WordPress Themes

Optimization of any WordPress based website is necessary because these websites are based on database and lots of queries and hence if proper optimization is not done it may lead to slow browsing of your website. There are several things to optimization like speed of the website, usability, changes by staff, proper maintenance, updates and theme and plugin optimization is also essential.

Lets focus and check the steps and methods to optimize your WordPress website

Hosting: Many times its the hosting which does the problem. Cheap shared hosting have too much server load and load up from a remote destination which causes all the problems your website has. It leads to slowdown of the website. After many refreshes the website loads up. And many times images fail to load up and thus showing up a 500 internal server error in times of more traffic. Hence you should invest a bit more if your website is important and get a great hosting for start. If your website is big then you should follow the next steps if they fail to help you optimize your website then you should consider upgrading your hosting to VPS or Dedicated server.

Images/Graphics/Video: Images cause all the problems when it comes to optimisation of any website. Because its the image size which matters. If your images are heavy in terms of size like 1mb or above then you should try to use tools like tinypng or compressjpeg or smushit type of plugins and regenerate your images and reduce their sizes. Always try to have websafe images. Also png and gif images are heavy in size so if they are static images and don’t include background one should change or convert them into JPG for better reduction in size. Similarly if you have a lot of videos and your server is slow then you should upload your videos in websites like Vimeo and Youtube which also reduces server load and fastens up your video download and playing speed.

Theme Optimization: Any WordPress theme which has minimalistic design should be good. But you should also try to understand that the lesser the scripts and elements on the homepage the more faster it will load up. Hence one should always consider reducing the scripts on the homepage and remove unnecessary page elements. Also one should consider removing the unwanted coding that has been done. Hence its important one should consider checking best WordPress themes and then selecting and opting for the one clean and minimalist one which is optimized for maximum speed of the website. Thus increasing speed of the website as well.

Plugin optimization: Too many plugins can cause a lot of problems. First those plugins can conflict among themselves and lead to slower speed of the website. Also these plugins might cause a lot of problem if they have been updated and cause problems with the latest version of WordPress. Hence minimum plugins should be used in order to have your website properly working otherwise it might cause problems amongst themselves and too many scripts may lead to slowdown of the website as well.

Maintenance and Updates: Maintenance and updates are required because from time to time WordPress releases several patches in terms of security, modern design as well as increasing the performance of the system. Thus it is important that these maintenance in terms of plugins, theme updates as well as core WordPress updates should be done.

Cache: Cache plugins minimize the server load by converting the pages into static HTML. Also they use more advanced techniques like minimizing the scripts by using minify. And then also use gzip compression. Also one can use server side caching like zend op cache and memcache and other cache methods which can be applied from server side to help you speed up the site as much as possible.

CDN: Many times offloading your static files like HTML, JS, CSS and images etc should be done using CDN. Advantages of CDN are that they load up these resources from nearest possible location depending on the position of the user visiting your website and thus giving him a faster website in terms of load speed and performance.

Database Clean up: Database is the one where several transients like old revisions and junk data could be stored which are in the form of redirection logs, bot logs, comments which are spam and revisions being stored. One should remove these as well to free up the database. The cleaner and smaller the database the faster it will perform.

There are several methods of updating and optimizing WordPress based websites and there are several plugins as well but the top methods should really help someone faster up and speed up their WordPress website and have an optimum performance for their website.