How to Improve WordPress Site Performance for Beginners

You want your website to perform great for all sorts of reasons, such as SEO benefits, top-notch usability, common sense, just to name a few. WordPress is a great content management system (CMS) to use, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can overload it before you know it.

This article helps you make sure that you keep most crucial performance aspects in check. And no panic! It’s really easy to do it, if you’re willing to learn a thing or two. Now let’s see what’s under the performance hood.

Site speed

The speed of your website is one of the most important site performance aspects you need to keep track of. Other than just being common sense, you also want to make your website loads as quick as possible for other reasons. If it takes your website over 3 seconds to load, you lose lots of potential site visitors because they just get sick of waiting for your website to be loaded and go elsewhere.

Most of us are anxious and want things right now and real fast. Your loading time can be slow for multiple reasons. You may be using too many WordPress plugins, non-optimised images, heavy videos, unoptimised JavaScript files and stuff like that.

Now that you know what you should pay attention to, you need to take a closer look at each the abovementioned concerns.

Too many plugins

Once you get to know about WordPress plugins and all the amazing things they allow you to do, it’s easy to get plugin crazy and install plugins left and right.

For starters, you need to install only the plugins that you totally need. You should check your website performance after installing every single plugin because some of them are not really optimised and can make your site load REALLY slow.

You can keep track of your website’s performance and speed in particular with Google PageSpeed Insights.

Also, you need to keep track if your new plugin helps your website in general (more sales, more visitors, etc). If you install a plugin just for the sake of it, think twice. Other than slowing down your website in general, you jeopardise your site’s overall security by installing all sorts of plugins because, if at least one of them is not properly coded (unsecurely), all your website is at risk.

Optimised images

If you just upload your image to WordPress and use the built-in editor to rescale it or perform other modifications, you are doing a HUGE disservice to your website. Thing is, the original image that you upload to your WordPress dashboard does get changed and used.

WordPress just creates a copy with your modifications applied. The original image just sits there, slowing down your website and taking up your hosting space for no good reason. It’s best to just use Photoshop to resize your images as you need them.

Image file formats

Also, you should use proper image file formats. Here’s a quick explanation why.

• .JPEG (.JPG)

  You should use this image file extension if you need an image with lots of detail and without transparent areas.
  
  

• .PNG

  This image extension is the way to go if your image contains semi-transparent areas and has lots of detail. Note: It’s a lossless and heavyweight file format. So you need to use it really sparingly.
  
  

• .GIF

  You want to use this format if your image has just a few colours and no semi-transparent areas. Note: The image format is usually used for logos.

Now that you know what you need to keep in mind while working with images, it’s high time to get to know how to work with video because it’s something that you may want to use on your website as well.

Optimised video use

In our day and age, every decent website has to use video because most people are prone to understand stuff better if it’s explained in visual (video) format. Plus people stay longer on your website if it has an explainer video.

Other than that, it’s also beneficial for the SEO standpoint because web pages with video tend to be of higher quality and Google treats them as such.

Since using a video on your website may slow it down, you should use an image thumbnail that the user can click to start your video instead of embedding your video in the actual page.

Other than just being good for your loading time and consequently SEO, it’s also a great style approach because such videos just look more professional.

Optimised scripting

You need to also keep in mind that your web page code can contribute to your site speed. For example, you want to make sure that you always specify the width and height for every single image you use on your website. If you don’t do so, your website loads slower every single time it needs to figure out how much space your image needs. Using specific values speeds up your website because your browser has the info about how much space your images need and there’s no guesswork left.

Chances are, you use some JavaScript gimmicks on your website. That’s totally ok, if that makes sense to your audience, but doing so may still cause issues if your website refers to multiple .js files.

You can easily check it by opening your header.php file (if your website is based on WordPress) and see if you have multiple lines which load .js files.

Here’s what you can do it about. You may want to just load all your necessary scripting to an external file and then just load its content once to your header.php file. In case what I just said doesn’t really make any sense to you, you should consult your webmaster or just ask them to optimise your JavaScript files. You’ll be surprised how fast your website may get after optimising your .js files.

Content delivery network

If you’re ok to go the extra mile, you may want to use a service that allows copying your website to many servers across the world and use a copy that is the closest to the user. That’s the approach that content delivery networks (CDNs) use. The distance between your server and the end user still matters, especially if your website is stored on a server in Australia and your users access it from California. In this particular case, the user from California would get a copy that is closest to them. Say, the one that is on your US server.

There are a slew of plugins for CDN integration. For instance, WP Performance Pack which serves (dynamically generated) images through CDN. Other than that, it falls back to local serving if CDN fails. The plugin supports CoralCDN, MaxCDN and custom solutions.

Bottom line

Since a well-performing website is a great thing for a deluge of reasons, you should do your best to improve your WordPress website performance at all times and in every single way possible.

As you could see for yourself, you’re just supposed to do a thing or two and your website will become snappier in no time. Both your website and your audience will benefit from those sort of improvements.

SOURCE: Onextrapixel