5 Steps To Optimize Your WordPress Website

WordPress is the first choice of CMS by millions of developers around the world. The major reason behind its reputation is its unmatched themes, templates, extensions and many other unique features. Creating a website over WordPress is quite simple. A well-designed website, featuring crisp and informative content and great functionality to the users keeps the readers engaged.

Although WordPress web development being such a great tool, many people mess with it and damage the reputation of the website. Sometimes, the website is loaded with useless pop-ups, irrelevant content or even the site is less responsive. To avoid getting the website lost in the crowd, you can hire a professional WordPress developer or take some measures yourself.

Install Cache Plugin(s)

In the digital world, the website which has the minimum loading time and is most responsive is the ultimate winner. And one of the sure shot ways to do it is to add some cache plugins to your WordPress website. When a cache plugin is enabled, the visitors of the website access the cached versions of the main website.

This helps in reduction of usage of PHP requests, access requests for static resources and heavily decreases MySQL database access. For this, you can hire WordPress developer or if you have the knowledge, you can do it by yourself. As soon as you install a cache plugin, you can see a significant boost in the responsive behavior of the website. Some of the best cache plugins are

• WP Super Cache
• W3 Total Cache
• Cache Enabler
• Zen Cache
• WP Rocket

Upgrade Your Database

An optimized database is highly beneficial for WordPress website, which is a database drive software. Database of a WordPress website can be optimized from the “PHPMyAdmin” dropdown menu.

The other, and simpler way to do it is by installing database optimizing plugins. These plugins delete the spam data, automatically saved drafts, trashed posts and other things that pile and slow down the website. Some of the database optimizing plugins are

• WP DBManager
• WP Optimize
• Optimize DB
• WP Clean Up
• P3

Select A Good WordPress Web Host

You can only start optimizing the site once you are assured that it is not the host services that are slowing it down. Many hosts put hundreds of websites to be hosted on a single shared server, killing the responsiveness of the website.

Look out for the hosting services who value your website and provide a better speed. There are many hosting services that specialize in WordPress web hosting. You can also consider managed web hosting services.

Install Gzip Compressor

It is always a better solution to present the website to your users in a compressed version. These are smaller in size, and loads a lot faster. You can enable this compressor directly from the control panel or using various plugins (try W3 Total Cache).

Put Off Pingbacks And Trackbacks

Trackbacks and Pingbacks are absolutely unnecessary and reduce the speed of the website. When a visitor comes to your website, a trackback is created. This consumes the database and utilizes the web server, ultimately slowing down the entire website. Turn off these features from the discussion settings to boost the overall speed of the website.