Check Why Website Optimization is Important
WordPress is the most popular CMS system in the world. There are millions of websites that are powered by this technology and there is a huge probability that it’s also applicable for yours.
Fast and well-performing website is driving users toward it. When it comes to WordPress, you don’t need the web design and development agency to perform basic optimization. Of course, for advanced work, I strongly advise you to reach out for professional help. Having that in mind, below you can see basic tips for optimizing your website.
Clear the database
You probably have tested a lot of settings and designs when you were creating your website. WordPress is saving and keeping all different versions of a website on the server. This autosave function is very useful when something got wrong, and you have to load an older version of a website to avoid a crash.
Yet, every record saved on a website is making a website database on the server bigger and bigger. More information database has, the slower response time of a website and for the end-user, that means slower loading of a page. Delete old records of a site when construction work on the website ended. You won’t be wasting valuable resources then.
Clean up plugins
Like in the previous paragraph, you have probably downloaded a ton of different plugins when you were building the website. To check how they work and establish which one is the best choice for your needs. That’s natural, but have you removed the unnecessary plugins afterward?
Plugins, just like old versions of the website, are saved on the server and when a user is entering your website all plugins components are loading along with the photos, text and so on. Every plugin contains hundreds of additional files stored on your server. Clean them up, to increase the speed of a website. What’s more, the more files on the server you have, the more exposed to malware attacks you are.
Website photos
In many cases reduction of website, image size is the thing that is going to speed up the website the most. There is no need to upload big pictures because the user will quit the sluggishly loading page way before they are going to load.
Pictures on a website should be uploaded in .jpg format and shouldn’t be bigger than 150kB. If you are not graphic and don’t know how to optimize photo file size in dedicated programs like Adobe Photoshop, you can always use web tools, that are resizing photos automatically. They are really easy to use, and your website is going to load much faster.
Cache
Every time, that user is entering your website, he has to load all of the websites from scratch. That means, that for every visit WordPress is preparing an HTML file for download that’s necessary to display the web page. Unfortunately, that means longer loading speed.
There is a plugin available, that is speeding up the process. It’s called WP Super Cache. This plugin is preparing a special HTML file, that user visiting your page for the first time is downloading to hey computer. Next time, he is going to enter that website, all the basic data is already stored on shared drive and can be quickly loaded by the web browser. This is speeding up the process of loading a lot because during every other visit the only thing that needs to be loaded on the user side are updates on a website.
What’s more to do?
There are tons of optimization options and how well your website is going to perform is entirely up to you. If you want your website to be faster on mobile devices, you should read more about AMP technology powered by Google.
If your website is heavily relying on JavaScript, you probably should find some plugin that is going to set up scripts to load asynchronously. By default, all JavaScript is downloaded and loaded at the same time and this is lowering the performance of the website.
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