Ways to Optimize Your WordPress Website

WordPress is a good platform for beginners to create websites for their startup or small business. It is a fairly flexible platform that gives you plenty of control over almost any aspect of a website. Large number of businesses prefer WordPress because of its simplicity, its ability for social media integration and also with the vast number of professional looking themes available.

Performance of a website have a major role in determining the success of your business. Yes, it influences your ranking in search engines and provide your visitors with great user experience. In many businesses it is a proven fact to have seen an increase in search engine spider crawling after speeding up their design. Let’s discuss few ways to optimize your WordPress website here.

Choose the right hosting plan

Look for a managed WordPress hosting service that will help you keep your website up and running at all times. If you have opted for a shared hosting plan you are more likely to face slow loading times as hundreds of websites are hosted on the same server. So we advise you choose a hosting plan that can handle traffic spikes efficiently. This is especially crucial when your website has grown to a point where you get tons of traffic daily.

Choose a fast WordPress theme and optimize images

You need to be careful in selecting a reliable theme for your site. Always look for themes that utilize sprites.  Sprites is a CSS technique that uses a single image to show multiple design elements on your pages. This way instead of loading dozens of small images, your site will open a single one.

Images are essential part of every website. It is important to have them optimized too – Smush.it and WP Smush.it plugin can help you. Also make sure to choose a design that has been optimized for desktops, tablets and mobile devices. Search engines favor responsive designs as they ensure all pages have the same URL.

Choose the right plugins

The more plugins you install without research, the more likely you will face performance issues. Certain plugins are known for causing websites to be slow or worse, make your entire website unviewable. So choose your plugins wisely and install only the plugins that you will actively use and delete the rest. You can install a P3 Profiler to see which plugins are slowing down your website.

Optimize CSS and PHP files

Disorganized CSS and PHP files can affect website speed. CSS simplification removes unnecessary lines and spaces. Just make sure to save a backup of your source CSS files for editing, as minified files can be difficult to read and edit.There are many online tools that you can use for free to minify your files

To optimize PHP files, you can remove empty tags such as the div and paragraph tag, which often go unnoticed. Also compress your PHP files by removing extra line breaks and spaces.

Enable browser caching

Browser caching allows internet users to speed up the loading time of their favourite websites by storing a cached copy of your website locally. This reduces calls to your server and saves the user from downloading the same files again.

By following these ways to optimize your WordPress website, you will ensure that your website has the most optimal performance loading speeds and retain more of your visitors.

 

IT’S YOUR TURN

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