Day 5

Subject: [firstname]: Is your site using WordPress?

Hey [firstname]!

Do you have a WordPress site?  Lots of people do. WordPress is great!  It's gone from being a clunky, blogging platform to a fully fledged content management system (CMS).  It's fully customizable – you can have a blog, a sales site, a shopping cart and more – all on the same platform.

Unfortunately, its strength is also its weakness. It's easy to load up a WordPress site will all sorts of themes and plugins that can really slow down the site's loading speed, so today I want to give you some tips about speeding up your WP site.

First of all, remove any unnecessary plugins – especially ones like “Hello Dolly” which serve no useful purpose and just take up loading time.  You should also make sure you keep plugins up to date as developers are always finding new ways of making the code simpler and faster. Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need as this can slow things down.

The same goes for themes, too. The simpler the theme, the faster it takes to load. If possible, ditch themes that have lots of javascript, slideshows, large images and so-on as these can take a long time to load.

Install a caching plugin like WP supercache.  Like we talked about the other day, when you enable caching, all the webpage data is translated into simple HTML pages that load faster.

If you have a blog, consider showing excerpts instead of full posts on the homepage.  This will reduce load time considerably. People can always click on a link to read the rest of the post if they're interested – and if they ARE interested, they're more likely to stick around longer, thereby reducing your “bounce” rate, too.

Finally, remove sharing widgets from the home page. These require DNS lookups like we discussed yesterday. Include them only in posts – after all, that's what you want people to share anyway.

 Talk soon!

[Your Name]

PS. You can download my site speed guide real fast from here: [link to sales page].
