Let you WordPress site perform 4X better: 5 Ways to Improve

Posted by Victor Bajaj on February 2nd, 2019

If your site takes time to load, then more than 40 per cent of people will leave your site. Yes, your site's performance is important. Not only this, site performance is an important part of your overall online presence. With a slow loading website, you are automatically creating a bad user experience, which will only negatively reflect on the success of your site, and reduce the chances of becoming a loyal fan.

Plus, you'll rank lower in search engines too. Fortunately, optimizing your WordPress site for speed and performance is not difficult. You have already given yourself a foot by choosing WordPress. Below we provide five different ways that you should ask when you hire freelance WordPress developer to improve the speed and performance of your WordPress site.

Measure your current performance:

If you do not know your current matrix, then you can not improve the performance of your site.

• There are two different tools that will analyze your site and give you a breakdown of how it stacks up to the rest of the web.
• The first is Pingdom, and the second is GTmetrix. You might find similar reports from both tools, but the more data you can compare.
• Open the tool above, input your URL and record your results. You will use them after working through the steps given below.

1. Compress and optimize your images:

It does not matter which type of site you run your images, maybe some of the biggest files will be. For this reason, they can actually erase your loading speed.
Fortunately, there are a few different tools you can use to customize your images and minimize them without sacrificing quality.
The first step is optimizing your images before uploading to WordPress. This is done in two steps.
First, the size of your images is changing so the dimensions are correct. If your site uses only images which are 600px by 500px, then there is no point in uploading an image that is 5000px of 6000px.
Once you resize your images properly, you can upload them to an online tool called TinyPNG. This nifty tool will compress your images and will shorten them without any loss of quality. Now, you are ready to upload them to WordPress.

You can install a plugin named Smush Image Compression and Optimization to further advance your image optimization efforts. This plugin will optimize any images in your existing library, and optimize the images as soon as you upload it to your site.

2. Optimize your WordPress database:

Over time, your WordPress database may be very messy and full of junk files that you no longer need. Rather than giving these stacks up and affecting your performance, you can actually get rid of them with the help of a plugin.
Now, you can do this process manually. But, this includes accessing your MySQL database and possibly even technical for most users.

There are WP-DBManager and WP-Optimize to use two easiest plugins.
The process of using these plugins is simple. Install it from the backend of WordPress and decide whether you want to optimize, repair, back up, or restore the old version of your database. You do not have to use both plugins, but instead, decide which of your requirements is most appropriate.

3. Use the power of the caching plugin:

Caching can be a very effective way to improve your performance for high-traffic sites.
Every time a page or post is loaded on your site without a caching plugin, information is to be retrieved from your CSS files and databases. A static HTML file is generated from that information and is served to your visitors. Since there are many levels of communication, this process can take a lot of time.
A caching plugin will store the versions of those HTML files so that they can be loaded at any time on your site at any time reaching that page.
Two of the most used caching plugs include W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. When properly installed and configured, these plugins will significantly reduce the loading speed and improve the overall performance of your site.
If you are using a high-performance WordPress host, there is a chance in caching already created there. Therefore, check it before deciding to install one of the above plugins.

4. Remove unused plugins and themes:

Over time, all of our sites experience disorder. It is important that your site no longer needs to work regularly.

Maybe, you have a group of topics that you have not used in years. Or, you may have plugins installed, most of which work without any purpose. If you have a lot of unused plugins and themes, it not only leaves you open for more security vulnerabilities but it also negatively affects your site's performance.
Go to your WordPress dashboard and disable and delete any themes or plugins you are no longer using. You may have too many media that you are not using or linking to.
To find and remove this unused media, use a plugin named Media Cleaner. This plugin will scan your site for media, which you are no longer using, and will give you the option to delete it.

5. Choose a display-oriented host:

One of the biggest influences of your site's performance is your host. Therefore, if you are still running on a basic shared hosting package, then it's probably time to upgrade.

Even if you apply all of the above tips, then you probably will not be able to make much improvement using the show host. Your best choice as a WordPress site owner will be to use WordPress-specific host. This style of the host will have a server setup which is fully customizable to run WordPress. You can also keep an eye on things like an integrated CDN, which will store copies of your site on the server worldwide.

Hopefully, your Freelance WordPress Developer has better equipped to speed up your existing WordPress site. As our attention attracts, the speed of your site decreases and becomes more important.