3 Ways to Speed Up Your Wordpress Membership Website

Posted on 13. May, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks

There has been a larger emphasis placed upon website speeds since Google announced that loading speed was going to become part of their ranking algorithm. Unfortunately, many membership website owners have ignored this issue because aside from the homepage and sales-page, all of the other pages are only available to members and will not be indexed by search engines.

However, it is important to understand that loading speed is an issue for everyone, because if a membership website is slow to load, there is a much higher chance that members will soon become frustrated and cancel their membership. The average person will only wait a maximum of 3 or 4 seconds before growing impatient and moving on to another page. Fortunately, there are a number of simple plugins that can be added to a WordPress membership website in order to speed up load times for the entire website, including the homepage and sales-page

WP Super Cache

WP Cache is always one of the first plugins that is mentioned when discussing WordPress website speeds. With a standard WordPress installation, all of the information about the website is pulled from the database, processed, and then sent to the user. This process is very time consuming. WP Super Cache will create a static copy of the web-page that is loaded and then every time a new visitor comes to that web-page, they will see the cached version of the page. By loading the saved copy, there are less calls to the database as well as the server as a whole. If you are going to only install one plugin to speed up your WordPress website, then Super Cache is arguably the best choice.

Gzip Output

The best practices that were introduced by the Yahoo! Developer Network reported that Gzipping can reduce the total response size by nearly 70%. Additionally, 90% of all internet users will be using a browser that supports the Gzip technology. This means that your website will load up to 70% faster without the end user noticing any difference, aside from the loading speed. All you need to do is install the Gzip Output plugin.

WP Minify

This plugin allows you to integrate the Minify engine into your membership site. It will take you JS and CSS files, combine them, and then compress them. Once the Minify engine has compressed these files, it will create a script for the plugin to reference. This can greatly increase your load time.

There are a number of other WordPress plugins that can increase your pages load time, but these 3 should be considered essential. Even though many of the pages of your WordPress membership site will not be indexed by search engines, the load time is still essential to keep your members interested and happy.