Supercharging WordPress: 7 Rules to Optimize Your Website's Speed and Performance
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 6:16 am
While the outside world talks about giving peace a chance amidst violence and outrage, online users are always clamoring to give pace and performance a better chance and priority.
Yes, speed and performance are the two most important considerations for websites and they are no different than WordPress websites. Since WordPress is used by one-third of all websites globally, there are too many low-performing and slow-loading WordPress websites out there.
wordpress
Are your WordPress websites suffering from poor performance and slow loading speed? Well, this poor performance can also be the reason for low traffic and slow business conversion .
Do you want to change this situation and ensure better performance for your WordPress website? No, without hiring a WordPress Development Company to redesign your existing website, you can improve the pace and performance of your website by simply following the measures and tips mentioned below.
Understanding the factors responsible
Before we explain the new zealand phone number library general measures and tips to increase speed, let’s start with the most basic tip. Yes, it is necessary to perform a complete audit of the entire website. Find out the factors responsible for poor performance and loading speed. Fortunately, WordPress 5.5, the latest version of WordPress, offers a host of performance-focused attributes.
These are some of the commonly responsible factors that a thorough website audit will reveal.
Poor website structure and poor navigation design can reduce a website's performance.
A complicated layout with pages that are too heavy can cause loading pages to crash.
Using too many plugins, including several poorly optimized or incompatible plugins, can slow down website performance.
Using poor themes that are not optimized for faster performance can hurt your website performance.
A non-responsive design can undermine performance when accessed via mobile devices. Since most web users access websites via mobile devices, this is absolutely crucial.
Now that we have pointed out some of the common factors responsible for slowing down the speed and performance of a website, let us move forward with some other important tips to improve speed and performance .
Using a WordPress Cache Plugin
Every time a visitor appears on a website, WordPress in the background has to put all the elements together. This dynamic nature of the website involves multiple backend tasks. This is the reason why a WordPress website can have slower performance when too many visitors come to the website at a given time.
To solve this problem, using a caching plugin can be very effective. By caching pages and their content locally, the entire process of generating a page view with each visit to the website can be avoided. And visitors can be shown the cached version quickly. This approach leaves no room for slow loading speed for any of the pages.
The entire process of retrieving data from MySQL database and PHP files and processing the data into HTML content can be avoided with every subsequent visit as the web pages once opened can be cached and served to users, allowing for instant loading.
There is no shortage of quality caching plugins for WordPress users. Two of the most recommended and acclaimed ones to choose from include the WP Rocket plugin (premium) and WP Super Cache (free). Many web hosting platforms also offer excellent caching services to make things easier.
Optimizing Website Image for Faster Loading
It is well known that images and visual content actually give style to a website and play a role in attracting the attention of visitors and engaging the audience.
image3
Since users nowadays mostly scan websites instead of reading long blocks of text, images and visual content play a very important role in generating traction and ensuring website usability. So, just because images consume a lot of memory and space, you cannot remove them from your website.
But you can always optimize images for faster loading speed. And that too without really undermining the quality of the images or the overall visual style of your website. On beginner websites, loading images directly from mobile actually slows down the website performance and loading speed.
While the original image files can be large in size, putting excessive load on bandwidth and server capacity when many visitors visit a website, you can always avoid this problem by using quality photo editing tools to resize and optimize images. Using these tools, you can easily reduce the size of image files by at least five times.
Now let's also spend a few words on the choice of image formats. JPEG is a compressed format with a smaller image size, while PNG is uncompressed and therefore larger in size. In case of images with many colors, JPEG is the ideal format to control the size. In case of monochrome or transparent images, PNG is good for optimizing the quality.
Opt for the best hosting services
Now we come to the elephant in the room of optimizing website performance. To ensure high-speed loading, hosting services also play an important role. When you choose shared WordPress hosting services and a budget plan, it is good as long as it has not passed the Indian stage and has not become popular.
image2
Once you start getting thousands of hits in a given hour, chances are the bandwidth provided by such a hosting plan will be too small to maintain optimal loading speed and performance.
If you are serious about converting business through the website and growing it consistently with traffic, you need to use high-quality WordPress hosting services with scalable hosting plans that leave no room for poor performance despite a sudden surge in traffic.
You can always opt for dynamic cloud hosting platforms to maintain optimal loading speed and performance. SiteGround is a good choice for cloud hosting plans.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) helps in promoting your content from the closest servers based on the location of the particular user accessing your website. And hence, irrespective of the server and the user’s location, the website content always maintains an optimal loading speed.
A CDN stores all the static files of the website including images, stylesheet, and JavaScript and loads them quickly when the user opens the website. To store these static files, a CDN service distributes the website content across multiple servers located in different parts of the world so that any user, regardless of their location, can see the instant loading of a website.
Instead of pingbacks and trackbacks, use Google Webmaster
Whenever your website receives a new link, the Pingbacks and Trackback feature sends you alerts by default, consuming a lot of server resources. Since they are responsible for consuming server resources and slowing down website performance, you should disable them.
Google Webmaster Tools
Alternatively, you can always use Google Webmaster Tools to check the website links. When you are looking to improve WordPress performance, even this marginal improvement should not be left out.
Maintaining a clean database
As your website ages, a lot of unwanted and irrelevant data keeps accumulating. And it consumes a lot of server resources while you are busy improving your content. When trying to speed up your website, you should also pay attention to this load of irrelevant content.
Simply get rid of this unwanted data from the website by cleaning up the database. This simplest solution to your website performance problem can be easily done from time to time. From publishing unused drafts of planned content to removing spammy content as well as removing unused images in the database, all these can be effective in getting rid of the unwanted load.
Conclusion
WordPress tends to be popular for its simple and modular approach to web development. By following these tips, you will be able to use this robust platform to its full potential. Plus, it ensures uncompromising speed and performance for your website.
Author Bio: Yakshit Bose is a Senior Developer at a leading WordPress custom development services company CMARIX Technolabs Pvt. Ltd. He is an experienced WordPress developer. He likes to share his thoughts on web development, CMS development, and technology news.
Yes, speed and performance are the two most important considerations for websites and they are no different than WordPress websites. Since WordPress is used by one-third of all websites globally, there are too many low-performing and slow-loading WordPress websites out there.
wordpress
Are your WordPress websites suffering from poor performance and slow loading speed? Well, this poor performance can also be the reason for low traffic and slow business conversion .
Do you want to change this situation and ensure better performance for your WordPress website? No, without hiring a WordPress Development Company to redesign your existing website, you can improve the pace and performance of your website by simply following the measures and tips mentioned below.
Understanding the factors responsible
Before we explain the new zealand phone number library general measures and tips to increase speed, let’s start with the most basic tip. Yes, it is necessary to perform a complete audit of the entire website. Find out the factors responsible for poor performance and loading speed. Fortunately, WordPress 5.5, the latest version of WordPress, offers a host of performance-focused attributes.
These are some of the commonly responsible factors that a thorough website audit will reveal.
Poor website structure and poor navigation design can reduce a website's performance.
A complicated layout with pages that are too heavy can cause loading pages to crash.
Using too many plugins, including several poorly optimized or incompatible plugins, can slow down website performance.
Using poor themes that are not optimized for faster performance can hurt your website performance.
A non-responsive design can undermine performance when accessed via mobile devices. Since most web users access websites via mobile devices, this is absolutely crucial.
Now that we have pointed out some of the common factors responsible for slowing down the speed and performance of a website, let us move forward with some other important tips to improve speed and performance .
Using a WordPress Cache Plugin
Every time a visitor appears on a website, WordPress in the background has to put all the elements together. This dynamic nature of the website involves multiple backend tasks. This is the reason why a WordPress website can have slower performance when too many visitors come to the website at a given time.
To solve this problem, using a caching plugin can be very effective. By caching pages and their content locally, the entire process of generating a page view with each visit to the website can be avoided. And visitors can be shown the cached version quickly. This approach leaves no room for slow loading speed for any of the pages.
The entire process of retrieving data from MySQL database and PHP files and processing the data into HTML content can be avoided with every subsequent visit as the web pages once opened can be cached and served to users, allowing for instant loading.
There is no shortage of quality caching plugins for WordPress users. Two of the most recommended and acclaimed ones to choose from include the WP Rocket plugin (premium) and WP Super Cache (free). Many web hosting platforms also offer excellent caching services to make things easier.
Optimizing Website Image for Faster Loading
It is well known that images and visual content actually give style to a website and play a role in attracting the attention of visitors and engaging the audience.
image3
Since users nowadays mostly scan websites instead of reading long blocks of text, images and visual content play a very important role in generating traction and ensuring website usability. So, just because images consume a lot of memory and space, you cannot remove them from your website.
But you can always optimize images for faster loading speed. And that too without really undermining the quality of the images or the overall visual style of your website. On beginner websites, loading images directly from mobile actually slows down the website performance and loading speed.
While the original image files can be large in size, putting excessive load on bandwidth and server capacity when many visitors visit a website, you can always avoid this problem by using quality photo editing tools to resize and optimize images. Using these tools, you can easily reduce the size of image files by at least five times.
Now let's also spend a few words on the choice of image formats. JPEG is a compressed format with a smaller image size, while PNG is uncompressed and therefore larger in size. In case of images with many colors, JPEG is the ideal format to control the size. In case of monochrome or transparent images, PNG is good for optimizing the quality.
Opt for the best hosting services
Now we come to the elephant in the room of optimizing website performance. To ensure high-speed loading, hosting services also play an important role. When you choose shared WordPress hosting services and a budget plan, it is good as long as it has not passed the Indian stage and has not become popular.
image2
Once you start getting thousands of hits in a given hour, chances are the bandwidth provided by such a hosting plan will be too small to maintain optimal loading speed and performance.
If you are serious about converting business through the website and growing it consistently with traffic, you need to use high-quality WordPress hosting services with scalable hosting plans that leave no room for poor performance despite a sudden surge in traffic.
You can always opt for dynamic cloud hosting platforms to maintain optimal loading speed and performance. SiteGround is a good choice for cloud hosting plans.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) helps in promoting your content from the closest servers based on the location of the particular user accessing your website. And hence, irrespective of the server and the user’s location, the website content always maintains an optimal loading speed.
A CDN stores all the static files of the website including images, stylesheet, and JavaScript and loads them quickly when the user opens the website. To store these static files, a CDN service distributes the website content across multiple servers located in different parts of the world so that any user, regardless of their location, can see the instant loading of a website.
Instead of pingbacks and trackbacks, use Google Webmaster
Whenever your website receives a new link, the Pingbacks and Trackback feature sends you alerts by default, consuming a lot of server resources. Since they are responsible for consuming server resources and slowing down website performance, you should disable them.
Google Webmaster Tools
Alternatively, you can always use Google Webmaster Tools to check the website links. When you are looking to improve WordPress performance, even this marginal improvement should not be left out.
Maintaining a clean database
As your website ages, a lot of unwanted and irrelevant data keeps accumulating. And it consumes a lot of server resources while you are busy improving your content. When trying to speed up your website, you should also pay attention to this load of irrelevant content.
Simply get rid of this unwanted data from the website by cleaning up the database. This simplest solution to your website performance problem can be easily done from time to time. From publishing unused drafts of planned content to removing spammy content as well as removing unused images in the database, all these can be effective in getting rid of the unwanted load.
Conclusion
WordPress tends to be popular for its simple and modular approach to web development. By following these tips, you will be able to use this robust platform to its full potential. Plus, it ensures uncompromising speed and performance for your website.
Author Bio: Yakshit Bose is a Senior Developer at a leading WordPress custom development services company CMARIX Technolabs Pvt. Ltd. He is an experienced WordPress developer. He likes to share his thoughts on web development, CMS development, and technology news.