If you’ve ever had the experience of surfing the internet on a very slow connection you know how frustrating it can be while you wait for a webpage to load. Images take forever, and staring at a blank screen just isn’t that entertaining.
Google, the biggest search engine on the planet, is always looking for ways to improve their searcher’s experience and one thing that they’re looking at now as how fast (or slow) a website will load. So site speed is an important topic to discuss. Or more accurately, how to improve a websites load speed is worth discussion.
Fortunately you and I don’t need to know a whole lot about this indepth subject. Simply put, the faster the better. Unfortunately as WordPress has gotten more powerful and robust, and as you add more complex themes, plugins, and functions to it, there is a risk of things slowing down.
To combat this there have been a number of plugins that are designed to cache or store certain parts of a website for a visitor, so the next time they come into the site, the pages (and posts) will load faster.
Some of these caching plugins can seem pretty complex, and they are to a degree, but I’m going to suggest you employ the W3 Total Cache plugin to make things really easy to set up. Some of the largest WordPress based sites use this plugin so you know it’s got to be robust and effective. In some cases it’s been touted to improve site speed up to about 10x compared to sites without it.
At any rate, watch the video below to see how easy this is to configure, it’s a matter of just clicking a checkbox and a few buttons. And for further discussions on what this plugin does and how you can customize it’s set up I’d suggest visiting the dedicated plugin page here.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70TqVjmtXYU[/youtube]