If you’ve just finished getting things together in WordPress, a #1 question to emerge is ‘how to give it, even more, boost and make a website/blog less ‘troublesome.’ You might ask people for help and receive lots of answers, but these answers will surely touch upon or hint at 7 tricks we’re going to open up in this post.
Read what did our customers do after they’ve switched to WordPress: Life After Migration to WordPress [Useful Resources + Video].
Quick fact: 2 sec or less. This is the website’s loading time, 47% of consumers expect from your website.
1. Explore how optimized your website is
Speed is a matter we want to start with. Before the ‘global house cleaning’ check how fast your website is, what’s drawing it back, determine what are the speed optimization standards which you should align to.
Services, like Gtmetrix, Yslow and Google’s PageSpeed Tools are created to help you define website’s loading time and each page’s file size. Seeing the results of speed performance measuring, is crucial, as furtherly it allow you determine your website’s ‘pain points’ where the improvement is needed.
2. It depends on Hosting Service Provider you choose
There are lots of cases when ‘to make things faster and cheaper’ a lot of WordPress site-owners choose unreliable hosting services. It results in poor website optimization, low speed and consequently fewer users/customers.
We recommend considering the following hosting service providers to run your WordPress site on:
— Bluehost
In fact, before deciding which hosting service provider to choose, read some reviews or ask people who already have experience in choosing hosting services.
3. Avoid hotlinking
Or a ‘bandwidth theft,’ it’s when users of other websites link directly to your media files (images, videos, etc.) which causes an increased server load and additional bandwidth ‘consumption.’
You can protect your media files from hotlinking by creating a .htaccess file and placing it into the main root directory of your website.
4. Cut down the functionality of useless widgets and plugins
Plugins and widgets are all nice and neat things which add something new, but if overuse them, then it definitely harms your website.
If there are too many plugins beware of plugins incompatibility issues. Keep as few (but powerful) plugins as possible, update them in time and install only the reliable addons.
5. Clear cache
Caching reduces server load by reducing queries made per page. Too many queries might lead to website crash and inefficient performance.
To make your website work faster, consider installing the following plugins to cache the pages of your website: WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache.
6. Page size optimization
It’s important for each page of a website not to be ‘overstuffed’ with content.
Remember the following 3 things needed for page size optimization:
- Split posts into several pages
Large posts with lots of attachments inside are recommended to divide into several parts and post them on separate pages.
- Place comments on separate pages too.
If there are zillions of comments for your post, divide them to be displayed on multiple pages.
- Instead of showing the full length of your post on the main page, use posts excerpts to display only fragments when by clicking at which will lead to the full post.
7. Images optimization
All the graphic-visual elements on your website make it more lively and colorful, though, they are among the heaviest elements.
To make best out of performance,
- Take care of images size. Reduce large images sizes;
- Compress images to make them load faster on your website.
Here, grab some useful images optimization related plugins:
WP Smush – reduces the pic’s size.
Lazy Load – images load only when they become visible for users.
See, optimizing WordPress site is not that big scary task at all (don’t trust words? Try actions – Free Demo migration to WordPress is here for you) We at aisite are always glad to supply you with helpful content to read after and before the migration process. Effortless migration, fella 😉
