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.