Tips for WordPress Performance Optimization
September 27, 2021 in WordPress, Web Design, SEO | 7 min
How to Boost Your WordPress Website
For starters, website speed is one of the most important factors of user experience. Research shows that users are more likely to bounce from your website if the website loads slowly. Bounce in this case means that the users will leave your website if they find it slow.
Website speed is crucial and a key factor for your website performance, however there are other factors that requires attention to speed up your WordPress website. Non-bloated theme, minimal usage of plugins, premium hosting and proper development are one of the few elements for successful WordPress performance optimization.
There are tools such as various plugins to help you with the performance optimization of your WordPress site. Plugins like Autoptimize and W3 Total cache will help with lazy loading, jss and css minimalization and cache clearance, while plugins such as Shortpixel will optimize your images for web and reduce file sizes in a way that the load on the page will be lessened. Additionally, your web hosting is an important factor on your website performance and custom WordPress development that offers no bloated coding will have positive impact on the performance factors.
Below you can find our tips on how to optimize your WordPress website and achieve successful results on many factors that affect your user experience, search engine rankings and overall well-being of your online presence.
Effective Non-Bloated Themes
There are many WordPress themes to choose from. In fact, there are so much themes, that it’s easy to get confused. These themes are made for novice web users that do not have the experience nor skill in web design and development. Moreover, these types of themes offer limited functionality and kind of force you to work within limitations. Customizing these themes are usually hard and not worth the time, they are basically limiting what you can design and develop and limit your growth in a way that affects your online presence in a negative way. Not the mention the code bloat on these themes that make the website slow and non-efficient, hence impacting your website speed and even your search engine rankings.
Instead of using these themes, it is a better idea to create a custom WordPress theme that offers all the functionality and design options that your business requires. Working with a professional web developer will ensure that your theme does not have an impact on your website speed. A customizable WordPress theme will ensure that it is lightweight and non-bloated, meaning that you can create a fast website that can easily be optimized. For the best WordPress optimization, customizable themes that are lightweight are important.
Unlike many pre-made themes that offer limited functionality and slow page load times, you can have full control of your website and can easily customize what you need with ease. For many companies that want a strong online presence, custom WordPress design is crucial.
Get Premium WordPress Hosting
Where you host your website and how it affects your website’s performance is no brainer. There are countless hosting options to choose from but investing in a hosting service that offers %99 uptime and malware protection can help you boost your WordPress website’s performance. With proper website hosting, the host service actually provides effective back-end tools to manage your website more efficiently and with managed hosting capabilities and proper CDN network, it speeds up your website.
In addition to website performance, premium hosting services offer website stress test and back end install methods that are crucial for your website’s performance. WordPress updates can be updated automatically with back end platform control management systems and can reduce the time and effort in making website run properly.
Minify Your CSS and Javascript Codes
Optimizing your code and minifying for the website performance is crucial for successful WordPress website performance. Optimizing your HTML, Javascript and CSS files can easily contribute to your website speed. A website developer should minify the script codes and help you bypass any issues that might arise due to coding. There are also some WordPress plugins such as Autoptimize and WP Rocket to help you minify your codes in a way that is not bloated.
Optimize All Media
One of the most crucial and important ways to boost your WordPress website’s performance is to optimizing all your media uploads. The media stored in the database should be optimized. Especially, all images should be a standard norm in optimizing workflow during the development phase. Using plugins such as Shortpixel does wonders in optimizing all media that is stored in the WordPress database.
Prior to uploading any image and media files, you should compress them and make sure that they are optimized for the web. Big file sizes can greatly reduce the page load speeds and have a negative impact on website performance. On top of optimizing the media files, you should also consider lazy loading options to help you with page load speed and performance.
While optimizing the media files, you should also be careful about not sacrificing the image quality. Blurry, low quality images offer poor user experience and can cause different penalties. In the case of large-sized images, using optimization features such as lazy loading in which the images are loaded when necessary is the perfect choice.
Additionally, the correct document type of images are important as well. JPEG files are suited for pictures and photography while PNG files are best suited for illustrations, animation type graphic images.
Responsive Design
Google is focusing on mobile-first indexing more and more each day. The search engine giant recognized the pattern of mobile devices’ popularity and leaning towards mobile approach in their search engine rankings. If your website is not optimized for mobile devices, it means that you are offering a poor user experience for more than half of your users. Making sure that your website is accessible and designed for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is crucial for website performance.
Update Your Plugins and Theme Regularly
WordPress websites like many others, needs to be maintained regularly. Your theme and plugin developers update their products in time and if you miss out on updating your theme and plugins, it means you are not on the same page with the product that you are using. Search engines such as Google notice this fast so it’s important to update your plugins and theme regulary. It is also important to update your PHP to the latest version since you want to use your server resources efficiently for HTTPS requests.
Correct Plugin Usage
Any WordPress website will use plugins for more efficient and effective performance and design capabilities. However, with the usage of plugins you run the risk of bloating your website in a way that it’s speed and performance reduces.
Only use the plugins you absolutely need to reduce code bloating and performance drop. Many of the performance plugins help with the performance but using only few will do your website good. ?Using too many plugins will hurt your website.