because that can really help with your file size. And the last thing
is that you want to make sure to scale properly right. If you have a picture that's really
large if you load it to your website you've got to wait for that entire picture to load
and then crunch it down into the space that you had given it just load up a small image.
It's going to make for a faster load time. Now the third thing we're going to talk about
is excess content. Any time your website or webpage displays information that's not necessarily
associated with the post or the pages you save in WordPress it's got to make a request
to get the information. It could be requesting your own database so for example if you want
to pull latest blog posts or show the users out of your database or something like that,
or it could be a third-party requester like if you have a Twitter feed or LinkedIn, or
Facebook or something like that. No matter where it's coming from every time you make
one of those requests your server slow down a little, your page load time goes up a little
bit with each request that but if you start getting like 10 or 15 different feeds loading
into a page, let's be honest. First of all the site's going to look bad, it's just way
to much going on. Your conversion ratios are going to be really really low because a confused
mind always says no in marketing. And the last thing is your page load times are going
to way up, that's bad for search engine optimization. So this is what I would suggest, and Dean
I didn't take at look at your website so I don't know if that's your situation. Make
sure you sit down with a professional developer and talk to them about your site and what
you want it to do and they can help you map out the flow or how your content should laid
out in a proper format. So Dean that's all we've got for you. I hope this has served
you, again this is Mike Linville from Black Dog Education I want to say thank you for
hanging out with us today, now it's your turn. What I want to know is, what's the number
1 thing on your site you feel is slowing you down?