5 Simple Steps to Optimize Your WordPress Site

5 Simple Steps to Optimize Your WordPress Site

“Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.”

– Lou Dorfsman

If you need to attract more traffic to your wordpress site, you need to take care of it, and I’m not talking just about the content, I’m talking about optimizing it. Make it more attractive, more eye candy, so people will stay more than 10 seconds and see what is on it.

You have gone through this also, you surf the web, you discover a new website, you check the layout, and then you go search for something else, without ever going back. Loading time is a great factor also, among other variables, so a good host is a must. Moreover, the security of the website matters too. I believe you will directly close those websites with “Your connection is not private” error.” Well, let’s stop chit chatting and get straight to it. We have compiled 5 simple steps to optimize your wordpress site.

1. Cache your site

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Cache your site, so your pages don’t need to regenerate for each visitor, instead they are generated once by the PHP engine. We recommend two cache plugins such as W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. W3 Total Cache has improved conversion rates and site performance which affect your sites rank on Google, instant subsequent page views,  optimized progressive render,  reduced page load time, improved web server performance that will sustain high traffic periods.

It is compatible with shared hosting, virtual private/ dedicated servers / clusters, caching of database objects in memory or on disk, and many more. It is the only WPO – WordPress Performance Optimization – framework. Well, now you are probably wondering what does WP Super Cache brings to the table. It is a plugin that generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog.

These static files are served to users who are not logged in, users who have not left a comment on your blog, and users who have not viewed a password protected post. This plugin serves cached files in 3 ways: Mod_Rewrite, PHP and Legacy caching. Try them both and see what suits you best!

2. Host files externally

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Hosting files externally will take some of the load from the traffic that arrives on your page. Have you tried using Google Fonts? It is used by professional designers and developers, among beginners and others that just want to try it out. The really great thing is that they are open source and easily customizable. You can use them for free, share them to your friends and colleagues with no worries of breaking copyright rules.

Another great one is Amazon CloudFront. Cloud Front is a content delivery web service that distributes it to end users that have low latency, high data transfers speeds, and with no commitments. Among their customers you can notice NASA, imdb, PBS, and Sega. With features such as device detection, geo targeting, cross origin resource sharing (CORS), support for POST/PUT and other HTTP methods, geo restriction, low TLSS is really hard not to get sucked in by them. They offer so much for so little pay.

If you think that is too much for you, try and use Jetpack. They don’t offer as much as CloudFront, and they are an entry level for this kind of thing. You can customize your CSS, and you get all sorts of stats, with no additional load on your server. Some of their key features are site verification tools, related posts, markdowns, monitoring, Photon – that lets you accelerate your site by loading images from WordPress.com CDN and InfiniteScroll. It just comes down to what you need, and what you want to use.

3. Remove unneeded plugins

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If you install too many plugins, it may cause your website to have loading problems, and you don’t want loading problems – they will surely make users avoid your website, and you will lose precious traffic. Monitor it with the P3, Plugin Performance Profiler, plugin.

It simply measures the impact your plugins have on your website, it shows you performance stats, and tells you what is unnecessarily inefficient, so you can delete them. Don’t just deactivate them, because they will not only take up file space on your server, but also they will fill up your database and will surely slow down your site. Try and use      the WordPress Admin panel to properly remove your unwanted plugins.

4. Optimize theme

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You need to respect the WordPress theme standards. Don’t know what they are exactly? Check them out here. You can do this with this little cool plugin called Theme-Check. This plugin lets you run automated tests that even WordPress uses, for their theme submissions. Don’t worry, it is not really that hard, in fact, it is super easy. The tests are run through a simple admin menu that also displays the results once the tests are finished.

Another cool tool that you can use is CSS Hat. But for it, you have to pay 34.99$, compatible with Mac and Windows. If you are not pleased with it, you can get your money-back guaranteed, if you don’t go over the 30 day period. CSS Hat “turns Photoshop layer styles to CSS3 instantly” and not only that but it also provides support for 3 CSS Preprocessors SASS, LESS or Stylus.

You can use it in CS4, CS5 and CS6 all the same. It is easily customizable and lets you use optional vendor prefixes or dimensions to get the maximum value. Josh Brewere, principal designer at Twitter has this to say about CSS Hat – “These days I have been trying to spend less time in Photoshop and move to code faster. But whenever I do need to spend some time pushing things around, having CSS Hat there to quickly export the CSS of what I just did makes my life a lot easier. Saves me a ton of time.”

5. Maintain your database

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Where would you be without taking care of your database? I’ll tell you. You will be nowhere. phpMyAdmin comes in handy, and helps you all the way. It usually comes pre-installed, but if somehow you don’t have it, or you want to reinstall it, you can do it by going to their website right here.

It has an intuitive web interface, it offers support for most MySQL features, like browse and drop databases, tables, views, fields and indexes, maintenance server, database and tables, with proposals on server configuration, manage MySQL users and privileges, import data from CSV and SQL, administering multiple servers and much more.

About

Claudia Radau is passionate about marketing and photography. Loves to travel and has a soft spot for dogs. She handles PR for Pixel77.com and Inkydeals.com. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook and/or Google+.

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