Attracting and maintaining high quality traffic is the ultimate goal for any site owner – and speed is a huge factor.

We’ve all heard the statistics about user patience … if the site doesn’t load virtually instantly, the visitor will simply move on to the next website.

A website with fast load times will always capture more traffic from search engines. In this age of browsers with support for multiple tabs, users are fond of concurrently loading several items from search engine results in several tabs. This means that the user will start by visiting the site that loads first and may never go to the other results if he gets what he was looking for. Even Google places importance on search results with sites that load fastest.

Good news, is that if you have a WordPress site, there are a few things you can do to increase the speed of your site.

Here are 5 ways to improve your WordPress load times.

1. Plugins
Plugins require extra time to be loaded when a user visits your site. This means that you should get rid of those that you no longer need.

2. Choose a Speedy Theme
Different themes have different load times. You should therefore test them and choose the one that takes the shortest time to load.

3. Database Optimisation
You should always optimise the database for faster querying by deleting unwanted contents such as unwanted draft posts and spam comments. The WP-DBManager plugin is also a handy tool for this.

4. Images
Images are an important factor, one of the biggest if your site has lots of images. You need to make sure they are correctly sized – both in file size and actual dimensions. Taking a photo in High Definition with your camera or phone, will result in a huge photo and large file size to match. You need to reduce the images, and optimise the size.

5. Fast Web Hosting Provider
You should consider choosing a fast Australian web hosting company with excellent server speed, and great bandwidth to meet your requirements.

Swish Connect is a leading provider of Web Hosting in Australia with a range of services including Domain Names, Web Hosting plans, Business Web Hosting, Reseller Web Hosting, VPS Plans and Dedicated Servers.