Google is always trying to improve the users experience. This is the reason they add page load time their algorithm in ranking sites. Everybody is in a hurry, nobody wants to wait for a slow loading site. With more and more sites using WordPress it’s important that your fully optimize your WordPress for speed.

Fortunately, there are some basic rules and techniques to follow that can improve your website performance and increase the quality of your viewer’s experience.

Here’s my top five:

1 Optimize your images: I love to use sliders with 3 to 5 pictures on the home page and many others load up images on your home page. Images grab attention and quickly tell the “story” of your company. However, make certain you resize the images to the appropriate format before uploading them. If the image size is large, make it smaller to improve your page loading speed. Here’s one of our site’s with a couple of 870 x 400 images in the slide show, each image is less than 100K. Smaller images should be even slower. This is perhaps the fastest and easiest way to improve load time.

2: Upgrade your software: This is also important for security. WordPress developers are always working to create a better and faster versions of their software. So upgrading WordPress, your themes and plugins is important.

3: Install W3 Total Cache: This plugin is easy to install and works great. It reduces page load time and improves overall site performance.

4: Limit Number of Post on Home page: Optimize home page: Don’t over crowd your home page with numerous posts. Fewer posts also improves the look of your site. Limit number of posts to 4-6 and show excerpts only instead of full posts.

5: Use a good hosting provider: Ooops here comes the self-serving plug. All my sites are hosted on my dedicated server at RackSpace. This provides the fastest possible hosting since I am not a shared server with other “unknown” sites that could be sucking up the bandwidth. However, there are many good reliable providers out there. Here’s a good link to test the speed of your site.

Everyone wants to appear first in a Google search. With Google latest release of Penguin they are trying hard to reward sites with GOOD content, while at the same time penalizing sites trying to “game” the system. People spend countless hours and vast sums of money optimizing their site. This is important to maximize your exposure, however, too many people fail to incorporate simple changes that can have a dramatic effect on their ranking.

However, the rules are explained by Google and explained in their Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Below is a paragraph from the guidelines.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

Many sites use Flash or graphics to display text on their pages. It’s important you verify that your webmaster didn’t use “images” instead of “text”. Sometimes this is done because the client wants a specific font, however, there are better ways to handle this. Thus it’s important that you check the site yourself. Below are the simple steps to check.

1: Type in your site’s name in a google browser
2: Your site should be listed on the top. Move your mouse to the right of your domain and you will see two arrows.
3: Click on “cached”
4: Then click on “text-only version”
5: You will then see what Google sees

Below is the result of a site we just redid. Below is what each of the interior pages from the old site looked like to Google. So Google was unable to index the text from the site and thus it’s impossible for Google to “learn” how to rank this site. The new site we designed use important key words in the text, which were easily indexed by Google. Now the client has a good chance to rank well for important key words, whereas before it was impossible.

If this is too complicated you can send me your domain name and I will be happy to check for you no charge.