If WordPress website development is your requirement, then one thing you should be knowing is that the performance of a website based on this PHP web development platform is usually slow. This is because the technologies that are used here, Apache and PHP considered as heavy technologies. However, it is possible to optimize such a website with some good tactics and hence, the fact that the WordPress website is slow does not have any impact on its popularity on this platform for website development. The majority of the websites found on the internet today are based on WordPress and are pretty well-performing. So, no need to fear with the performance of the website, in case WordPress development services is what you require to meet your website development needs.
The following are some of the quick fixes to get your WordPress website running at its best possible speed. These fixes will minimize the time required to load your website, reduce the bounce rate for your website and hence, improve the customer experience.
Optimize Your Plug-ins:
There is no doubt in the fact that plug-ins are for the enhancement of the features of your website. But sometimes it may happen that adding too many or unnecessary plug-ins to your website may hinder its performance. Hence, deactivation or deleting of the unused or unnecessary plug-ins would help.
There would be a few plug-ins which though are necessary would be better to get rid of. Few plug-ins may impact your page loading time and may cause your website to run slow. Better to remove such plug-ins for enhancing your website performance.
Fine Tune the Images and Videos:
Having images and videos on your website is definitely a great way to grab the attention of the prospects. But, when you have too much of media content, your website is sure to perform slowly as the media content will occupy a major part of the bandwidth of your website. Time taken to load a page with images compared to that without any images is far higher. Hence, you need to fine-tune the media content on your website for its better performance and to do this, you need to follow the below steps.
Always use compressed JPGs as they will be loaded faster because of reduced file size. There are plug-ins like WP Smush for this purpose. This plug-in automatically compresses the images as you upload them to your media library. Compression would be lossless and hence, there would be no effect on the picture quality. So, with quality images, you are still reducing your page loading time for better website performance.
CSS Optimization:
With CSS, you can reduce the efforts required in coding the look of every single web page or element in your website. However, if neglected or not used properly, CSS files may interrupt the performance of your website. The better way to go is to remove all the unwanted styling elements and minify the CSS files by removing the unnecessary lines of coding and spaces from it. This will reduce the file size and hence, reduce the loading time.
Keep Your Database Clean:
WordPress has a fantastic feature called autosave which saves everything by default and hence, this will populate your database with a lot of unnecessary content. It’s hence, a good practice to keep your database regularly.
Hence, with all the above measures taken, one can definitely improve the performance of their WordPress website drastically.