7 Ways To Optimize Your WordPress Website
WordPress is
considered an excellent platform for budding entrepreneurs to create
websites for their startup or small business. This content management service
is used by millions of business owners. Over 400 million websites worldwide are
powered by WordPress. Most of the
top one million websites in the world are powered by WordPress and related to business. So, WordPress as a content management service plays
an important role for businesses of all sizes.
Social media integration, large number of theme options
available is key reasons why startups and small businesses prefer WordPress. WordPress, as a platform, is well coded. Some
people mess their WordPress
installations by installing low-quality plugins, choosing awful web host,
filling their site with garbage. Even if you don’t do something stupid
with your site, there’s improvement when it comes to speeding up your WordPress site.
Mostly people would not like
visiting your website it takes more than four seconds to load. As you know that
optimizing your WordPress website is
very much important. Improving your WordPress
website speed would get more visibility on search after you implemented them. In
order to improve speed of your WordPress
website follow the following methods
1. Choose a good hosting provider:
This is the most basic step as it
plays a huge role when it comes to improving speed of your WordPress website. If you are running an
online business, then you should invest in a good web hosting provider. If you want your website to load quickly, use premium WordPress
hosting providers like
SiteGround or MediaTemple.
2. Use a Premium Cache Plugin:
WP-Rocket: You may know about free caching plugins like W3
Total Cache and WP Super Cache. But most of them do not know about this plugin
– WP-Rocket. This is the first premium plugin that was released in the market.
Now, it is the dominating cache plugin. This plugin can improve the
speed of your website in a number of ways:
§ Page caching
§ Gzip compression
§ Image optimization
§ HTML & CSS Minification
§ Caching for mobile devices
§ DNS prefetching
§ White label
WP-Rocket is super easy to use and only takes few minutes
to install and configure the plugin to your website.
3. Use CSS Sprites:
A
sprite is one image that contains all of your images. If you have a dozen of
images, pack them into one big image via SpriteMe or
any other similar tool. Using CSS, you can hide
everything except for one image that you need, by specifying a set of
coordinates. If you have a large website with several images attached
to your every blog post, use SpriteMe to pack all images. It would increase
your WordPress site speed.
4. Optimize Your Database:
WordPress adds a lot of unnecessary information. That
results in inflating size of your database by retaining spam comments, post
revisions, trash items and deactivated plugins.
WP-Optimize is a fantastic free plugin that optimizes
your site and deletes all jink that is cluttering up your database. Set your
site to delete after 2 days (by default, it is set to 30 days) or disable post
revision option. To limit number of post revisions that are saved, add a line
of code in your wp-config.php file. If you want to disable the post revisions
completely, set the value in the below code to “0” or “false”.
define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3 );
Automatically remove the trash items after 2 days,
add the below code in your wp-config.php file.
define(‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 7);
5. Use P3 Profiler Plugin:
P3
Profiler is a great plugin,
created by Godaddy. This shows the plugins that needs to be removed from your
site. WordPress sites load slowly because of poorly configured
plugins. By using this plugin, you can easily spot which plugins are slowing
down your website.
Most of the time, it is a social sharing plugin
that negatively impacts the website speed. Replace with a plugin such as
Floating Social Bar, Digg Digg, which doesn’t bloat loading time of your site.This
change is only possible if you can see which plugins are making your website
load slower.
6. Use a CDN:
A
CDN is a group of networked servers located around the world. These servers
store your site files and will deliver them to your visitors. CDN can give you up to 50% reduction in bandwidth
usage. Setting up a CDN can take a few minutes but can have a huge impact
on your site speed if implemented appropriately.
Some of the most popular Content Delivery Networks
are as follows:
§ MaxCDN – This CDN is the industry standard when it
comes to WordPress CDN services.
§ Amazon CloudFront – This is the service that is
used by sites like Imdb and 9Gag.
§ CloudFare – It is a free content delivery solution,
used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers. It also enhances the security of the
site.
§ Photon in JetPack –It will upload all your images
to WordPress.com’s servers (which run on the EdgeCast network).
7. Optimize the Images:
If you have been blogging for a while, then you
know how important is to have images for a site that relies heavily on content.
Putting visual graphics such as images and infographics to your website helps
you attract more traffic (particularly search traffic on images).
This should not just end with including images
because you also have to properly optimize them for search engines. WordPress plugins like Smush.it, desktop based application like Shrink-O-Matic can
optimize your images, making internal pages load faster.
I believe that this article has helped you with the
information on
7 ways to optimize your wordpress website. If you
have any doubt regarding this topic, please make sure to comment, the
professional techies at Artemas Digital Creative Website Design Company India are
always happy to help you. Artemas Digital is one of the Top Web Development company in India. We offer high-quality service
in Web
Design and development, SEO,
Web Hosting, App Development and Social Media Marketing. We are one of the top
Web Design Company in India.
