Optimizing and Speeding up WordPress Websites: Top 7 WordPress optimization tips

Optimization of your WordPress website is essential for its better performance. Only a better performing site can give a good experience to the site visitors, increase the page viewers, and drive a good traffic to it helping with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

I had already mentioned in my previous blogs that WordPress is considered as the best platform to build a website as it is probably the easiest and the most powerful blogging and website content management system in existence today. It is found that WordPress sites around the world publish blog posts or articles every 17 seconds. So, optimization of your WordPress website will do good to your business for sure.

Here I tell you some amazing optimization tips to boost your WordPress website performance and speed. They will definitely help you have an awesome WordPress web with high performance and traffic and thus will take your business to the next level.

The Top WordPress Optimization Tips

1: Choose the right host

The optimization techniques will be depending on the hosting plan you have chosen for your website. You have to search for a managed WordPress hosting plan which will keep your site updated all the time and remain catchy always. Managed WordPress hosting services will also include automatic backups and advanced security configurations.

Try to avoid a shared hosting plan as it will make your website loading slow. A slow website means that visitors will potentially leave your site even before it loads

2: Use awesome and quality themes

Selection of a right theme is another important way to optimize your WordPress website for better speed and better performance. While there are thousands of themes available, choosing a flexible and reliable one is quite difficult.

Choose responsive designs as search engines favor them for their performance. Be aware of some stunning and beautiful looking themes which are actually poorly coded and uses lots of images since they can slow your website way down.

3: Select effective plugins

Installing all the plugins will never help you in optimizing and speeding up your WordPress website. Choosing very effective and necessary ones is the key. W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache are some pretty good plugins you can use.

Plugins are one of the biggest causes of WordPress being slow and outperforming. Only add the plugins which you actively use and delete all other unnecessary ones.

4: Optimize your images

If you want to optimize your WordPress website and speed it up for better performance, it is better to not fill the pages with lots of images since they will drag down the page load time and will ruin your website. Resizing and compressing is a remedy for this. You can use JPEGmini for compressing image size.

Smush.it and WP Smush.it are other two amazing plugins you can use to reduce the file size of an image without losing the quality.

5: Use a CDN

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is inevitable for WordPress website optimization. This network will cache the requested files and deliver them to the visitor as quickly as possible from a point closer to that visitor than your site’s physical server.

Using Amazon CloudFront as your Content Delivery Network is a good choice. This will increase the load time of the files and will reduce the server load as well.

6: Optimize your WordPress database

It is recommended to optimize your WordPress database time to time if you really want to boost the website performance. Clean up the unwanted files, spam comments, drafts, old post revisions, and pingbacks and trackbacks.

WP Optimize, WP Sweep, and WP DBManager are some awesome database optimization plugins you can choose from many others.

7:  Optimize your home page

Optimizing the home page of the website is another major way of advancing the speed and performance of your WordPress website. Since the home page is the landing space of your web visitors you have to ensure that it loads as quickly as possible.

You can optimize the home page using post excerpts or read more tag instead of full posts, reducing the number of posts on the page, and removing unnecessary widgets and inactive plugins.

Other than these there are many other tips and tricks as well for optimization and speeding up WordPress website like combining CSS files and JavaScripts into one big CSS and JavaScripts files respectively, disabling hotlinks, adding an Expires header to static contents, using CloudFlare, enabling Gzip compression, etc. Hopefully, we will discuss these in detail in the next part of this blog.

So, keep in mind that optimizing your WordPress website is no longer an option but, I will say, compulsory.