Speeding up your WordPress has become more than a necessity. For all its marvellous achievements, one thing that needs a little bit of tweaking is in its speed. You need to take the right precautions for using the right resources from WordPress or else you could end up with a sluggish website of your own.
User would prefer speed any given day and if you fail to that, you might lose some of your viewers or subscribers for that. Speed is about making the first impression when a user lands on your website and second thing is to provide them with a content that makes them stay on your website.
A report given by Microsoft Bing search team stated that, Users satisfaction dropped to 3.8% if there was a delay of about 2 seconds longer, which in result increased lost revenue per user by 4.3% and clicks dropped to 4.3%.
So lets us dig the insights of WordPress and speed it up with some simple tweaks.
Choosing the Right Host :
To share a host in the beginning might be an appropriate choice for many of the users but that certainly comes with a cost. At the cost of insanely slow speed and frequent downtimes during heavy traffic period.
If you have plan of making your site popular with all the incredible stuff you have in store to offer, might just be washed out by sharing Host. You need to find yourself the right Host to increase the lifespan of your website.
Finding the right Host will provide you with good Support and make your site even better.
An effective Caching Plugin:
Server problems are always painful but by choosing the right Plugin could save up to 90% of the server problems that you face. What it does is, it offers static files to users by avoiding numerous calls back and forth from the database. You can always look for the best plugins out there for WordPress like, W3 Total Cache and W3 Super Cache.
Drop the Plugins & Widgets of No Use :
Keep what is important and drop that eats up your memory. WordPress plugins does make your applications powerful but keeping them all could be troublesome. Each and every plugin that exists on your website creates an extra process for your servers which will eventually result the page to load every time, so by removing them could help you speed up your site. Things like adding Analytic Codes by yourself and not let a plugin do that for you, could prove useful. Add things which can be added by you rather relying on Plugins because there are chances of these plugins to bloat unnecessary codes and will use their own required CSS and JavaScript which didn’t even vouch for.
Coding Your Templates :
The Designers and Developers who run their own sites, it is more advisable to hard code your own templates. By keeping plain old HTML instead of WordPress PHP tags, could boost the speed of your site because you didn’t allow WordPress to do the extra steps. Even WordPress Development Experts can provide you with the proper insights about coding.
Optimizing The Homepage :
Homepage is where visitors will be landing the most and you must have a Homepage that loads quickly. You can tweak your homepage just by managing a few things like;
Show excerpts rather showing a full post
- Try and keep a limited number of post on the homepage
- Remove the unnecessary widgets
- Remove the inactive plugins and widgets that chunks down the speed
- lastly, try and keep the homepage Minimal.
End of the day, a cleaner and simple homepage will save your day from sluggish load times
Image Optimization :
Images are important but well optimized images are clearly more than important. Try and keep Header images and other theme related graphics much more optimized because they usually load on every page.
Yahoo! has an image optimizer named Smush.it that will reduce the file size of the image without compromising its quality but you will have to do that for every image on your website and if it doesn’t matter to you, it is one of the best image optimiser. On the other hand, WP-Smushit is a free plugin that will do the optimization for every single image on your site and there is no reason for not installing it.
Knockout Post Revisions :
It is always advisable to use what you need the most and keeping everything makes life difficult. A post revision is a feature that is useful for sites having multi-author blog but for others it is just an unused feature. Post revisions could puff up your database with multiple copies of the post by adding extra MBs to your SQL files.
Hotlinks:
Hotlinks are nothing but bandwidth “Theft”. It usually occurs when other sites gives direct link to the image of your site from their posted articles, which directly affects your servers. More and more people will scrape your posts which will cost you in providing high speeds you want your users to have.
Trash the Spam Comments:
Spam comments take some heavy database space if you haven’t deleted all of them for a while. They keep on coming and unnecessarily create havoc in your spam section. But you have the right muscles to flex and flood out all of them by simply pressing the button in WordPress admin area.
Discard Pingbacks & Revertbacks :
WordPress interacts with the other blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and revertbacks as it is default in WordPress nature. What it does is, every time a blog mentions you, it will notify you, which will gradually update data on your post. Disabling it won’t affect the backlinks to your site, only the setting that generates the extra work for your site.
WordPress is definitely a platform for everyone to taste the success of their websites. You certainly don’t want users to complain about your website having lack of speed. The above steps will land your website to a better place and will deliver more efficient results for your user base.
Why Choose Us?
Here at Helios Solutions, Our WordPress Developers are highly skilled and believe in the philosophy of delivering the best solutions, for any of your queries. Outsource WordPress Development and we will land the best results and with the most satisfactory outcome.
