In WordPress there are a lot of methods and ways of speeding up the site. Here are some that are proven to work…

Dedicated or VPS instead of shared hosting

If you are having more data or higher traffic on your Directory website then instead of shared hosting, we recommend using a VPS or dedicated server. Directory is an application like theme so it is natural that it will require more server resources then other simple WordPress themes and as soon as your site gets traction both content and traffic on your website will increase simultaneously so your website will need more server resources for better performance. If you are on a shared hosting your server resources will be shared with other websites on the same server so you will get limited resources for your website which will ultimately result in an under performing website. On the other hand if you go with a dedicated server all server resources will be available for your website and it will perform much better.

Remove plugins

Please visit plugins page in your WordPress admin and remove any and all unnecessary plugins which is not really contributing to your site. This is also true for Templatic plugins. If you have plugins installed and you’re not using them – just remove them.

Not using the multi-city feature? Deactivating the “Tevolution – Location Manager” plugin can significantly speed up your site. When you do this your theme is placed into the “single-city mode”. Click here to learn more about that.

Optimize DB

If your site is more than few months old, you should optimize your site database with plugins like RGV optimize and Simple optimizer. They will remove unnecessary junk from your site such as spam comments, post revisions etc. which will make your site database perform better

Limit post revisions and delete spam comments

Most users don’t need each version of post revisions. Here’s a good article on how to disable or limit it.

If you get a lot of spam try to delete it at regular intervals. You can do this from wp-admin ⇨ Comments ⇨ Spam ⇨ Empty spam (button).

Image optimization

It is very important to upload the just perfect sized image & that too with the specific formats like jpg, png etc.

WP Super Cache and CloudFlare

These tasks will really make your site faster. We highly recommend using WP Super Cache which will cache your site and serve pages really faster.

Use CloudFlare to improve your site performance and increase it’s availability. The service is free!

Other CDNs

Most of the popular sites nowadays use CDN services such as MaxCDN or likes to deliver content from their site (we at Templatic use it too).

Memory Limit

Many times increase in memory limit variable of the php.ini file also helps the user in loading the site faster. The following WooCommerce article provides short and easy-to-follow instructions on this subject.

Better WordPress Minify

It compresses and combines CSS and JS scripts on site to improve the page load time. It can be downloaded from here.

When this plugin is active, go to it’s settings ⇨ Manage enqueued Files. Select below three mentioned files:
– google-clustering
– location_script
– google-maps-apiscript

Select them and choose action “Say at position”.

– Select CSS file & _supreme.min.js file and choose “Not Minify” action and save changes. Note: Do the same for all the CSS files.

Google page speed

If you really wish to go in detail, Google Page Speed is a very good site analysis tool that will tell you exactly how you can improve your site speed.

To fix the The following cacheable resources have a short freshness lifetime error just specify an expiration at least one week in the future by adding this code to your .htaccess file:

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##

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For more details and methods on how to speed up your WordPress site please check out these articles:
http://www.eugenoprea.com/increase-wordpress-site-speed/
www.socialmediaexaminer.com/improve-the-speed-of-your-wordpress-site/
http://www.wpexplorer.com/how-to-speed-up-wordpress/