One of the major points of a website development and maintenance is the website good performance.
This means how fast is your WordPress website in order to provide a great user experience (UX). Speed optimization means that a fast website will:
- Attract more users
- Keep users in order to make them possible customers – Impacts your conversion rates
- SEO reasons
A slow website can be very tiring and annoying for a user. Also, a sluggish site is a SEO bad practise so it would be lower in search engines classification.
For these reasons you should consider speed optimization a major issue and work to improve it. We are here to give you our suggestions for a good website performance.
Server Configuration
Server Optimization probably is the most important factor and also the most difficult to achieve. There are many hosting providers out there and you can choose between shared, dedicated and server as a cloud. It depends on the concept of your project and how much you can spend.
For example if you only need a small blog you can use a shared server. On the other hand if you want to create an e-shop you would need a better server that has much more to offer.
You always get what you pay. The better your server is the better your website will work. So, think sensibly of what hosting provider and plan will you choose. When it comes to money be a little more generous because a good server always pays off.
Image Optimization & Load
You can try to shrink your images with many ways. Reduce image size can boost your site performance quickly. When your images are compressed they have a better load.
An easy way could be to use a plugin to do it for you such as Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer. This way also helps if you have already uploaded many images so it will save you much more time.
Image Load for better performance
Also, a good way to reduce your image size is to use tools such as Photoshop, GIMP or an online tool like ShortPixel. You can choose how images will get shortened and see if they will look great after.
Last, a helpful way is also to use a plugin that will make your images load later than the page load. So, user can see your initial content on your page much faster without waiting for all images to load simultaneously. There are many of such plugins on WordPress repository & premium themes with such built-in functionality like Crocal theme.
Database Optimization
Tidiness is always the best! So, the same applies to databases. WordPress uses MySQL database which is growing as much as your website is getting older. This database keeps many useless data such as spam & trashed comments, old post revisions and more.
It is wise to find a cleaner to do the job for you such as Autoptimize. Database cleanup can diminish speed as the tables content gets smaller and it is easier to reach. Similarly, backup time gets shorter too.
Other Useful Tips
- Premium Theme and plugins: It’s important to choose a theme with clean and updated code. A WordPress theme like Crocal, provides optimized code to keep up the good performance. The same with plugins. Additionally, unused plugins are always recommended to be deleted in order to avoid loading unnecessary scripts.
- Stay Up-to-date: Keep WordPress, theme and plugins up-to-date. Also, it’s important to upgrade your PHP version on your WordPress installation if your using a really old version.
- Cashing Plugins: A good choice is also caching plugins. With these plugins page users see a saved version so load time reduces effectively. A beneficial plugin for this could be WP Super Cache.
- CDN: A Content Delivery Network spreads your static site content like CSS, JS and media files in other server locations around the world so your page loads much faster.
- Commenting System: You can use a system to manage your comments so you can easily avoid and delete spam comments. This helps you keep your database in a better condition.
WordPress plugins
Performance Check
Before or after optimizing your site performance you can make your tests in order to see its level. There are many useful tools to check your page speed. The most famous and efficient are Google PageSpeed Insights and Gtmetrix.
Last thoughts
You should think about your site performance from the very start. It would be easier if you make useful steps from the beginning to keep up the good page speed. The good thing is that you can easily optimize your live websites as well.
Regarding WordPress, there are many ways and plugins to assist you. So, it is not difficult to achieve a good site performance. Of course, it also depends on your content but if you follow the above steps you can keep a high speed.
So, make your survey on server hosting, which is the most risky part, and then choose which practises will you follow concerning your project and you will succeed a good result.
