Tips to Optimize your WordPress Site
WordPress is a well coded and well-maintained platform. Some website owners ruin the performance of their WordPress by installing lots of low-quality plugins, choosing some awful web hosts, filling the sites with garbage, etc.
Even if you don’t do all of these with your site, there is a room for optimizing your WordPress. This article will guide you through some of the tips to optimize WordPress. For your convenience, the article is divided into different sections such as:
- Why optimizing WordPress is important?
- Main reasons that slow down WordPress
- Tips to optimize WordPress
- Some of the best plugins to optimize WordPress
Why optimizing WordPress is important?
Good site performance is one of the most important factors for a good user experience. Users hate waiting for web pages to load. So slow sites have usability and SEO issues. If you are running an e-commerce store, your website visitors need to find quickly what they are looking for. Longer site load can take them to some other websites. This can affect your business and site popularity.
Greg Linden one of the Amazon officials discussed during one of the presentations that how only a 100-millisecond delay could lead to revenues of the online company dropping by 1%. Based on Linden’s disclosure, increasing page loading times by just a fraction of a second would cost Amazon $745 million a year in lost revenue! This shows the importance of faster web page loading. Hence optimizing WordPress has a lot to do with your business.
Main reasons that cause your WordPress site to slow down
Before trying to optimize Wordpress, you should know what are the main reasons that cause your WordPress site to slow down. Here are some of the reasons:
1. Awful web host
When you are diagnosing your site’s load speed, the first thing to check is your web host. Check how quickly your server responds to a request. No matter whatever you do to boost your optimize WordPress if your web host is slow, your website is slow. Your web host is responsible for your site’s performance. It is the foundation of your site.
If you are confused about choosing a good web host, we recommend you to go with 000webhost.com. It has been giving this free service for the last 14 years!
2. Your server may be in the wrong place
If your potential audience is in the USA and if your server is in Australia, it might take a longer time to get responses to your requests. The logic behind it is quite simple, the information has to travel more to reach your visitors.
If your server is already far from your potential visitors, ask your web host to move your files to a closer server, or search for a web host located nearer to your visitors.
3. Old versions of your software or plugins
If you haven’t updated your software or plugins, there is a high chance for your WordPress to be slow. That is the reason why WordPress pushes constant releases and updates. They have been regularly fixing bugs and performance issues to keep your WordPress site at full power.
4. You have chosen a heavy theme
WordPress offers you tons and tons of free themes and designs. However one has to choose the best theme by judging the overall aspects of performance, design, ease of integration etc. Some themes contain complex coding that can slow down your website.
Some of the tips for finding out the speed of any theme is to run the demo website through a speed checker (It should be less than 3 seconds maximum). Another tip is to check the total file size of the theme (ideally it should be less than 2MB). Also, check how many HTTP requests the demo site makes, it should be preferably less than 60.
You can also check the detailed article on 12 Best WordPress eCommerce Themes 2018.
5. You are not caching your site
Caching enables you to store your website data in your visitor’s web browser. Doing this can make your website load quickly next time when they visit rather than fetching all the data from the server.
There are many caching plugins that can do the job for you. Read our article on detailed information about How to Improve Site Performance with WordPress Caching Plugins.
Tips to optimize WordPress
Many of them think that you need to be a tech geek to optimize WordPress and make your website fast. But these simple practices can help you in making your WordPress site as fast as possible.
1. Keep your WordPress site updated
WordPress developers are working hard to keep it secure from security threats and performance issues. WordPress offers you frequent updates with new features and fixes to several bugs. Apart from this, your themes and plugins also have regular updates. Keeping all of these updated plays an important role in optimizing WordPress.
2. Show only a portion of your contents on one page
Usually, WordPress displays a full content on one single page. This can cause your page to load slower. If your article is big and contains many heavy images, it may take longer to load. Not only that, users don’t feel to read the whole big article if they see all at once. This may decrease the total time a user spends on your website.
To speed up your loading times for archive pages, you can make your site to display excerpts instead of the full content. You can go to Settings » Reading and select “For each article in a feed, show:” Summary instead of Full Text.
3. Split comments into pages
Do your blogs get a good audience reach? Do they pile up your comment section? Loading all of these comments can also cause your webpage to load slower. WordPress has a built-in solution for this problem. Just go to Settings » Discussion and check the box next to the “Break comments into pages” option.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
As we discussed in the earlier part of this articles, the location of your server can affect the loading speed. For example, if your web hosting company has it’s servers in the United States and the visitor is accessing the page from India, the user will feel a lower loading speed. This is where Content Delivery Network can help you.
A CDN is a network made up of servers all around the world. Each server will store static files used to make up your website. Static files are constant files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript, unlike your WordPress pages which are dynamic.
If you are using a CDN, every time when a user visits your website they are provided with those static files from whichever server is closest to them. Also, your web hosting server will be faster since the CDN is doing the work for you.
5. Never upload videos directly to your website
When you are directly uploading videos to your WordPress site, it will automatically display them in an HTML5 player. But this should not be done.
Uploading videos directly will increase the bandwidth. Your web hosting company could charge you excess fees, or they may even shut down your site altogether, even if your plan includes unlimited bandwidth. Uploading videos also increase your backup sizes and make it difficult for you to restore WordPress from backup.
Instead of just uploading the videos directly to the WordPress site, you can use a video hosting service like YouTube, DailyMotion, etc. They have the bandwidth for it and they will do the hard work for you.
WordPress comes with a built-in video embed feature, so you can copy and paste your video’s URL directly into your post and it will embed automatically.
6. Choose themes which are optimized for speed
There are tons of free themes available for WordPress. However, most of them are not optimized for better WordPress performance. It is important to pay attention to speed optimization whenever you are choosing a theme for your website. Some of the themes may be of beautifully designed and appearance will be too good. But, these might be poorly coded which makes your site too slow.
We recommend using WordPress optimized themes like Themify, Avada, The7 etc. You can also read the article on ‘2018’s Best Selling WordPress WooCommerce Themes’.
7. Optimize images
Images can bring more audience to your posts. Yes, it is true. But if these images are not optimized it can make your website slow. Non-optimized images are the main cause of speed issues for beginners site. Instead of just uploading the images from your phone or camera, just edit it using a software to make it optimized for WordPress.As you know, if we upload images as it is, since the image size is higher it takes longer to load. You can reduce the image size up to 5x by using some photo editing software.
Some popular image formats are JPEG and PNG. PNG is uncompressed whereas JPEG is a compressed file format. If your image has a lot of different colors then we recommend using JPEG and if it is a simple image, we recommend using PNG format.
Some of the best plugins to optimize WordPress
Below are some of the plugins that can help you to optimize WordPress:
1. Perfmatters
By default, WordPress has some options enabled that are not necessary for most of the sites and it can slow down the website performance. With Perfmatters disable these options with the click of a few buttons.
2. WP Fastest Cache
It is one of the best plugin available on the market. It comes with great set of features and balanced with ease of use. By using this plugin, it is very easy to set cache expiration times for certain URL strings. This plugin is trusted by more than 200,000 people and receives great reviews on WordPress.org.
3. WP Rocket
This is a premium plugin which offers a lot of advanced features. It is very easy to set up and use. The plugin can enable page caching on your site. It has a page loading simulation process makes search engine indexing easier. The WP Rocket comes with a pricing from $39 for a single site license. The plugin also offers one year of updates and dependable service with the purchase.
4. Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler is one of the popular plugins from the team at KeyCDN. It is also easy to set up and it requires just a few minutes time. It offers an option to set cache expiry time, minification setup and a few other options.
5. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress.org. The plugin has more than 2 million active installations. This clearly shows the popularity of the plugin. The plugin has also managed to get good customer reviews.
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress posts. Just after a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
Concluding comments
Now don’t lose your revenue from your business due to a slow loading website. Go ahead and try out these simple tips to optimize WordPress and boost your website speed. Test your website speed before and after trying these simple tips and see the difference in speed.
Hope this article was helpful to you in increasing your WordPress website speed. Feel free to add more tips that you follow to keep your website super fast in the comment section below. For more related articles, visit learnwoo.com.
