How To Optimize Your WordPress Website

Author: Sandeep Kanojia

A Good Web Hosting

The first step in optimizing your WordPress website correctly is to choose the right hosting plan. You are fighting a losing battle if your server is taking an age to process HTTP requests and database commands.

When you check your performance, services such as GTMetrix and Pingdom will advise you of the exact response time of your server. I recommend testing the response time of your own website against similar websites.

Depending upon your business model services/products and based on expected monthly users' visits on your website, you must choose the better performing hosting servers. There are certain cheap hosting available in the market, but those may result in poor performances, yet again there are some of the best affordable and performance-optimized hosting servers available as well. These are some of the basic and commonly used hosting types.

  • Shared Hosting ( Cheap, average-performing Server)

    • Example: www.bigrock.com

  • Managed Hosting ( affordable, specifically optimized for particular tools and software packages)

    • Example: www.siteground.com

  • VPS and Dedicated Hosting ( Expensive, complete controlled system to manipulate as you want).

    • Example: www.bigrock.com/vps

  • Cloud Hosting ( Affordable to Expensive based on the usage, flexibility to manipulate server and resources as you need ).

    • Example: www.digitalocean.com

Our experts at dsourc.com always recommend Cloud Hosting is the most favorite web host because they excel in exactly the same areas where bad web hosts frustrated me the most back in the day — speed, uptime, and support. Cloud Hosting is blazing fast and has a tech support team that goes above and beyond the scope of their service itself to help its customers.

Cloud hosting is often considered the most reliable of all of the services. Rather than relying on the disk space of a single server, it pulls its power from several resources, making sure you never have any downtime. Other benefits include:

  • Scalability — You can add to your cloud space at any time.

  • Unmetered bandwidth — You don’t have to worry about your site going down due to a server failure.

Read some genuine reviews and plan information of the host you were planning to go with Cloud Hosting.com

Fast Theme/Framework

First, use a fast theme. You need to start with a fast and well-coded WordPress theme or framework. If you choose a theme packed with lots of additional features that you don’t need, it’ll negatively impact your site performance.do not choose a theme that allows you to change everything directly from the theme options, making your job easy.

Second, use a responsive design. These load fewer resources for mobile devices, or specify high-res images for desktop displays. Mobile users don’t have to download huge images, while desktop users don’t have to squint at tiny ones.

Monitor your Plugin

Before you install any plugin on your website, ask yourself "Is this plugin necessary?".

Uptime monitoring means periodically checking your site to make sure it’s still up and running. Minimize the number of plugins you use. Having a large number of plugins installed won’t make a huge difference to the speed of your site, but it increases the risk of installing badly-behaved plugins.

There are three things you should be monitoring

  • Visitor Statistics: Find out how many people visited your website, which pages they visited, how they got to your site, and a whole host more.

  • Website Speed: Does your site load quickly? Do all pages load quickly? Monitoring site speed makes sure you know all about this and can step in if necessary.

  • Uptime: This is the amount of time your site is accessible to visitors. You want this to be 100%, or as close to that as possible. Monitoring uptime lets you see when your site is unavailable, so you can do something about it. Conversely, time your site is inaccessible is known as 'downtime'.

Top Wordpress Monitoring Plugin

  • Jetpack

  • Orbit Fox

  • ManageWP Worker

  • Pingdom

  • Uptime Robot

  • InternetVista

Speed a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Offloading the static resources of your site, like images, scripts, CSS files, can speed up your site. Essentially, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all the static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript, and images, etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them.

Generally, those static resources will be served to your visitors by the server closest to them. That will ensure the heavy part of your site loads as fast as possible for your users.

But one that’s really easy to set up on WordPress sites is W3 Total Cache. I’ve been using W3 Total Cache since the beginning of this year and it was very helpful.

Optimize Images

Image optimization helps in improving page load speed, boosts websites’ SEO ranking, and improves user experience. Optimizing web images is a process of delivering high-quality images in the right format, dimension, size, and resolution while keeping the smallest possible size. If the page takes more than 3 seconds to load almost 40% of visitors tend to leave that site, thus increasing the bounce rate. Image optimization is the only solution to this problem.

We suggest WP Smush.it plugin optimize images that have already been uploaded is so installed these plugin and optimize your images. if you do not install any plugin then we suggest you compress your image in tinypng.com and upload it to your website.

Use A Responsive Design

Responsive web design (RWD) creates a system for a single site to react to the size of a user’s device—with one URL and one content source. A responsive website has a fluid and flexible layout which adjusts according to screen size. Use a responsive theme to load fewer resources (for example, images) for mobile devices or specify high-resolution images for high-resolution screens. That way, mobile users won’t see heavy images, and desktop users won’t see small, highly-compressed images.

You need to Design your Website for mobile

Google officially announced that they would be using mobile-first indexing. This means that they are going to be indexing websites based on their mobile version- not their desktop version (as was done in the past). This update has come at a time when mobile searches are becoming the majority and desktop searches are becoming the minority.

Minify and Combine CSS and Javascript

we use CSS and javascript on the website, and creating lots of lines in CSS, javascript but all lines are not useful for those websites then the code should be removed.

CSS and javascript code can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time.

Leverage browser caching

When a browser loads a webpage it has to download all the web files to properly display the page. This includes all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images.

In the web pages might only consist of a few files and be small in size – maybe a couple of kilobytes. For others however there may be a lot of files, and these may add up to be several megabytes large. that's why we suggest when you create a website then the website should be a minimum of 3 MB pages.

How to reduce leverage browser caching

To enable browser caching you need to edit your HTTP headers to set expiry times for certain types of files. Otherwise, on the WordPress website, we can suggest using some plugin to reduce your browser cache.