Tag Archives: images

The Best WordPress Plugins Every Blog Needs

Posted on March 8, 2019 by Hosting

The post The Best WordPress Plugins Every Blog Needs appeared first on HostGator Blog . When you build your blog with WordPress, it’s easy to customize it and add cool features with plugins. But which plugins? You can choose from more than 54,000, which is kind of a lot. To help you avoid choice overload, we’ve compiled what we think are the best must-have plugins for new and growing bloggers, especially bloggers who want to gain subscribers, raise their social media profile, ace SEO, and more. WordPress Mailing List Plugins for Blogs Building an audience is the main goal for most bloggers, whether they’re creating a community for fun or profit. The cornerstone of audience-building is building an email list, so you can let your fans know when you publish a new post, launch a contest, or have something else to offer them. E mail Subscribers & Newsletters by Icegram is a free WordPress plugin that gives you a shortcode snippet to paste into your posts and pages wherever you’d like an opt-in box. As you add subscribers, you can use the plugin’s dashboard to view, import, and export contacts, create welcome and update emails, send test emails, and integrate with a third-party email marketing service like Constant Contact. WordPress Social Sharing Plugins for Blogs Add to Any lets you add social share buttons to your blog that look good on any device, load fast, and connect your content to more than 100 social networks and messaging apps. Want to see what’s getting shared and who’s following those links? Add to Any also integrates with your Google Analytics and Bitly accounts. Add to Any is free, so you don’t need to upgrade to access all its features. Do you have an archive full of posts you’d like to share again to reach new readers and build your subscriber list? The free version of Revive Old Posts will automatically share your old posts to Facebook and Twitter so you can get more mileage from your content. You can choose the sharing schedule, the number of old posts you want to share, hashtags, and other elements. The Pro version adds sharing for LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr. Both versions of Revive Old Posts support link shortening services like Bitly and Rebrandly. WordPress SEO Plugins for Blogs When people search for the topics you blog about, can they find your blog? Even great content can be hard to find if it’s not formatted, indexed, and optimized for search engines to understand. That’s why bloggers who want to rank well in searches typically add a few plugins to make that happen. We’ve blogged before about how schema.org formatting can help you generate rich Google search results for your reviews, recipes, articles, and other content. You can do this manually with code, or you can add the All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets WordPress plugin to your blog. This free plugin supports 9 common schema formats, including articles, people, recipes, reviews, and videos. When you install All In One, you get a dashboard that walks you through choosing how your snippets will display, where you’ll add the snippets on your site, and how to test your snippets to make sure they look good. You’ll also want a plugin to help Google’s search engine crawlers understand what’s on your site. You can install the Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin to handle this. However, if you’re also going to install Yoast SEO , you may want to use its XML mapping tool instead. (It’s not a good idea to use both at the same time.) Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins out there, and the free version offers a lot of tools to help you optimize your blog. For instance, Yoast helps you optimize each post for a keyword or keyphrase that you want to rank for, shows you how the post will look in Google search results, tells you how readable your post is before you publish it, keeps you from accidentally duplicating content within your site, and updates regularly to keep pace with Google’s ongoing improvements. If you have a large or fast-growing blog, you can detect and fix site-indexing crawl errors by connecting Yoast to your Google Search Console account. WordPress Performance Plugins for Blogs Jetpack is the Swiss Army knife of WordPress plugins, and it can tackle a lot of tasks for you, like scheduled social media posting, statistics collection, and performance improvements. Jetpack also adds its own layers of security to your WordPress blog. When you’re ready to start making money from your blog through ads or direct sales, one of the paid versions of Jetpack can help you with those tasks, too. As your blog grows, it can take longer for your pages to load, especially if you include lots of images in your posts. To avoid this slowdown, which can raise your bounce rate and affect your search rank, compress your images. The Smush Image Compression and Optimization WordPress plugin can handle this for you. You can “smush” images in batches of up to 50 or smush them individually, without losing image quality. (And yeah, pushing the “smush” button is fun.) If you want detailed analytics of your site traffic, the Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights connects to your Google Analytics account and deploys your analytics tracking code for you so you don’t have to paste in the snippet yourself—all for free. Then you can see your Google analytics in your blog’s dashboard. A good backup program is insurance against blog catastrophes. Updraft Plus helps you automate site backups, store your backups in the cloud, and access them easily when you need to restore your site or move to a new host. The free version lets you automatically send your backups to Dropbox, Google Drive, your email, and other cloud services, and it makes it easy to restore your site even if you’re not tech-savvy. (Or, you can upgrade to an automated daily backup for your blog with CodeGuard . CodeGuard packs in additional security features with data backups for up to 5 websites.) Set Up Your WordPress Blog WordPress plugins can help you get the most out of your blog, but they can also impact your blog’s performance. Maximize your blog’s functionality and its performance with a managed WordPress hosting plan from HostGator. You’ll enjoy 2.5x faster load times, automated backups, and more. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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4 Best Free WordPress Themes for Photography Blogs

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Hosting

The post 4 Best Free WordPress Themes for Photography Blogs appeared first on HostGator Blog . A well-designed blog is a must, by definition, for photo bloggers, but professional photographers and Instagram addicts can benefit from having a photo blog, too. That’s because a blog that’s set up to show off images does more than connect bloggers and fans. A regularly updated blog also helps pro photographers keep their portfolio current and helps them rank better in search results. And photographers with a following on Instagram can use a blog to reach a wider audience with their images and build a list of prospects who may want to buy prints, products, or how-to know-how. To create a photo-friendly blog, you’ll need a theme that’s designed with images in mind. Here are four of our free favorite WordPress themes for photography blogs. 1. Camer Camer is an image-grid based theme from Blogging Theme Styles . Images on Camer’s pages only display text when site tap or mouse over them, which keeps visitors’ focus on your work, not your words. Camer’s layout for computer screens features a full-width text header above a 4-column image grid. On phones, Camer displays images in a single column. The free version of Camer is designed to work with Gutenberg, the new modular editor for WordPress that’s meant to make it easier for users without web design backgrounds to create and update their websites. Camer’s free version includes an unusually wide array of design options, such as five page templates, thirteen sidebar position options, a built-in menu for social media feeds, and more.   To get tools to let you adjust the width of each section on your pages, plus additional layouts, page templates, and sidebar positions, you can upgrade to Camer Pro ($49).   2. Himalayas Himalayas from Theme Grill is one of the most popular single-page themes around, and it’s a great option for photo bloggers who want to keep their site simple while showing off their best work. The full-width banner slider is followed by a blog section with featured images and text snippets and a portfolio section that’s all images with mouse-over/tap text display. There’s a built-in call-to-action button so you can invite your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, contact you to book a sitting, or visit your online store. Services and portfolio widgets help showcase your work, too. The pro version ($69) is WooCommerce compatible and includes Google fonts along with font size, color palette, and slider options not available in the free version.   3. Image Gridly Photographers can display their work and their words with Image Gridly from Superb Themes . The name probably gives away that the layout for this theme is an image grid. Unlike Camer (above) Image Gridly overlays titles on the lower third of each image, so users can see text related to each photo without having to tap or mouse over. Image Gridly’s desktop display includes a full-width banner photo with a three-column image grid below it. On smartphones, Image Gridly’s display has a full-width banner followed by featured post images displayed in a single column. Image Gridly’s free version is a great choice for showing off photography, but it lacks some of the features that other free themes include, like tools to customize the theme’s appearance, Google fonts , and speed and search optimization. Upgrading to the premium version (starting at $26) adds these features and tools.   4. Juliet Juliet is a minimalist, image-heavy, feminine theme from Lyra Themes that’s a solid choice for photo bloggers who enjoy writing about their work. It’s designed as a fashion blog theme, but the full-width image header followed by a 4-column row of featured images from different blog categories works for other types of photography, too. Juliet is responsive, WooCommerce compatible, and lightweight for fast image load times . The free version also gives you options for image and text logos, overlay colors for the banner, background color and image, sidebars, headers and footers, and two different skins. Although the free version has enough features to get most photo bloggers off to a strong start, the pro version ($35 plus $8/month for support and updates) has a lot to recommend it, like a lookbook template that could make a great portfolio tool, additional video display options, Jetpack-powered social media sharing tools, and an email subscription widget.   Picturing Your Ideal Photo Blog Theme Each theme publisher offers a live demo so you can see how their designs look and work on computers, tablets, and phones. However, it’s a good idea to try out the themes you like with your own blog content before you commit to one theme. As you try them out, ask yourself a few questions: How does the theme look with your content? Does the overall design of the theme work with the overall themes and mood of your photos? For example, a soft-looking theme like Juliet might be a great showcase for portrait photography but not so much for shots of brutalist architecture. Do you want to make money with your blog ? If you plan to sell prints of your work on your site, display ads, or set up a customer service chatbot to connect with potential clients, does the theme integrate easily with the tools you’ll need to use? How quickly does your site load with the theme installed? Images can dramatically slow down page load times, which can lead to lower search-results rankings, more bounces, and less traffic overall. Ideally, each page on your photography site should load in less than 3 seconds. Once you start using a theme, keep an eye on your blog’s bounce rate, the average length of time visitors spend on your site, and whether conversions are increasing, falling, or staying flat to get a sense of whether your theme is helping visitors get the most from your content. You can also listen for feedback from your visitors to see what they think of it. Do the images display properly for them? Can they navigate around the site easily? Use their questions and comments to get a clear picture of where the theme is working for you and where it may need improvement. Then, optimize your photo blog with these essential tools . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Your 2019 Website Redesign Checklist

Posted on February 22, 2019 by Hosting

The post Your 2019 Website Redesign Checklist appeared first on HostGator Blog . The beginning of the New Year is a good time to make resolutions and commit to the work that often gets pushed aside during the busy year. For a lot of business owners, that includes redesigning your website. The website that was bright and shiny and looked just how you wanted it to a few years ago probably isn’t pulling its full weight anymore. Every website owner should periodically revisit their website’s design to look for opportunities to improve. How to Tell When It’s Time for a Website Redesign Taking on a website redesign project requires a commitment in time and money, which makes it easy to find excuses not to do it. But there are few compelling reasons that are good enough to squash those excuses and move forward in 2019 with a website redesign.   It’s been years. Web design best practices change. Just because your website was intuitive to visitors five years ago doesn’t mean it is now. And if you haven’t done a thorough update in a few years, you’re likely missing opportunities to get more out of your website based on current trends in SEO (search engine optimization), UX (user experience), and new technology. If your last website design project was years ago, at the very least you should do a thorough review to figure out if your website is currently meeting your needs or could use a makeover .   You’re not getting as many visitors as you’d like. If you’re not seeing much traffic, you should both step up your online marketing and look for ways to strengthen your website. A website redesign presents the opportunity to analyze any weaknesses in your current website and spot missed SEO opportunities, so you can create a version that will perform better in search and bring in more visitors.     Your visitors aren’t sticking around or returning. Getting visitors to your website doesn’t matter much if they immediately click away and never come back. A good website is designed to get visitors to stick around, click through to additional pages, and keep coming back for more. If your visitors aren’t doing that now, you’ll want to reconsider your website strategy and look for ways to redesign your pages to encourage longer and repeat visits with useful content and compelling CTAs (calls to action).   It doesn’t work on mobile. One of the top sins of web design in 2019 is having a website that’s awkward or difficult to use on mobile. Too many people do their web browsing on mobile devices now for you to get away with providing a bad mobile experience. If your website is hard to use on a small screen, visitors will click away and the search engines will punish you in the rankings. This is probably more urgent than any other item on this list. If your website isn’t mobile friendly , a website redesign project is imperative.   Your business strategy has changed. For business websites, a New Year means revisiting your business plan and considering if your overall strategy and goals need to change. Anytime your business embarks on a new strategy—developing a new unique value proposition (UVP), introducing a new product, deciding to target a new demographic, etc.—your website needs an update to bring it in line with your new approach.   You’re tired of the website you have. Really, this is a good enough reason on its own. If you’re no longer happy with the website you have—maybe you want different colors, think the design looks outdated, or have recently come across a few websites with designs you like more—that’s a good enough reason to change your website so it better matches what you really want.   10 Steps to Include on Your Website Redesign Checklist When launching a website redesign, you can cut down on a lot of guesswork and risk by spending time on research and planning. Here’s a ten-step checklist to help you get your website redesign right.   1. Clarify your goals. Before you start working out the details of your website redesign, define what you want to accomplish. Every website will have some main overarching goals, such as making sales or developing an engaged community. In addition, you may have a number of smaller goals that help you achieve your main ones, like increasing traffic or getting people to sign up for your email list. Write out a list of the main goals your website ought to achieve, and determine the priority levels of each so you know what to focus on in your website redesign. Where possible, assign specific metrics to track to each goal so you can better measure your success once your new website is up.   2. Analyze your website metrics. Dig into your website analytics to gain a clear understanding of what about your current website is working, and what isn’t. Your analytics will reveal insights about who your audience is, how they find your website, and what they do once there. Look for trends in the data that suggest the types of topics, CTAs, and design elements your audience responds to. And confirm that the audience you’re attracting now is the one you want to reach—otherwise, your website and marketing may need to take a different approach to get in front of the right people.   3. Develop a persona. While you definitely want your website redesign to produce a website you like, that’s actually less important than making sure your website appeals to your target audience. For your website to work for the people it’s really for, every decision about the website’s design needs to put them top of mind. A buyer persona is a basic sketch of the type of person you most want to reach. It typically includes demographic details, a description of their interests and online behavior, and notes on their common questions and problems. A persona lets you picture the person you’re building your website for, so it’s easier to get inside their head and make sure you center their experience in your approach to the design. 4. Do keyword research. Keyword research is both a crucial step in optimizing your website for the search engines, and a useful way to gain knowledge about what your audience is looking for and the language they most commonly use. Using the terminology your customers use is a helpful way to make the website more user friendly for them, and increases the chance that your site will show up in the search engines for the terms they’re looking for. For on-site optimization, choose a relevant, unique primary keyword for each page of your website, along with a couple of secondary keywords. Work them into the URL, title tag, headings, alt tag, and website copy—but always naturally, don’t try to force them in. Lots of keyword research tools are available to help identify the best keywords for each of your website’s main pages, and many of them are free. If you do content marketing, keyword research is also a valuable resource for finding the topics your audience cares about.   5. Do a content and SEO audit. A successful website redesign doesn’t require starting over from scratch—you can still use a lot of the pages you already have, but look for ways to make them better. A thorough SEO and content audit will reveal opportunities to make the content you already have on your website go further and get better results. In particular, in reviewing your current website, look for: Web pages that aren’t well optimized for search now Web pages that lack a clear CTA, or have one that isn’t getting results Opportunities to improve your site structure so it’s more intuitive for users through more useful categories or a clearer menu Successful content that can be repurposed into different formats Successful content that can be updated to better drive visitors to take the actions you want Underperforming content that can be improved upon for better results Broken links or other issues contributing to high bounce rates Content that no longer supports your goals, that your website is better off dropping While your content has little to do with your website’s visual design, incorporating it into your website redesign plan will ensure your new design supports your content—a crucial feature of a strong design.   6. Develop a style guide. A style guide is a helpful tool for clarifying the general look you want your website to have. If more than one person will be involved in your website redesign, it will keep everyone on the same page when it comes to the website’s primary design elements. Even if your website redesign will be completed by one person, it makes it easier to ensure each web page communicates a consistent visual brand. Your style guide doesn’t have to be something complicated. It can be as simple as defining your color scheme, choosing your typography, and addressing formatting choices. You can also include choices about the images to use, the button colors and styles to go with, and the proper icons to use (and not use). Whatever you decide to include, a simple style guide will serve as a handy reference point as you work to helps you achieve visual consistency throughout the site.      7. Find the right designer or website builder. With your basic research and strategy in place, the next step is deciding how you’re going to create you new website design. Your main two options are hiring a web designer or choosing a website builder. Each option has its advantages. Most notably, a web designer allows you more flexibility and control, while a website builder provides convenience and affordability. Whichever you’re leaning toward, take some time in this step to research your options. Hiring a web designer that’s a good fit for what you want is crucial to the overall success of your website redesign process. And choosing the best website builder for your needs will make the designing process easier and ensure you have all the features and functionality you need.   8. Consider UX. UX is the term used to describe design that centers the user experience. In other words, thinking through how your visitors will interact with your website in order to spot issues that may be confusing or difficult for them. For example, if a significant number of your visitors come to the site looking for kids’ products, then making sure you put a link to the Kids category of your website right in the menu makes it easier for people to find what you’re looking for. Other factors that influence UX include making sure your text and buttons are in colors that are easy to see, your fonts are easy to read, and your links are well sized for people on mobile. Before you settle on your new website design, go through it looking for any factors that could make it difficult or confusing for your visitors to take the actions you want them to take.   9. Prioritize the mobile experience. A mobile friendly website is a requirement in 2019. When you’re considering your website builder options, take into account whether they offer responsive templates that make creating a mobile friendly website easy. Or, when you’re interviewing designers, ask about their experience creating responsive websites. Double check how all your design elements look and work on mobile devices. A too-small button or link can make a website that otherwise seems fine basically unusable on mobile. You can’t treat mobile as an afterthought any more, it ought to be top of your mind throughout the website redesign process.   10. Do user testing . When you’ve finally got everything else on this list checked off and your website seemingly finished—don’t publish just yet. You’re never going to be as good at seeing your website the way your visitors will as someone who comes to it with fresh eyes. So find some customers or friends to help you test out your website. Ask them to complete a few main actions on the site, like making a purchase, filling out a form, or navigating to a particular product. Encourage them to do so on different types of devices and in different browsers. And make a note of anything they have trouble with, so you know what changes to make before you go live.   Launch Your New Website! Once you’ve checked off all ten steps, your new and improved website is ready for the public. Publish it to the web, but keep a close eye on your website analytics to see how it fares. You never want to assume a website redesign will accomplish everything you hoped. Track specific metrics based on your stated goals to see what’s working, and continue to make small tweaks to the design as you go based on what the data tells you. Your redesign is a great way to make your website go further in 2019 and beyond, but when it comes to website maintenance, your work is never entirely done.   Ready to transform your website? Contact HostGator’s Web Design team today. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Today’s 5 Best Free WordPress Themes for Freelancer Websites

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Hosting

The post Today’s 5 Best Free WordPress Themes for Freelancer Websites appeared first on HostGator Blog . Every freelancer needs a website for one major reason: Clients can’t find you if you don’t show up in their search results. Other reasons freelancers need websites are to show your work to prospective clients, to let prospects know which kinds of services you provide (and which you don’t), and to give people an easy way to get in touch with you. To make the most of your website, you’ll need a theme that loads fast, looks good and is easy to use on phones and computers, and establishes your professional brand . Here are five free WordPress themes that work well for different types of freelance businesses. 1. Bootstrap Journal Bootstrap Journal from Bootstrap Themes describes itself as feminine, but perhaps a better word is fun. The fonts are what give this image-heavy theme a slightly whimsical look, which can work for freelancers in businesses that require an outgoing personality, like wedding and event planners, independent travel agents, stylists, makeup artists, and hair stylists. This theme is best for freelancers who have a strong visual portfolio to display. On my laptop, the full-width header image fills the space above the fold. Beneath it are page navigation tabs and a 5-image grid with post titles over the images. Post excerpts with large images follow, and there’s a subscription box to encourage visitors to join your email list. On a smartphone, everything converts to one column. Bootstrap Journal is responsive, fast, SEO friendly and WooCommerce compatible. The pro version ($49) adds ad management tools, multiple design customization options, and an editable copyright text option.   2. Clean Fotografie Clean Fotografie from Catch Themes , as you might guess from the name, is a good choice for freelance photographers. It’s also useful for freelancers in other businesses whose portfolio is mainly visual, like makeup artists, fine artists, interior decorators, and landscape designers. Clean Fotografie’s responsive design puts images front and center on computers and phones, gives you hero image options for your home page or the entire site, a portfolio feature, full-screen HD image capabilities, and Instagram compatibility. The free version also includes customization options for text excerpts, menus, header media, and layouts. On a laptop screen, the header media includes a call-to-action button to get visitors moving through the site. Beneath the header, a three-column row of images for categories is followed by a header image and text block, featured images in another three-column row, and news items with large featured images. On a smartphone, the content shifts into a single column but keeps the focus on images rather than text. Clean Fotografie’s pro version ($55) is WooCommerce ready and adds more customization options,  featured slider tools, and font families.   3. Experon Experon from ThinkUp Themes looks like a good option for freelancers who work in a field that requires precision and a sense of understated style, thanks to the hexagonal category icons below the slider banner. Because of the design, the above-the-slider-banner tabs for pages and social media, and the three-category row just beneath the banner, Experon is a good option for a freelance agency or solo freelancer that offers multiple services they want to describe in depth on the site. Experon’s free version loads quickly, is SEO friendly, and is optimized for HD screens. It’s compatible with WooCommerce for selling on the site and Elementor for drag-and-drop page design. The free version also gives users access to regular security and feature updates. The pro version of Experon ($35) adds full-width and boxed layout options, more than 100 shortcodes to add features to the site fast, hundreds of Google Fonts, and unlimited color and sidebar options.   4. Life Coach Life Coach from Blossom Themes is a great choice for freelancers who are serious about building their email list through content marketing. Designed for—you guessed it—life coaches, this theme also works for writers, teachers, and speakers. On both laptops and smartphones, there’s a sign-up section where visitors can enter their email in exchange for a free info product (a checklist, e Book , or some other marketing content). Next comes page navigation tabs and a hero image with another subscription section. Next, there’s a social proof section for the logos of media outlets, websites, and events where your work has been featured. About, services, learn more, testimonials, and articles are next, followed by contact information and a contact form. Life Coach’s free version is fast, SEO friendly, Schema.org optimized, responsive, and WooCommerce compatible. Coach Pro ($49) adds more layout and design options as well as sections for case studies, pricing, podcasts, and events.   5. Ryan Grid Ryan Grid from ThinkUp Themes has a black-and-white palette and a focus on text blocks that’s good for writers , editors, tutors, transcription, and other freelancers whose work is based on text. On a laptop, Ryan Grid is similar to Experon, with two unobtrusive menu headers for social media icons and pages, followed by a slider header, then three category text blocks. On a smartphone, that first text block is where you’ll want to put your most important information, because it’s the most prominent element on the smartphone-screen homepage display. If you do have images to include, Ryan Grid is HD Retina-ready. The free version has an options panel for easy customization of the design and it’s Elementor-compatible for drag-and-drop page building. It’s also WooCommerce compatible, which is helpful if you have information products you want to sell on your site. Ryan Grid’s pro version ($35) adds unlimited color and sidebar options, Google Fonts, and more than 100 shortcodes for easy customization.   Choosing a WordPress Theme for Your Freelance Website Once you’ve decided on a couple of themes you like, download them and try them out with your own content to get a sense of which one will work best for you. After you make your choice, ask for feedback from your peers, clients, and prospects about how easy it is for them to find what they need on your site. If you need to make changes to your theme, or pick another theme, you’ve got lots of good free options. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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7 Ways to Improve Site Speed and Performance in 2019

Posted on December 28, 2018 by Hosting

The post 7 Ways to Improve Site Speed and Performance in 2019 appeared first on HostGator Blog . You go to a website and it feels like it is taking forever to load. What do you do? Do you wait patiently for the webpage to load in its entirety? Or do you simply close the browser tab and move on with your life? The fact of the matter is that page load time not only has a dramatic impact on user experience, but it also greatly impacts conversion rates, as well as search engine optimization. Regardless of the type of website that you have —whether it’s a blog, an e-commerce store, an online forum, or an affiliate landing page—it is in your best interest to provide the fastest site speed and performance possible. But how do you get there? Here are seven tips that you can use to reduce those load times and boost the user experience on your website in 2019. 1. Use a Content Delivery Network There are certainly a lot of steps you can take in terms of the actual content on your website. You can shrink images and optimize your JavaScript. But you also have to consider where your servers are located relative to the users who are accessing them. The Internet isn’t wholly virtual, because physical space must still be traversed. It is substantially faster for someone in Los Angeles to access to a server in San Francisco than it is for that same person to reach a server in London or even Chicago. The goal of a content delivery network, or CDN for short, is to improve website performance by picking a server that’s closest to the end user. We recommend you take a look at the way a CDN works , to get a better understanding on not only how the concept works, by also why it’s being used my the majority of top sites on the internet today. That’s where there’s a whole network to deliver this content. The best CDNs take this further by offering higher-speed storage, optimization tools, intelligent and dynamic caching, and security features to optimize performance even further. You’ll want a CDN with great global network coverage and high availability solutions. The pro plan from Incapsula starts from $59 per site per month, while the business plan goes for $299 per site per month.   2. Smush Your Images It probably won’t surprise you to learn that loading images can be one of the most taxing activities in terms of site speed and performance. Part of this has to do with resolution, but it also has to do with the level of image compression and other factors as well. There’s no real reason to upload and display a massive 20-megapixel photo if you’re just going to resize and show it as a thumbnail that’s only 200 pixels wide. You can start from the images you actually upload to your server in the first place. Generally speaking, you don’t need images that are several megabytes in size. Depending on circumstances, you can get away with 200 KB or less with no real discernible loss in quality for most users. Another great approach is a WordPress plugin called Smush . The goal is to cut “all the unnecessary data without slowing down your site.” 3. Shrink Your JavaScript and CSS One of the first and easiest places for you to look in terms of improving page load times is by addressing unnecessary inefficiencies in your site’s code. More specifically, JavaScript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be very inefficient in their default code. There’s a lot of white space, for starters, and several lines of redundant code can be reduced down to something much shorter. As you can imagine, the less code a browser (and server) need to run through, the faster the page should load. If you have a WordPress site, it’s easiest if you use a plugin like WP Super Minify to do this for you. You’ll want to make a full website backup before you do, of course. As recommended by many of the top CSS sites , if you have a different kind of site or you’d rather just do it manually, there are several online tools that can do this to. Minifier is one such example. The tool works by removing whitespace, stripping comments, combining files, and optimizes/shortens a few common programming patterns.   4. Reduce HTTP Requests All else held constant, the simplest sites are going to be the ones that load the fastest. If you have a simple, plain HTML page with plain text and minimal images, it’ll probably be quite quick. If you have a dynamic page that calls upon a number of other factors and content types, you’re going to get bogged down. You can dramatically increase the speed of your site by reducing the number of HTTP requests. The cleaner the code, the better. Perfmatters is a performance-oriented plugin for WordPress that can automate most of this for you. It starts from $19.95 per year for one site, going up to $99.95 per year for unlimited sites. While many site owners and bloggers might not understand what each of these settings or commands actually are, the tool makes it extremely easy to check on or off which performance options you would like enabled.   5. Upgrade to Dedicated Hosting Most people who are just starting out with their first website, and indeed many veterans too, typically opt for shared hosting because it is usually the most cost-effective option. What this means, though, is that you are sharing resources (server and bandwidth) with other customers and you have no control over how they are using those resources. If another website on the same server suddenly sees a monumental influx of traffic, the site speed and performance of your website will suffer. There are many variables outside of your control. To overcome this, you might consider getting an advanced dedicated server . They have managed and unmanaged solutions, but the long and the short of it is that you get a server all to yourself. This allows for much greater customization, should you so desire. More importantly, you get dedicated hardware and much more consistent performance. That means faster speeds overall, especially when you opt for dedicated servers with better hardware too.   6. Enable Lazy Loading Generally speaking, when someone arrives at a webpage, the entirety of that webpage will try to load. Some elements can load simultaneously, while others must load sequentially. Depending on how the site is designed and laid out, users may experience really long loading times due to elements that they can’t even see yet (and they may not ever see). Or they’ll notice that the site is still loading in their browser, even though it looks as if the content of interest is already available. In both cases, this detracts from the user experience and hampers site speed. A way to overcome this is something called lazy loading. When lazy loading is enabled, elements on a webpage are loaded on an as-needed basis. In this way, items further down the page don’t get loaded until the user scrolls down there. This results in the perception of faster load times, as elements higher up the page are prioritized. There’s a great guide on the Google Developers Web Fundamentals section for more on this technique.   7. Minimize External Scripts Widgets can be great. They can be wonderfully convenient, updating your website with all sorts of dynamic content. Maybe you’ve got a Twitter widget in your sidebar that displays your latest tweets. Maybe you use a widget from Amazon to display featured products. There’s a world of possibility. The problem is that when you rely on these external scripts, you are also at the mercy of these external scripts for page load times. If Twitter happens to be hanging for whatever reason, then your site speed suffers as it waits for that widget to load correctly. And the same is true with all sorts of “hidden” elements on your page that rely on external services too. While it may not be completely practical to eliminate all external scripts altogether — you’d want to keep Google Analytics , for instance — it is prudent to minimize their use as to minimize their impact on page load times.   Better site performance tends to improve user engagement . Implement these tips in 2019. Your website visitors will thank you! Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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