Why WordPress maintenance is one area you must focus on for the betterment of your site?
One of the worst things that could ever happen to you is that your WordPress website falls short on speed. If that ever happens, then you be prepared because there is a strong chance that Google can penalize you. As a result, potential visitors can leave your website, and your business can have a severe blow. At times as such, you want your website to load in 2 or fewer seconds now, don’t you?
It’s what WordPress performance optimization is all about.
Today, we are going to share some essential tips which will help you learn the best way to boost your WordPress website. Do you want your WordPress website to be performance oriented? Let’s explore.
So Before We Begin,
Right now, if you load your website on your browser, it will load up quickly and will hardy take even 2 seconds. But does that define your website is slow? Not really. We often ponder why exactly did my website load up faster on my browser without having a clear answer, well that’s because our site is already cached, within my browser’s database. And it only takes a few seconds to load up.
You can’t tell the difference,
But new users might have different experiences. If you do want to have a similar experience, then why not erase your cached data and reload your website on the browser again. The results will be there.
At times like this, you wonder if there is a specific tool to help you measure the speed of your site.
Some services which can help you identify the speed of your website load time and its file size tools like GTMetrix, Yslow, Google Page Insight, and Pingdom are great tools to help you measure site speed. Once you’ve completed the maintenance of your site, you can check your site speed using one.
Below, are the best WordPress maintenance checklist which you should not ignore.
Table of Content
- Tip # 1: Slow Speed? Try Shifting Your Web Host
- Tip # 2: Keep a Tap on the Plugins Which You Use
- Tip # 3: Consider Re-Optimizing Your Website Theme
- Tip # 4: Check if the Static Content on Your Website is Optimized
- Tip # 5: Pay Attention to the Optimization of your Site Widgets
- Tip # 6: Check if the Images on Your WordPress Website is Optimized
- Tip # 7: Optimize Site Cache to Increase the Speed of your Website
- Tip # 8: Don’t Forget to Perform Regular Maintenance
Tip # 1: Slow Speed? Try Shifting Your Web Host
The first and foremost step to optimizing your website speed is to get a reliable hosting server instance for your website. So, where do we start to look for a hosting that is performance oriented?
If you are a fan of managed WordPress hosting, then Cloudways can be a great option allowing you to select your server on one of the renowned cloud providers and launch any application of choice.
Cloudways can offer you well-optimized site speed because it uses the latest SSD storage, a free CDN service, and a powerful stack with PHP7 and HTTP2 support for ultra-fast/quick site loading.
Tip # 2: Keep a Tap on the Plugins Which You Use
Plugins are an integral part of any WordPress website. Plugins are a great resource as they allow you to do things that you can’t normally do. Installing a significant number of plugins to your website isn’t the problem; installing the bad plugins at the backend of your WordPress can hurt your site speed.
Also, you need to make sure that the WordPress plugins which you’ve installed to your website are updated to their latest versions. Before you decide to download one, do some background checks, and see what reviewers on the Internet have to say about the plugin. If they are rated 3-stars, then find out why they are rated so low. Updating is necessary as it makes the plugin comply with security updates.
Tip # 3: Consider Re-Optimizing Your Website Theme
So first things first, if you aren’t using a fast and responsive theme for your WordPress website, then get one. A theme with a lot of customizability is excellent to add some solid aesthetics to your site. Still, when it comes to page load time, it overloads the webserver and automatically slows the browser down. If you want to speed up your WordPress website, then choose a theme with fewer options.
Believe it or not, every extra feature which your website does not use eventually slows your WordPress site maintenance down. So if you know how to get your way around coding, might I recommend you get a free theme.
The following are some of the lightweight themes:
- GeneratePress WordPress theme.
- Divi WordPress theme.
- Astra WordPress theme.
- Schema WordPress theme.
- OceanWP WordPress theme.
- StudioPress Themes.
- Skin WordPress Theme.
- Elementor Hello Theme.
Also, check the theme which you are about to select is a responsive one. If it’s a responsive theme, then it utilizes quite a less amount of resources to load up your website on other smart devices. Also, lightweight themes are more favored by Google, so that you can expect a slight boost in your SEO as well.
Tip # 4: Check if the Static Content on Your Website is Optimized
Static content can have a certain amount of load on your WordPress website. Hence, some WordPress hosting services recommend that you try compressing static content on your website. You can compress static content using the gzip extension. Gzip can be enabled directly from the site’s Cpanel. If you don’t have access to Cpanel, then you can activate it using the W3 Total cache plugin.
Secondly, use a CDN to take the load off your web server. There are several static elements, such as scripts, images, and CSS files that are associated with your WordPress website. Using a CDN will help you optimize the delivery of these static elements to even the far-fetched servers. So, if a person located somewhere in Canada searches your website, it will only take a couple of seconds to load.
Several hosting services offer CDN as a part of their web hosting plan.
Tip # 5: Pay Attention to the Optimization of your Site Widgets
Different maintenance services on the Internet explains why optimizing widgets are necessary. So when you plan to add widgets to your WordPress website, just make sure that they aren’t heavy and can quickly load. At times, widgets render a powerful CSS or JavaScript code at the backend. You can commonly find these codes on social widgets for Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.
It is also best advised that you directly load the widgets to your servers. If you do not rely on external servers for loading widgets to your website, then you will eventually enhance your site performance.
Tip # 6: Check if the Images on Your WordPress Website is Optimized
Almost 65% of your website content is made up of images and makes up the bulk of your site content. Larger the size of your images, greater will be the time your website is going to take just to load up.
So make sure your website images are properly optimized so your website doesn’t take time to load.
Start by specifying image dimensions for thumbnails. You can access these configurations in Settings/Media. Now, your images will automatically scale down to the pixel size in which your site displays the content on various devices. If you’re still unsure, you can use a better alternative, such as tools like reSmush.it. It will reduce the size of your images without downgrading the image quality.
You can find Semrush.it in the plugin repository of your WordPress.
Lastly, you can utilize the lazy loading technique. Here, you pre-configure your website to load the content first instead of waiting for all the images to load. As a result, your site becomes accessible.
Tip # 7: Optimize Site Cache to Increase the Speed of your Website
Using a cache to run your website is very effective for delivering high-speed and good page load-time. Every time a person loads your website, information is normally retrieved from the WordPress database maintenance where different elements of the CSS and HTML come together so they can be loaded into a single browser.
This whole process of loading information from the database consumes time.
But if your website has a cached server, it can keep these HTML files for people visiting in the future. As a result, it significantly shortens down your page load time and increases your site performance.
Tip # 8: Don’t Forget to Perform Regular Maintenance
Last but not least, if you want to keep your website in great shape, perform regular maintenance. By employing a good WordPress maintenance service, you can have a top-notch site working remarkably.
By onboarding a good W maintenance provider, you find experts who can fix your website’s faulty codes, update all your site plugins, delete outdated content, keep your site clean of spam, etc.
Also, they add a variety of performance plugins at the backend of your WordPress dashboard.
EndNote
Just as much as having a WordPress website is essential for your business, it is sequentially essential that your website offers a good page load time. If it fails to load up fast, you will eventually rank down in the Google SERP and can, in fact, get penalized by Google for underperformance.
As a website owner, that sure sounds like a nightmare, especially when your business depends on it.
Best, you try to make the most of the website maintenance for beginners’ tips and check your website’s load time. Employ any of the site performance measuring tools that I discussed right in the beginning.
Do you see any difference in your page load time? Let us know in the comments.
