With over 100 millions of websites across the world are powered by WordPress, it has become one of the most dominating content management systems on the web. The majority of business owners create professional looking websites for their start-up using this CMS platform – all thanks to its comprehensive range of themes and plugins. WordPress themes and plugins let you customize the design and functionality of your site.
With WordPress, you can create anything – be it a simple blog, travel portfolio or an e-commerce website. But this flexibility also means you need to put more efforts to make your site look more appealing and personalized. For higher conversion rates, you need to optimize every aspect of your WordPress site that can give rich user experience to your potential web visitors.
Fortunately, there are many useful WordPress optimization practices that can improve the overall performance of your site on the go. So, in this blog post, we will light upon the seven best WordPress optimization tips that can help you generate quality leads for your business.
7 power-packed WordPress Optimization Tips:
1. Choose Web Hosting Provider Wisely
Hosting plays one of the most crucial roles when it comes to creating a business-oriented website on WordPress. If you want to do a serious business, you need to choose the reliable hosting provider that can give a safe and secure environment and protect your site from hackers and other security threats.
So make sure that you opt for a right WordPress hosting provider that can provide you best hosting service and keep your site up and keep running even in adverse situations. Plus, they should also offer regular updates and backup solutions.
Note: Hostgator and BlueHost are the best WordPress hosting providers if you are just getting started.
2. Caching
Caching of a WordPress site becomes imperative if you want to improve the speed of your site. Let’s get down and understand why caching is crucial?
Since WordPress is a dynamic content management system, it loads web pages and posts from your database every time when a visitor accesses your site. It means that if 100 people visiting your site in a 5-minute window, your site will have to serve over 100 separate PHP requests to create the front pages for your existing visitors. This slows down the speed of your website, which ensures bad user experience.
However, you can overcome from this situation if you properly configure caching protocols on your WordPress site. It helps you prevent redundancy and improve the loading speed of your site. There are many powerful caching plugins for WordPress to help achieve the same quickly and efficiently.
Quick tip: W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and WP Fastest Cache are the best caching plugins for WordPress that you can use it for free.
3. Use quality WordPress theme(s)
With hundreds of WordPress themes available on the web, it becomes quite difficult to choose the perfect one from a reliable source.
You need to be very careful while selecting your theme from the available resources. If you are looking for a theme for your first web project, you can download the most suitable theme from the WordPress theme repository for free.
And if you are looking for premium one, make sure that you purchase from the reliable source – as they can offer you customized and well-coded theme that can automatically boost the performance of your site.
4. Delete all inactive plugins
WordPress offers a ton of plugins that let you embed additional features into your website, without any coding. But using too many plugins could downturn the speed of your website. So, it is better for you to check all your plugins and remove the unused ones. Also get rid of inactive plugins from your site.
Use the proper format while adding the plugin in your template files. Rather than using the following code:
<?php wp_page_navi(); ?>
Use the below code:
<?php if (function_exists(‘wp_page_navi’)) { wp_page_navi(); } ?>
If you use the first coding, and inactivate the plugin, your page will load along with error. But with the second form of coding ensures that WordPress will only use that code on the page if the plugin is active.
5. MySQL Database Optimization
This is a crucial step that can improve the performance of your website.
When you remove unused plugins they won’t necessarily depart from your site’s database. This can slow down the loading speed of your site.
To delete it from roots, you need to use WP Sweep plugin that can help you find those plugins and delete them from your database. The plugin optimizes your site by cleaning those unnecessary and duplicated data from your site.
6. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role when it comes to the visibility of a website on Google and other search engines. Search engine optimized websites not only improves visibility but also boosts the performance as a whole.
With the help of best SEO practices, you can optimize the content of your WordPress site for popular search engines. For effective results, you can also use the WordPress plugins, like Yoast SEO to achieve the same results quickly and easily.
Along with SEO, it is also essential to use the social engine optimization by generating the strong presence on multiple social media platforms to drive more social media visitors.
7. Track and delete spam comments
Although WordPress is a robust CMS tool, it can instantly collect spam if you don’t do anything about it. You should moderate all of your comments before publishing on your site. You can also set reCaptcha functionality on your comment box to prevent your site against hackers and spammers.
You can also strengthen the security of your site by blocking some suspicious IP addresses from your site. But if you want to delete only spam practices but still allow those users to access your site, you need to add the following coding to the .htaccess file:
ErrorDocument 503 “Commenting disabled”
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^60.173 [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^218.10
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wp-comments-post.php$
RewriteRule .* – [R=503,L]
Endnote
WordPress optimization becomes crucial when it comes to the performance of a website. With the help of the above tips, you can improve the visibility, accessibility and usability of your WordPress site.
Apart from these tips, you should always keep a backup of your website on a regular basis. Also, update your core WordPress, installed themes and plugins with their latest versions. This will protect your site from hackers and also boost its performance.