If you want to attract new visitors and keep existing ones, you must optimize your website’s performance. A well-optimized website provides visitors with a pleasant experience and encourages them to return.
Furthermore, studying how WordPress sites work, as well as learning digital marketing tactics and combining them, can yield spectacular results in terms of reaching your target audience.
This article provides a high-level overview of the top ten best practices for optimizing your WordPress site. A WordPress training course would be highly advantageous for you if you wish to study and build your website, as you will have your site ready in no time!
Easy Steps To Optimize Your WP Website
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Make use of CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of geographically spread servers that work together to provide content across the internet more quickly.
Static files such as pictures, CSS, and JavaScripts are stored on each server and are used on your website. When a visitor visits your site, the server nearest to them displays these static files to them, speeding up the loading process.
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Clean Your Trash
Any content that is deleted, such as a post, a picture, or a comment, gets thrown to the trash. The content can be retrieved or permanently removed. Trash, on the other hand, takes up a lot of space in your database and makes retrieving information take longer.
Disabling the garbage option or clearing trash on a regular basis can help save up space in your database.
Furthermore, the database is clogged by the amount of draughts and post-revisions. As a result, regularly remove unwanted documents and restrict the amount of post-revision edits.
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Cache
Website caching is the technique of temporarily saving a few of your website’s static files on your visitor’s machine. This covers logos, CSS, and JavaScript, among other things.
As a result, caching aids speedier loading every time a visitor returns to your website because they are no longer required to fully load the site.
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Don’t forget to update
Because WordPress is an open-source project, it gets updated often. WordPress themes and plugins, as well as the site, may be changed on a regular basis.
Updating your site, themes, and plugins to the newest versions is critical for a variety of reasons. Each update does not provide new features, but rather corrects security flaws and bugs. It protects your website from hackers, as well as ensuring its security and optimization.
To maintain your site safe and well-optimized, you could use WordPress auto-update tools.
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Monitor Image size
Long passages of text can be broken up with images, which increases engagement. According to studies, visual content inspires 80% of consumers to read your information.
However, if your pages contain a large number of non-optimized images, your website’s loading time will be significantly slowed.
There are two basic methods for reducing the size of your images:Before uploading, compress images up to 5 times and Adapt your photographs to modern screen resolutions by resizing them.
Make sure your photographs are saved as the correct file type. It’s a good idea to use JPEG for photographs with a lot of colors and PNG for simpler graphics. Furthermore, WordPress has a number of plugins that can be used to reduce the size of your images.
When the Lazy Load plugin is enabled, images are loaded only when the region is visible to the user. This will significantly speed up the loading process.
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Utilize excerpts
By default, WordPress shows the entire article on the homepage. This slows down the loading process and may result in fewer page views if readers do not feel compelled to read all of the articles.
As a result, go to settings and tell your site to show excerpts instead of the entire article.
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Use pages for long posts
Longer postings with more photographs are more detailed. It takes a long time for these to load. As a result, WordPress provides built-in functionality to its users in order to reduce loading times.
Users can simply add a ‘nextpage’ tag to an article if they want it to be divided into two pages.
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Minimize HTTP requests
The browser communicates with a remote web server via the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The web server uses HTTP requests to send different portions of a website page, such as photos, videos, JavaScripts, and stylesheets, to the protocol.
Longer request queues tend to block a few requests and dramatically slow down your website.
Consider the following points to reduce the number of HTTP requests:
- Compress and merge CSS and JavaScript files into a single file.
- Remove any images, JavaScript files, fonts, or stylesheets that aren’t needed.
- Remove any unnecessary plugins.
- Make the switch to HTTP/2 on your website. This, however, is dependent on the hosting company you choose.
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Add plugins
While trying out and playing with new plugins might be entertaining, they are the primary cause of WordPress site slowness.
Plugins provide additional functionality to website owners, such as analytics or the ability to schedule, comment on blog entries, and so on, but they also slow down the loading process. As a result, it’s a good idea to disable or remove any plugins that aren’t absolutely necessary for your website.
Even if everything goes wrong and you have to restart your website from scratch, there is a plugin that will do it for you; a chore that web administrators hate executing. WP Reset plugin, in addition to resetting the entire page, this plugin offers many other capabilities such as going back in time with a single click, making collections of preferred plugins and themes, providing more than 25 cleaning tools, having a white label option, taking automated photos, and many more.
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Go for optimized WP themes
WordPress has a variety of themes, but not all of them are optimal. To be able to develop a website that operates well, you must choose the correct theme that meets your aim.
A website with a poorly developed or intricately planned design can add unneeded weight. As a result, to improve your performance and enhance loading speed, it’s a good idea to use an adaptive theme that’s popular with search engines.
Keep in mind,
Because search engines place a great value on a website’s loading speed, employing the above SEO tactics effectively can be quite beneficial.
An Online SEO Course would be very helpful if you want to learn more about optimizing your website and ranking higher in search engines.
I hope you had a good time reading this blog! Will you use the ten recommended practices to improve the performance of your WordPress site? Please share your thoughts in the comments box below.
Also, do check out our previous article on 4 easy ways to make a website more visible.
Author’s Bio
Karan Shah
Founder and CEO at IIDE
Karan Shah is an Edu-preneur, Tedx speaker, Harvard alumnus specializing in eCommerce, and the founder of IIDE – The Digital School.
He is a reputed author on the topics of education, digital marketing, and Ed-techs. Over the years he has penned a plethora of articles in leading news outlets such as Entrepreneur, BusinessWorld, Education Times and Youth Magazine to name a few.
