8 WordPress Website Optimization Tips for Speed & Performance

1) Perform WordPress Website Optimization

An optimzed database will always boost your WordPress website. It’s like organising your things well and keeping them in places where you can find them easily. Have you ever walked into a super mart? They have all their products organised and kept in sections so that customers can easily access them just by looking at their section labels. There are several WordPress optimization plugins available such as WP-Optimize or WP-DB Manager. With the help of this plugin, you can do a wordpress website optimization and manage your database efficiently. The WP-DB Manager plugin will regularly set dates for optimization, so that your website performs exceptionally.

2) Implement Caching On Your Website

Caching is an interesting topic since this relates to things being at hand for fast usage. Using the same example above, you can either say the things you need are at the super mart to be fetched or else you can buy some things you require and keep them stocked up at home so that when you do need them, they are there with you. Here we are stocking up those things which we will require urgently. There are many caching related plugins available which helps you in loading your website faster. The biggest advantages of using such caching plugins is that they support static HTML files which improves the loading speed. WP Rocket is one of the most widely used caching plugin.

This plugin is very easy to use and it covers all the aspects of your website while caching. It gives better user experience with improved server performance.

3) Optimize Images On Your Website

Yours website’s loading speed becomes slow when you have large size images on your website.

While it is always good to have more attractive images in order to keep the visitors interested, they also requires a lot of storage space, which slows the website loading speed. To overcome this issue, you must optimize your images so they become less in size while maintaining the image quality. There are many plugins such as ShortPixel, TinyPNG which helps in compressing the PNG and JPEG images without affecting their quality.

4) Implement gZIP Compression

The size of the data that gets transferred between your server and the users is huge and this is often the reason for the slow performance of your website. In order to resolve this issue, all you need to do is use gZIP to compress your data files including the CSS and JavaScript files. By doing this, the server will compress the content up to 70% its original size, before transferring it to the browsers.

This reduces the loading time taken by the website as the size of the content being transferred is drastically reduced. It’s very simple to activate gZIP compression on your website.

You simply need to add the below mentioned codes to the .htaccess file in the WordPress root folder to improve the performance of your website.

## ENABLE GZIP COMPRESSION ##mod_gzip_on Yes

mod_gzip_dechunk Yes

mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$

mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$

mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*

mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*

mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*

mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*## ENABLE GZIP COMPRESSION ##

5) Use CDN Network For Your Website

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are widely used, in order to deliver the highest quality content to the users. It does so by replicating the static content, including images, CSS, Javascript, etc, from your website and serving it to the users from the nearest servers. This results in faster download time on your website.

There are many CDN’s available in the market which includes CloudFlare, MaxCDN, Amazon CloudFront CDN and so on. These CDN’s has a very user-friendly interface and are very simple to use.

6) Install Anti-Spam WordPress Plugins

Most of the popular websites face the problem of getting spammed. Spam comments take a lot of your database space which slows down your website. Hence for wordpress website optimization it is mandatory to delete the spam comments on a daily or weekly basis from your database.

However, instead of manually deleting the span comments you can make use of WordPress plugins which will in return save your valuable time. There are various anti-spam plugins provided by WordPress such as  Askimet, Antispam Bee, WP-SpamShield and so on. These plugins automatically checks all comments and filters out spam, helps clear disk space which further improves optimization of your website.

7) Manage Revisions In Your WordPress Website

Revisions is a post type and a feature in WordPress. It enables WordPress to automatically save revisions of your posts, pages, or custom post types after every 60 second while a user is working on them. Revisions were added in WordPress to prevent the risk of losing data. 

WordPress often saves all your drafts after revision, thus taking up a good amount of storage space that gradually brings the speed of the website down.

There are several WordPress plugins which provides revision control. One of them is WP Revision Control. It allows you to set the limit to the number of revisions that can be stored for every page or post. This way you can easily restrict the unwanted post revisions and reduce your website’s loading time.

8) Test Your Website’s Speed

Once you have done a detailed analysis on how to speed up a WordPress website, then it’s the time to test the speed of your website. There are several plugins provided by WordPress such as  GTMetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom Tools, which allows the user to test the speed of their website.

These websites will give you a detailed analysis on where your website is getting affected in terms of its loading time and also give you suggestions on how to make the necessary changes to correct any shortcomings. This will allow you to improve the speed of your website effortlessly.

All the above WordPress Website Optimization tips also play a vital role in SEO. The optimization of the website improves the visibility of the website to the users of a web search engine by improving the quality of website traffic.

Ricky Noronha