Ensuring that your WordPress website runs both swiftly and smoothly is not just a preference—it’s a necessity. In the current digital age, a lightning-fast user experience forms the cornerstone of online business, playing a pivotal role in maintaining visitors’ engagement and ensuring their return.
Moreover, website performance isn’t just about end-users; it is also integral to the digital marketing ecosystem. Search engine giants, like Google, factor website speed and performance into their ranking algorithms. Therefore, a slow or laggy website can adversely affect your site’s SEO, leading to reduced visibility and organic traffic. Our optimisation efforts for BestNewBingoSites.co.uk have led to rankings that considerably outstrip their competitors.
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Consequently, WordPress optimisation encompasses more than merely enhancing site speeds—it’s about providing a superior user experience, gaining a competitive edge, improving your search engine rankings, and ultimately driving your business’s online success. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most effective techniques to optimise your WordPress website, from using plugins and custom coding to leveraging content delivery networks (CDNs).
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Using Optimisation Plugins
Optimisation plugins are one of the most straightforward ways to enhance your WordPress site’s performance. A variety of plugins are available to help with different aspects of optimisation, including caching, image compression, and database clean-up.
- Caching Plugins: Caching stores frequently accessed site data to provide quick access to users. W3 Total Cache and WP Rocket are examples of caching plugins that can improve page load speeds and overall site performance.
- Image Compression Plugins: High-resolution images can consume substantial bandwidth, slowing your site. Plugins like Smush or ShortPixel can automatically compress and optimise images, reducing their size without compromising on quality.
- Database Optimisation Plugins: Over time, your WordPress database can get cluttered with redundant data, slowing down your website. Plugins like WP-Optimize can clean up your database, removing unnecessary data and enhancing speed.
Custom Coding for Optimisation
While plugins can certainly enhance a WordPress website’s speed, they can also introduce their own overhead, particularly if you’re using a large number of them. That’s where hard coding can come in handy. Hard coding refers to implementing changes directly into your website’s source code, thus bypassing the need for plugins.
- Minifying CSS and JS: Reducing the size of your CSS and JavaScript files can significantly improve your load times. You can manually compress these files by removing whitespace, comments, and other unnecessary characters.
- Optimising the Database: Regularly optimise your WordPress database by removing post revisions, trashed posts, and other redundant items. WordPress provides a range of SQL queries that can be run to perform these tasks.
- Use a Lightweight Theme: Complex themes with numerous features can slow your site down. Using a minimal, lightweight theme and custom-coding the additional functionalities you need can optimise speed.
Leveraging CDN and DNS
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) store copies of your website on servers located around the world. When a user accesses your site, the content is delivered from the nearest server, speeding up load times. CDNs also reduce the load on your primary server and provide an added layer of security against DDoS attacks. Some popular CDNs include Cloudflare, BunnyCDN and Amazon CloudFront. There are premium CDNs including Cachefly, Fastly which also offer whole site caching and solutions for video and application delivery.
Same goes for DNS. Cloudflare, Exoscale DNS, DNSMadeEasy are among the fastest DNS and Rage4, Route 53 are among the fast DNS providers.
Selecting Optimised Themes and Templates
When it comes to WordPress optimisation, your theme’s design and coding quality play a crucial role. Although a visually appealing theme might tempt you, remember that not all attractive themes are built with performance in mind.
Themes laden with complex functionalities and bloatware may slow down your site. Therefore, select a lightweight, speed-optimised theme, like StudioPress Genesis, GeneratePress or Astra. These themes offer essential functionalities without compromising speed. For any additional features, consider custom-coding them rather than relying on heavy multipurpose themes.
Hosting Considerations
Hosting is a vital yet often overlooked factor in website optimisation. The type and quality of hosting can directly impact your site’s speed, security, and uptime.
- Shared Hosting: While it’s the most cost-effective option, shared hosting might not offer the best performance, especially for high-traffic websites, as resources are shared among many websites.
- Virtual Private Server (VPS): A VPS is a step up from shared hosting. It provides better performance and resources but also requires more technical knowledge to manage as often the packages are not supported by the hosting companies.
- Dedicated Hosting: As the name suggests, this type of hosting offers dedicated resources for your site, providing superior performance. It’s ideal for high-traffic sites but comes at a higher price. Unlike a VPS solution, this will more than likely come with full support from the hosting company (when they are managed dedicated plan). Also, there are third party services which offer dedicated server managed for a fixed monthly fees.
- Managed WordPress Hosting: This type of hosting is tailored specifically for WordPress websites. Providers, such as Kinsta and WP Engine, offer server-level caching, automatic backups, staging sites, WordPress-specific security, and more.
They are fine-tuned specifically for WordPress website which often provides better results than the options above.
Your hosting decision should be a balance between budget, website needs, and performance requirements. The super low-cost hosting packages are priced at that level for a reason, so think about how important your site is to you and your business before you select your hosting company and package.
PHP Version and Site Performance
The version of PHP your server is running can significantly influence your WordPress site’s performance. Newer versions of PHP, like 7.4 and 8.0, are not only faster but also more secure than their predecessors.
Most WordPress hosting providers support these newer PHP versions. You can typically upgrade PHP through your hosting control panel, but remember to back up your site before making this change, as it may cause compatibility issues with old themes or plugins. Many WordPress websites are still using PHP 5.4. You are very likely to experience issues if you move to 7.2 and above from 5.4. You should move your website to a staging space and test there so you don’t affect your live site.
Some Basics
You should always back up your website before you add or remove any plugins, change PHP versions or add/remove code. If your website host doesn’t offer this facility then you can use plugins like Updraft and BackupBuddy. For backup of dedicated server, use well known service such as from Acrosis.
You should ideally optimise images before you add them to your website. Having this as part of your process gets you better results along with optimising and caching plugins. There are tons of tools for this including Photoshop and TinyPNG.
Avoid using costly paid webfonts instead use either system fonts of the targeted devices or self host with Apache 2.0 or GNU GPL License. Fonts such as Roboto, Noto are optimized by Google for mobile devices. We have a list of such fonts.
Final Thoughts
WordPress website optimisation isn’t a one-size-fits-all process and it’s not a do-it-once-and-forget process either. It requires a multifaceted approach, implementing a range of strategies and tools to achieve a noticeable impact. Remember, a well-optimised site offers a better user experience, improves search engine rankings, and ultimately drives higher engagement and conversions. Through the thoughtful application of these techniques, you’ll ensure your WordPress website is not only fast and efficient, but also well-positioned for future growth.
