A Guide On How To Optimize Your WordPress For Maximum Performance
Imagine powering your laptop on because you need to find an important and urgent piece of information. You search the relevant website. Click it open and it’s loading and loading and loading. A whole minute passes and the website seems to be stuck without even getting started. What do you do then? Hit the back button (and maybe slam the cover of your laptop shut too!).
I’m sure this has happened to us many of the times. A time -when even 40 milliseconds are considered long enough to search- being fast and apt is preeminent for websites. According to a case study involving large sites like Amazon and Google, if the page load is delayed by even a second time it can result in 11% less page views, 16% decline in customer satisfaction and 17% loss in revenue conversion.
The huge clutter and excessive data causes the websites to slow down which eventually becomes responsible for loss of page views. For every online presence the aspiration to provide best possible experience to the audience is an important factor to garner attention and a faithful fan following.
How to actually cope with this speed issue?
WordPress being the most powerful CMS (Content Management System) covers around 29% of all websites in the world. To improve user experience, efficient and fast loading websites always wins the race. Now, here comes WordPress Performance Optimization into play.
WordPress Optimization – running on PHP and which in turn uses web server software- mainly works on the principal of less the code to process, more the performance. With less instructions, tasks, and data, the software can move faster and orderly.
Hosting Considerations Help in WordPress Optimization
With various companies providing a wide range of web hosting services, it becomes difficult to choose the most suitable hosting for your website. One thing to be assured of is money will only increase with the features.
There are many vendors from premium (Kinsta and WordPress VIP by Automattic) to medium tier (Flywheel, A2 Hosting, Site Ground and Pantheon). Choose only after comparing and making sure of reliability, package components and compatibility of control panel with your system. Another important thing to take notice of is; the yearly subscription fee, as the lower upfront money often promises high fee later.
Web hosting servers should also be configured to not suffer from slow loading speed.
Software and Data Model
For software, recall that less the work a website has to do, the faster it will be. Take your time and choose your theme only after a lot of consideration. Don’t render your website slow and ineffective with a lot of Java Script and Plugins. Remove anything extra, but only after confirming a proper backup of your database.
Similarly data model should be simple too. Database should be minimal and custom web frames should be chosen while keeping in mind its complexity. Widgets and plugins that show extra posts in sliders can be exorbitant.
Caching
Whenever a request is performed on your server, a series of action is carried out by WordPress which mainly consists of loading content, media, plugins and whatnot. If a similar request is made, the whole cycle will have to take place again. This can result in waning of the whole system.
Now caching works to cut down all this repeated work and make a single file to be readily accessible for these similar requests. It not only conserves your resources, but also devises your website to be customer friendly.
Caching is provided by number of applications in the form of plugins (WP Super Cache, Content Distribution Network, Git Hub and WP Rockets).
Types of Caching
There are also various ways of caching; like page caching in which entire HTML output of the web application is cached.
Fragment caching is considered when cookie dependent websites needs only a part of the page to be cached.
Another type object caching, in which all the data stored is present in memory only and is non-persistent.
Russian doll caching is used when cached fragments are clustered in other cached fragments to reuse the fragments in which it resides, even when a product is updated.
Last but not the least, browser caching which renders the visitors to keep static files in their own browsers, so they don’t need your server to repeat the process.
Compression and Image Optimization
Compression (most commonly gZIP) helps wonders for the web pages to be read and transfer on browsers swiftly. It can be used to compress images, JavaScript and CSS. In this way, web servers counter with smaller files and transfer them to the target place that is visitor’s browser. The information being conveyed is confined in a smaller place now. Hence it takes less time to move and your system works faster.
Image optimization works similarly by compressing the size of images while maintaining the quality. Web font usage instead of encoded texts can also be helpful. Tools (Photon and Imsanity) are available to resize the images for quick loading.
Removing Clutter
Plugins and themes take time to load, so better not keep anything extra in your server that may cause it to lag behind. Also, when we install different themes, plugins, and add-ons over the span, a lot of data start residing in the system. So, the better course of action is to remove any unused, poorly coded and debugging plugins, instead of only disabling them. Moreover, even when we remove and delete these plugins, much of the data remains which start cluttering and in turn making the website sluggish and squander server memory.
For cleaning up our database, we can use many WordPress tools (WP Sweep and WP Optimize) that are totally free.
I hope this article helped you in understanding the principles on which WordPress Optimization Performance works. To nip the evil in the bud, the foremost thing needed to be done is to apply these techniques before the launch of websites. This will not only help you to launch your website satisfactorily, but also deliver the best customer experience from day one.
We, at Heuristix offer a wide range of services which includes optimizing your website to the best of our qualities. All you need to do is hand over your precious project to us and we will handle everything from web development and optimization to digital marketing.