Many times you might encounter some slowness on your site that could be caused by so many things. If you want to know more about how to improve your overall site's performance, read further.
Some basic recommendations to improve the site's speed and its overall performance are:
- Optimizing the images
- Keeping all of your installed software (like plugins, themes, and WordPress itself) up to date
- Having the latest available version of PHP
- Installing a caching plugin
- Having no more than 20 installed plugins (a higher number could cause some latency)
- Reduce the number of JS and CSS scripts
- Optimizing the database
First Things First
First things first, test your site on some website optimization tools like GTMetrix, Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Tools, etc. Once done you should examine the results and then proceed with improving them based on suggestions given in the reports.
Image Optimization
WordPress recommends that your site should be as small as it can be from the perspective of image and media file sizes. since the lower site size would produce a higher speed and smoothness. Non-optimized images and videos could cause very big issues, so it is highly recommended that you optimize them first and then upload them to your site. When it comes to images you could use a plugin like EWWW Image Optimizer, Shortpixel, WP Smush, etc.
Per videos uploading to your site, it's important that they are compatible with HTML5 so that you’ll be able to feature your videos without the need to use any external plugins. You have to compress your videos prior to uploading them to your site. There are multiple tools to achieve this, but the open-source software HandBrake is a great option.HandBrake’s interface is very easy to navigate and on top of compression, you can use it to convert your video files to a variety of modern formats.
Keep your Installed Plugins, Themes, and WordPress Up to Date
WordPress highly recommends keeping all of your installed software up to date. This will ensure your site has the latest optimizations and strict coding standards for quality. Keeping these updated will prevent issues related to any incompatibility that could arise between various plugins and themes, which is important to keep in mind.
Installing a Caching Plugin
Installing a caching plugin improves the site loading time by making a copy of the page after the first load, and then serving that cached version to every subsequent user. When a user visits your WordPress site, your server retrieves information from a MySQL database and your PHP files. It then puts it all together into HTML content which is served to the user. It’s a long process, but you can skip a lot of it when you use caching instead.
Caching is best for static pages that don't change very often. Dynamic pages, such as checkout and login pages, which have different information when they load should not be cached.
Reduce the Number of Installed Plugins
It is highly important to only have the plugins that are needed on your site and not use several plugins with similar functionalities which might interfere with each other. Having plugins installed that are not needed or used could produce some latency and issues with keeping things organized and helping in improving the performances.
Reduce the Number of JS and CSS Scripts
Decreasing the number of components on a page reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page, resulting in faster page loads. Because of the way WordPress works, sometimes JS and CSS scripts are loaded even when they aren't needed. The good news is, there are several plugins that could help in improving ton his score such as Autoptimize, Fast Velocity Minify, etc.
Optimizing the Database
As your website naturally grows and as you add new content, your database will increase in size. The database contains various settings and options from plugins, themes, and all the content of your site. If you don’t optimize your database you’ll eventually notice a considerable slowdown. By regularly deleting outdated and unnecessary information from your website, you will greatly improve the efficiency of your database, allowing you to serve pages quicker.
The most common things that you should check here are:
- spam comments
- post revisions
- transients
Some of the WordPress plugins that could help here are WP-Optimize, WP-Sweep, etc
Further Reading
Your site's performance is very important to your user's experience on your site. This article provides a basic overview with some suggestions, but it does not cover everything. If you want to know more about improving site performance we recommend the following articles as well https://gtmetrix.com/recommendations.html and https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-performance-speed/
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