How To Optimize A WordPress Site For Maximum Benefits

Have you ever found yourself struggling to increase the speed of your website?

Website speed is an extremely important aspect that determines your success. After all, your website visitors won’t be willing to wait for a long time for your website to load.

Website performance also has a direct impact on the search engine rankings. The search engine bots crawl a website in order to index it and while doing this, the website speed is also taken into consideration. If you have a website that loads quickly, the search engines will be happy with your website.

Here are 6 quick tips for you to help you to optimize your WordPress website and make it load faster.

Before you move ahead for implementing these techniques to your website, it is important to first check the speed of your website with any of the free online website performance checking tools like GTMetrix, YSlow or through Google PageSpeed Insights. These services will let you know your page loading time and the overall file size of the page and tips to improve the page load time.

Choose The Right Web Hosting Package

The first step in optimizing your WordPress website is choosing the right web hosting package. You would be fighting a losing battle if your server takes a very long time to process the HTTP requests and MySQL commands.

Your web hosting company might not always be the reason for your slow website. Your WordPress website may be hosted with a great web hosting company but you might notice poor response time because your chosen hosting package does not consist of enough resources. Website owners using a shared hosting package are more likely to witness slow loading times of the website because there are many other websites hosted on the shared server.

Any web hosting package can fall short when it comes to RAM and CPU. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the resources that your website needs for functioning smoothly. Select a web hosting package that can manage the traffic spikes of your website efficiently.

Use A Fast WordPress Theme

A theme that is not coded properly, or if it uses too many images throughout the design, will result in adding unnecessary weight to your website. Some WordPress themes might be heavy in size and this might add a few more seconds to your page load time, which is deadly.

Select a WordPress theme that has been optimized for tablets, desktops and mobile devices. Search engines favor responsive website designs because they want to make sure that all web pages have the same URL and that the mobile and tablet users have a great browsing experience.

Unfortunately, many theme developers optimize the theme demo website through caching and content delivery networks. As a result of this, it becomes difficult to know whether the WordPress website theme is fast or not.

Here are some fast and simple WordPress themes that can be downloaded from WordPress themes:

* Suits Theme
* Reddle
* Singl
* Blissful Blog
* Hemingway Rewritten
* Splendio

Monitor Your WordPress Plugins

Before installing any plugin, ask yourself – is it really necessary?

Plugins are one of the biggest reasons why WordPress websites are slow. If you keep installing plugins without any research, you will face performance issues.

There are some plugins that are known for slowing down a website. Some may bottleneck your CPU as a result of persistent processes. In such a case, there is the chance of the whole server going down.

Empty Your Trash

WordPress 2.9 version introduced the WordPress trash system. Whenever any type of content is deleted, whether it is a post, page, comment, media etc., it is sent to the trash folder. You can either restore this content or delete it permanently. This is an effective system that helps you to recover the files that were deleted permanently.

But trash can take up a lot of unnecessary space in your website’s database. The time required to retrieve the information from the database depends on its size. WP-Optimize is a plug-in that helps you remove trash from your database. (By default, WordPress has a feature to automatically delete files after thirty days.)

Plus, keep your WordPress website malware free (and keep the hackers away).

Reduce Post Revisions, Spam, Pingbacks and Trackbacks

It just isn’t the trash folder that can take up the database space. All the post types also populate the table rows with data. Therefore, it is important to delete the spam comments on a regular basis along with the unwanted pingbacks and trackbacks.

You should also be aware of the number of drafts and post revisions that your website has stored. The WordPress revision system enables you to go back to the older versions of articles view them and restore them.

For spam, you can install and use plugins like Combating Comment Spam, Akismet, or Growmap Anti Spambot.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website is no longer an option. As the search engines give so much importance to the web page loading speed, it is important to have a fast website in order to determine website success.

Many people have the misconception that you need to be an expert to optimize a WordPress website. However, 99% of website optimization is done by following good practices and by taking advantage of caching and content delivery networks.

Kavita Menon writes articles on topics related to technology, search engine optimization, web hosting, WordPress hosting  and social media. Her aim is to create informative articles that provide value to the people. Visit MilesWeb Blog to get a range of information on various topics like CMS, web hosting, social media, SEO etc.