Ways You Must Follow To Expedite Your WordPress Site Speed

Despite putting in a considerable amount of efforts and time in building a WordPress website, you might still fail to attract visitors towards the site if it loads slowly. After all, even your aesthetically pleasing design won't help you if it can't even load.

In this post, I’ll share some of the best ways that will help speed up your WordPress site:

1. Pick Up a Good Web Hosting Provider

You will find plenty of web hosts available online, however, the majority of hosts meet limited WordPress requirements. Remember that choosing a wrong web host for hosting your site can slow it down. However, selecting a hosting plan from the crowd can be challenging. Thankfully, WordPress makes it a little easier for you to pick a good host and recommends using Bluehost as your hosting provider.

Apart from Bluehost, there are several other great hosting providers worth considering, such as:

• SitePoint
• Hostgator
• InMotion

2. Choosing The Right Type of Hosting Plan

As a startup, choosing a shared WordPress hosting plan may appear as a good bargain to you. But, keep in mind that though you can get shared web hosting for low rates, but it might hurt your site loading time. However, you can make your website blazing fast by choosing managed hosting plans offered by WP Engine.


3. Choose a Lightweight Theme That Guarantees Performance


Most of the people (if not all) prefer installing a pre-built WordPress theme for setting up their website. You can easily find hundreds to thousands of free and premium themes over the web, however, not all of them ensures good performance. Especially, the free to download themes usually scores low in terms of speed, as they contain bloated code. But this doesn't mean that each and every free WP theme is bad. But the point is, you must carefully select a ready-made theme that is lightweight and contains only essential features.


4. Leverage Browser Caching

One great strategy that will help in improving your WordPress site speed is browser caching. Well, as you know fetching resources from the server over and over again can be expensive and increases overhead. However, browser caching helps in storing files on the local system when a user visits your web page, and make the user reuse cached pages. This helps in improving page speed. W3 Total Cache is one of the best plugins that can help in performing browser caching effectively.

Moreover, you can tools such as Pingdom or Webpage Test to know how well your chosen themes perform.

5. Implement a CDN (a.k.a Content Deliver Network)

When choosing a standard web host, all your website files will be kept on a single server in a single location. Your website will load quickly and users will be able to access the files if their location is near to the datacenter – where your files are stored. But, your site will run slowly when visitors distant from datacenter will try to access the files. However, you can avoid such a situation from happening by implementing a CDN.

A content delivery network, basically, helps distribute your website files to different data centers across the world. And thus, increases the chances of making the server closer to each website visitor. This will ensure that your all your visitors are able to download files from your site as fast as possible.  My personal favorite is Max CDN, however, you can also use content delivery networks like CacheFly, CloudFare and many others.

A Few Other Nitty-Gritty Yet Important Considerations To Boost Website Speed

• Make sure to keep your WordPress website updated, as it will help in fixing bugs found in previous versions and will also provide new performance enhancements. This will eventually help in improving the performance of your website. 
• Avoid installing too many plugins, as it cause your website to crash. Also, remove any unwanted plugins from the site and keep the plugins up-to-date.
• Reduce the size of image files, as they can make your website slow down. Luckily, there is an excellent plugin that can help in optimizing your images, called as WP Smush

. Additionally, minify your JavaScript and CSS files.

Wrapping Up!


You'll find plenty of recommended ways and techniques to optimize the speed of your WordPress site, ranging from themes, plugins, to making changes to the code and so on. In order to save your time from having to find such ways, I've covered some of the most important and best ways that help in improving your website speed.

Author Biography:
Samuel Dawson is working in Designs2html Ltd where he has lots of responsibilities on his shoulder. He is responsible to convert psd to wordpress website. Above he has shared some valuable points on how you can speed up your website.

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The potential of Big Data in Digital Marketing

Big Data is a solution to the problem of ever increasing data volume and variability.  For marketers Big Data is like a gold mine for its ability to handle complexity of information.  The ability to take data driven decisions based on Big Data analytics is a powerful resource for digital marketers.

Big Data serves four major purposes for any organization in terms of digital marketing.

1 Customer Engagement

Big Data allows you to collect as much as data possible about the customers. You can learn about who your customers are and where they are from. You can gain insights on their interactions with your online store or website. Learning about the demographics and preferences helps you to provide them a user experience which would be most suited for them. For example Big Data can help you find that most of your customers from a particular age group and when they like to be contacted and which marketing collateral will be appropriate for them.

2 Customer Retention and loyalty

Big Data can help you learn about what is the reason behind the return visits of the customers. Is it the price, the product display, the brands, the offers or any other contributing factor which is helping your customers in making a decision to return to your store? This is the most powerful insight that Big Data can give you which will help you in retaining your customers and design a well planned customer loyalty program.

3 Optimizing Marketing

Big Data will also help in keeping track of your marketing efforts. It will give you insights about which social media channel is best suited for your marketing campaign. It will help you understand how much effectively your marketing efforts were able to create desired results for you.  You can easily tweak your marketing campaign based on insights gain from Big Data analytics. For example you were able to learn through Big Data analysis that most of the audience responded to your videos than your email marketing or posts.  The next time you can channelize your efforts more towards creating videos for your brand rather than investing time in email campaign.

4 Forecast

Big Data will help you forecast when would be the best time to develop & implement marketing plans.  Big Data helps derive meaning and trends from large volume of data. With the analysis of past purchase behaviour of your customer you would be able to predict when the demand rises and when there is fall in demand. You can use this insight in making better marketing related decisions.



Conclusion

Big Data is becoming very important part of your digital marketing efforts as more and more organizations are becoming data driven.  Big Data will be able to provide value from this data which was not utilized earlier. Big data will provide competitive edge to the marketers as they will be able to make better decisions and will be well informed about the customer’s preferences. The businesses that will be not using Big data will be bring a knife to a war which is fought with guns.

About the Author:


Vaishnavi Agrawal loves pursuing excellence through writing and have a passion for technology. She has successfully managed and run personal technology magazines and websites. She currently writes for intellipaat.com, a global training company that provides e-learning and professional certification training. The courses offered by Intellipaat address the unique needs of working professionals. She is based out of Bangalore and has an experience of 5 years in the field of content writing and blogging. Her work has been published on various sites related to Big Data, Business Intelligence, Project Management, Cloud Computing, IT, SAP, Project Management and more.

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10 E-Commerce Marketing tricks you'll regret missing

Today, driving maximum traffic and sales for your e-commerce website has indeed become a difficult mission. Its not that easy to woo your customers to a level that they choose to purchase your products and/or services. Fortunately, we have an easy access to some brilliant e-commerce marketing tricks, which if put into action can shoot up your conversions by an astonishing level. So, here I'm with ten simple marketing tips and tricks that can encourage customers to visit you repetitively in addition to making huge purchases.

1. Get rid of abandoned carts immediately

There are some online shoppers who irrespective of adding items to their carts, choose to abandon the carts during the checkout process. Such abandoned carts can pose as a loop hole in your e-store. Hence, it is recommended to reduce/eliminate these abandoned carts on an urgent basis. You can always choose to convince such customers for completing their product purchase by sending them emails regarding the same.

2. Create exciting exit offers

Even the best-designed e-commerce websites can easily lose potential customers if the product prices seems to be sky-touching. A simple solution to prevent such a situation is to offer free shipping or tempting discounts that can refrain the customers from navigating to an entirely different e-store.

3. Don't delay in capturing maximum number of Email Subscribers

Email is an excellent channel for communicating with potential customers and prompting them to make regular purchases from your e-store. Sending marketing messages via emails is perhaps the best method of making people aware about any coupons or discounts that are available on your product range. Ensure that maximum number of e-store visitors opt for subscribing to your newsletters and emails.

4. Leverage Social Proof

Customers carry a mindset of purchasing from a site which has excellent product reviews and ratings on different social networking websites like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. You can opt for installing the 'Product Reviews' app(designed by Shopify) which would offer you a convenient way of adding reviews for different products featured on the e-store.

5. Make it convenient for your customers to receive what they're looking for

Well, a badly designed e-store can make you lose multiple customers. Whether it's about the deficiency of a clear value proposition, non-impressive product descriptions or a tedious navigation, all such factors can easily ruin the credibility of your e-store. Therefore, it is recommended to pay attention to each minute detail associated with your e-commerce website. If you've an ill-fitting theme, check out downloading one which can suit your site's purpose in the best way.

6. Incorporate a 'Gifting' section within your e-store

The trend of exchanging gifts has always proved beneficial in nurturing relationships among human beings. As an e-commerce merchant, selling gifts can boost your sales by an amazing level. There are multiple apps that can be installed within the e-store for integration of a perfectly-designed 'Gifting' section that can impress prospective buyers.

7. Hone your Ad Spending 

It is a good idea to try out minimal variations on bids available for keywords that can help you identify a perfect business niche. You can opt for Google AdWords which will ensure top ranking for your e-store everyone a user types in your keywords in the Google search box. In addition to this, you can also try advertising on Facebook- a popular social networking website accessed by millions and millions of users all over the world.

8. Engage your customers with Instagram

Your decision to integrate Instagram with your e-commerce website can fetch you maximum customers from different parts of the globe. As per a recent study, it has been found that as compared to other social media platforms, Instagram has the competency of giving a 25% lift to user engagement on your brand. By using the right kind of filters, hashtags and posts, it can become quite convenient for you to build a huge following on Instagram.

9. Opt for up selling your products

Up selling i.e. the concept of selling a product at a slightly higher price while its being considered by a customer is something that will prove a whopping 20 times better as compared to cross-selling via the web. Do ensure to emphasize on how your product is better than the one available at a different online outlet. Don't forget to make your product best fitting for the customers.

10. Make it a point to do excellent market research for anticipating future sales

If you're planning to expand your product line, then it is imperative to evaluate the product demand in the targeted market. Go ahead with doing a detailed keyword research and checking out the latest social media trends. You can also try your hands on pre-selling specific items or listing some products as 'out of stock' to check the number of people who place their order request for the products under focus.

Wrapping Up

I seriously hope the roundup of best e-commerce marketing tricks covered in this post would allow you to make the most of your online presence and help you reach out to targeted customers instantly.



About the Author: Amanda Cline works with Xicom Technologies Ltd- A reputed IOS/Android App Development Services with an excellent track record. When not busy developing great iOS apps, she feel proud in blogging and rendering IT support to individuals and enterprises.

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