No matter what you do for a living, there is a big chance that you are running a website dedicated to your business. After all, the number of websites keeps growing steadily as there are now more than 1.7 billion sites on the Internet.
Now, every website runs on a content management system (CMS) and WordPress is by far the most popular choice among webmasters of all levels of knowledge and skills. A report reveals that WordPress powers 34% of all websites on the Internet, but the platform’s market share goes as high as 60%.
Users love WordPress because it’s simple and easy to figure out, but they still need to know a few basics in order to keep their sites running smoothly and efficiently. In this post, we will show you nine WordPress performance tips that are suitable for everyday users. Let’s take a look!
Find a Reliable Hosting Provider
Many webmasters make a simple mistake of choosing cheap but unreliable hosting providers. A typical user does it because he/she is not expecting a huge amount of traffic and therefore is not willing to invest in WordPress hosting.
Jake Gardner, an essay writer in charge of IT topics, claims this is a big mistake: “As soon as you create an army of loyal fans, you will notice that your site is slowing down. This is why I recommend you to pick a well-known provider such as Page.ly, WP Engine, or Bluehost.”
Pick a Good Theme
A theme is a collection of templates and style sheets used to define the appearance and display of a WordPress powered website. As such, it has an overwhelming impact on website performance because people love to see a beautiful online presentation.
Now, you can find a lot of WordPress themes with “one size fits all” solutions. While it may seem tempting, we encourage you to opt for a specific niche-focused theme. How come? Generic themes are covering all sorts of features – even the ones you don’t really need.
For this reason, you should pick a narrow theme that suits your business needs. If you visit a website such as Best Essays, Assignment Service, or EssayEdge, you will realize they use the same sort of theme because it gives them only those features academic writing agencies might need.
Choose the Right Plugins
WordPress themes determine the appearance of your site, while plugins help you to make the website better and more efficient. Just like a theme, you should also be smart enough to choose the right tools for your business demands. Generally speaking, almost every website needs plugins to enable search engine optimization, online security, contact forms, email marketing, content creation, and similar.
Remove the Plugins You Don’t Need Anymore
Every day WordPress users are known for their “set it and forget it” philosophy. This often turns out to be a disastrous habit because hackers take advantage of outdated plugins to attack WordPress websites.
If you know that over 50% of WordPress vulnerabilities come from plugins, then you understand how important it is to uninstall the tools you’re not using anymore.
Take Advantage of Excerpts on Homepage and Archives
Another thing you can do to make the website more functional is to take advantage of excerpts on the homepage and archives. Namely, WordPress will automatically load and display the entire content on a given page, which is a surefire way to degrade website performance.
If you really think that visitors should read the whole thing, then you can leave the function as is. But if you think excerpts are enough, then follow this pattern:
- Settings → Reading → For each article in a feed, show Summary
Minimize the Size of Images
Visual content is always burdening WordPress websites, so you should consider minimizing the size of your images. Photos that are too big will make the site slower, which is a big deal in the world where almost 60% of visitors leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
The easiest solution is to use lighter images and avoid gigantic files. Another option is to install a plugin such as Smush Image Compression and Optimization to make visual content go easy on your site.
Split Comments into Pages
When your website becomes very popular, you can expect people to start writing lots of comments all over the place. While this is a sign of professional success, it can also jeopardize performance because comment loading increases the overall speed of your website. If you want to prevent this problem, go to Settings once again:
- Settings → Discussion → Break comments into pages
Optimize a WordPress Database
As you keep creating new posts and adding fresh content to the website, you can expect WordPress to get slower gradually. In such circumstances, you should not hesitate to optimize a WordPress database because that’s where all the information is stored.
You can do it manually through settings, but a much simpler solution is to install a WP Sweep plugin. This tool will help you to get rid of many redundant features in these (and many other) segments of the site:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Revisions
- Orphaned user meta
- Transient options
- Unapproved comments
- Unused terms
Keep Your System Up To Date
Do you know that almost 40% of hacked WordPress websites were using an outdated version of the platform? This means that webmasters who neglect updates are likely to suffer from malicious attacks.
The only logical response to the threat is to keep your WordPress system up to date. Every time you see there’s a new version available, take your time to upgrade and solidify both the performance and security of your website.
Conclusion
WordPress is responsible for the functioning of more than a third of all websites currently available online. Users appreciate the platform because it’s super-easy to figure out, but some of them are still not able to identify the most important functions of the CMS.
In this article, we analyzed nine WordPress performance tips suitable for everyday users. Remember our tips and make sure to leave a comment if you need additional explanations – we would be glad to help you out!
