Top 10 tips to optimize your WordPress website!
A fast loading website is the key to keep the visitors coming back to your website. Here are the top 10 tips to optimize your WordPress site and decrease page loading times.
If you have found unsatisfying performance results from your website after analyzing its speed on tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, YSlow, GTMetrix, here’s what you should do to decrease the page loading time.
- Install a caching plug-in
The one basic thing that you can do at best to optimize your site is install a caching plug-in like W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, or any other. The caching plug-in will allow you to publish static HTML files instead of the dynamic files. This will reduce the page’s load time as there will be no PHP or MySQL commands to be executed. - Enable Gzip
Enabling Gzip compression will allow you to compress the size of the data that is transferred between your server and your site’s visitors, thus lowering the loading time. - External hosting of files
Try and host some of your static files externally. As the browsers usually download two files in parallel from a single domain, using multiple domain will increase the number of files that can load simultaneously. - Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN is a server network which clones your site on all its location nodes. Using this means that whenever the visitors request your site, they will be served by the closest server location instead of the main datacenter. This is also considered as one of the best methods of optimizing your WordPress site.
- Identify and remove plug-ins that are slowing down the website
The P3 plugin enables you to do just that. It is one of the best diagnostic plugins which will show the impact of the other plug-ins on your website’s loading time. To make the website load faster, it will also be a good idea to replace social-sharing plugins with embedded social buttons in the source code of the themes. One should also delete plug-ins which are not being used because even when deactivated, the plug-ins not only take up your server’s file space, but also fill up your database and leave extra files and functions, slowing down your website. - Fine-tuning the content
Reducing the content on the pages and in the feeds will also speed up your website. You can also reduce the number of widgets, show excerpts of the posts on the pages, use the native social network services carefully, and compress and optimize before uploading.
- Maintaining the database
You can either use a plugin or use a tool like phpMyAdmin to maintain your database. Other things which can help you optimize your site’s speed is – emptying the trash and spam of your site, deletion of inactive users, reducing the number of revisions that WordPress stores for your pages and posts, and deleting unused images.
- Choose a good hosting company and the right plan
Choosing a hosting company with a server that is near your target audience will ensure that your server does not take ages to process the HTTP requests and MySQL commands. You must also choose the correct plan which can handle the traffic on your website efficiently and make sure that your hosting company allows your account to have zlib compression tools and sufficient memory.
- Minifying JavaScript and CSS files
Another master trick to optimize a WordPress website is to minify the JavaScript and CSS files. It ensures that unnecessary data like doubles spaces, empty lines, comments, etc., are removed from the HTTP requests. You can either use Better WordPress Minify or WP Minify to minify your files.
- Ensure the security of your website
Even after following all the above mentioned tips, you wouldn’t be able to optimize your site unless it has a robust security plan. You should keep the themes and plugins up-to-date, use anti-spam plugin like Bad Behavior and Akismet, and use the Login LockDown plugin to prevent brute force attack attempts.
Or simply, you can get in touch with us to optimize your WordPress site’s speed or for a free SEO analysis of your WordPress site. Our flexible hiring models empower you to hire WordPress developers from us for fast-loading WordPress website development or for efficient optimization of a WordPress website at affordable rates.
To ask us for a free quote on hiring our WordPress developers, kindly write to us at info@technoscore.com.
