Ideas for optimizing your wordpress site

Having a website that is too slow is the best way to have a huge bounce rate and to lose many customers. To avoid this confusion, it is important to optimize the speed of your website: your pages will load faster and your visitors’ navigation will be smoother. Don’t panic, anyone can improve the speed of your website, especially WordPress sites, in several ways. Here are the easy tips to do so.

Keep your WordPress site up to date

As a well-maintained open source project, WordPress is frequently updated. Each update will not only provide new features, but will also resolve security issues and bugs. Your WordPress themes and plug-ins may also have regular updates.

As a website owner, it is your responsibility to keep your WordPress site, themes, and plug-ins up-to-date with the latest versions. Not doing so can make your site slow and unreliable, and leave you vulnerable to security threats.

Remove unnecessary plug-ins and themes

It is common to add new features to your site to keep it modern and relevant. On WordPress sites, this is done via WordPress themes and plug-ins. Often, new plug-ins replace the original features, making them less effective. Over time, your website can become filled with plug-ins and themes that haven’t been used in a while.

Too many plugins, especially outdated ones, can seriously affect the performance of your WordPress site. Usually, the first thing to do when optimizing WordPress is to remove or at least deactivate unnecessary plug-ins. Ideally, your website should only contain plug-ins that are essential to its operation.

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Lighten your images to improve the speed of your WordPress

Images are very important to illustrate your pages and posts. However, they can suffer a backlash if they are oversized.

What’s the point of importing an image that’s 2,000 pixels wide when blog posts are typically about 600 pixels wide? Always make sure to resize images using photo editing software or image resizing websites.

Image format is also important: always choose JPG over PNG. The latter is heavier (and therefore detrimental to the speed of your site), although it is of better quality and promotes transparency.

Divide comments into pages

Do you get a lot of comments on your blog posts? Congratulations! It’s a great indicator of an engaged audience. But the downside is that loading all those reviews will affect the speed of your site. WordPress provides a built-in solution for this. Simply go to “Settings” Discussions and check the box next to the “Split comments into pages” option.

Minifying CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Minification is one of the most useful techniques if you want to speed up WordPress. It tries to reduce the size of front-end files and scripts (HTML, CSS, JS) by removing special characters such as spaces and comments from these files. The result is exactly the same functionality, but in a smaller size.

Plug-ins that can help you minimize include Autoptimize and W3 total Cache. For a more in-depth look at how to improve website performance by minimizing files, check out a detailed tutorial.

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