WordPress is a great platform for small businesses and startups to create their own websites. According to WordPress, more than 409 million people view more than 23.6 billion pages each month and users produce 69.5 million new posts and 46.8 million new comments every month. WordPress is the fastest growing CMS, with roughly 500+ new sites being built daily in the top 10 million websites on the web. It powers 14.7% of top 100 websites in the world. 17 posts are published every second on WordPress sites around the world.
Bottomline: WordPress is huge and businesses need to leverage its power as a content management service. However, a common issue reported for any WordPress website is its loading time, or its speed. Since speed is important.
Here are a few tips to optimize a WordPress website in the best possible manner for 2019
- Choose good quality themes
There are several of free and premium themes available to create a WordPress-based website for businesses. But you have to choose a theme that is well-coded with the right presence of images and content. It should not put too much load and slow down the loading time of your website. Since the theme directly affects the speed of your website, choose one that provides the best user experience.
- Look for the right host
It is important to pick a host that offers excellent speed and support and which will keep your website up and running always. They should also provide regular updates and backups. While shared hosting is cheaper, it may not improve the speed of your website. You should opt for a host that provides an extensive range of services.
- Opt for proper plugins
You should not install too many plugins on your WordPress website because it will slow its performance. Choose only plugins that you will actively use. You can opt for caching plugins as they support static HTML files instead of dynamic ones which improves speed.
- Configure your website well
After you decide on WordPress installation, configuring it is the next step. For instance, you need to pay attention to how comments are moderated, permalinks are set up, and other practices. You can rely on WordPress settings for this during your initial setup.
- Pick a responsive design
In today’s age where mobile devices from smartphones to laptops to tablets and phablets are the norm, you need to have a strong responsive design that provides optimal viewing experience across all these devices. You need to choose a WordPress design that ensures that the layout, text, and images are re-sized as per the size of the screen, enhancing user experience as well as speed.
- Pay attention to security
While there are enough security features with WordPress, it is better to opt for more advanced security measures using plugins and other best practices to keep away potential threats. To ensure security, it is important to check if there is proper configuration, no third-party code and are up to date.
- Optimise images
While images do a great job at keeping visitors engaged and improve the overall experience of a website, they often slow down the speed and take up storage space. It is better to optimise images by using something like ShortPixel or TinyPNG so that images on your website are automatically replaced by optimised ones.
- Think SEO
You need to consider search engine optimization (SEO) to enhance the visibility of your website on Google and other search engines. Using SEO best methods along with WordPress plugins will help you on different levels. Additionally, you can also use the new SEO (Social Engine Optimization) as well. You can make your presence felt on social media networks and build a brand people trust faster.
- Use a good Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Today, Content Delivery Networks are commonly used to deliver the best quality content to the users. You can choose from the range of CDNs available in the market like CloudFlare, MaxCDN and Amazon CloudFront CDN. These are easy to use and have a user-friendly dashboard.
- Test your speed on GTMetrix
You can get the speed tested on websites like GTMetrix, Pingdom Tools or Google PageSpeed Insights. They will give you a detailed analysis on where your website is getting affected with regards to loading time. They will also suggest how to make the necessary changes to correct any drawbacks.
The above-mentioned tips play a vital role in SEO. It is good to have websites on Google that are fast loading and code clean. You can try doing it yourself or seek expert advice from the many SEO companies in the market.