Built on PHP, WordPress ensures the development of highly functional sites without complicated changes. While tricky website adjustments are now a thing of the past, speed remains a consistent concern for WordPress site owners.
In today’s digital age, achieving a high search engine ranking and providing a better user experience necessitate making a WordPress website faster and smoother, with optimized WordPress themes and fast WordPress hosting playing a critical role.
Optimizing a WordPress theme can improve search engine ranking, decrease loading time, and reduce bounce rate. All this contributes to achieving a site that is highly profitable.
In this blog, we’ll discuss practical tips and tricks to optimize your WordPress theme, ensuring you can speed up your WordPress site easily:
- Choose the Right Hosting
- Add WP Cache Plugin
- Optimize Your Images
- Efficient Content Delivery Network
- Be Cautious with Videos
- Select Well-Optimized WP Theme
- Focusing on CSS & JavaScript
- Eliminate Spam Comments
- Monitor Installed Plugins
- Optimize Your Homepage
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1. Choose the Right Hosting
Selecting a good wordpress hosting provider is essential because a strong foundation can be useful in erecting a powerful structure. It is all about picking the right hosting space for adding the required speed. In this regard, one should be careful enough that they must not select a shared hosting server. Just think that too many websites on a single server will definitely affect the speed and business too. I will prefer to choose managed WordPress hosting platform.
2. Add WP Cache Plugin
Integrating a WordPress caching Plugin is another factor that can be considered to boost the speed of the WordPress theme. In fact, one should have a separate cache plugin for the different pages. In this way, it will support the efficiency of the page and lends its distinctive speed. One of the most useful Cache plugins is WP Super Cache; it can help you in enhancing the speed of your site.
3. Optimize Your Images
The use of heavy images tends to create a problem in the “bandwagon”. It kills the downloading speed, and the user will find another website for his task. Of course, no one wants to lose business. So, compression of images through related tools such as Tiny PNG can be helpful. Apart from this, cropping the image size can be effectively managed in Adobe PS through the batch process.
4. Efficient Content Delivery Network
Making use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in creating a WordPress-based website helps to a large extent. It allows loading files to the nearby data center for the users. It also distributes the files from a server to a server throughout the world for easy loading of the information.
5. Be Cautious with Videos
It is better to avoid using too many videos because videos take too much space and this may affect the speed of WordPress-based websites. Certainly, one should use only the requisite videos but have them as less as possible will be more useful.
6. Select Well-Optimized WP Theme
There is a necessity to pick optimized WordPress theme from professional developers, which is well-coded and exceptionally structured. It will surely enhance the overall performance of the website and make it user-friendly too. After all, websites are always looked upon as a means to carry the profitable business on the global front.
7. Focusing on CSS & JavaScript
Minifying and combining external CSS as well as JavaScript files is a necessary step to enhance the speed of WordPress. As a part of this procedure, removal of whitespace, comments and additional characters from JavaScript and CSS takes place. Along with this, combining individual files that get loaded one-by-one is also mandatory for the better performance of the website.
8. Eliminate Spam Comments
Make sure you remove all spam comments as they can quickly deplete your server resources. This can be done using the Akismet plugin that helps you block harmful comments. Apart from Akismet, here are some other plugins that you can consider using to get rid of spam comments:
- Spam Comments Cleaner
- Stop Spam Comments
- WP-SpamShield Anti-Spam
9. Monitor Installed Plugins
Plugins are central to WordPress, but we all know that they can affect the loading time of your site. The trick here is to use only plugins really necessary for the proper functioning and compatible with your WordPress theme.
In order to optimize WordPress theme, remove those that are not essential and if your website still has to load pages, try to disable the plugin one at a time and re-test your loading time. You will detect which plugin is responsible for this slowdown.
10. Optimize Your Homepage
It is highly likely that when visitors arrive on your WordPress site for the first time, they do so by accessing your homepage. That’s why you need to make sure it loads quickly and attracts as many visitors as possible.
Here are the best tips to easily optimize your homepage:
- Reduce your content: Instead of displaying the full content of each article, make sure that only excerpts are visible on the first page of your site.
- Limit the number of articles per page.
- Remove the social media widgets you do not need on your homepage, it makes more sense to have them appear only on the individual pages of the articles.
- Get rid of inactive plugins that are not essential to your home page.
- Keep a clean, simple and bright design, carefully choose your style, scripts, and theme and remember that in the world of web design, the least is often the best.
Final Thoughts
WordPress is one of the most important and essential platforms that has created ways to make better websites. By making use of above tips, you can speed up the functional prospect to optimize WordPress theme. It is a user-friendly CMS, which is easy to operate. Now, there is no need for an expert to keep making changes to the website because this practice turns out to be a “pricey affair”.
As a thank you for reading through the article here’s an exclusive discount code, i.e., CLOUDWAYS you can use this code while checkout and get an exclusive 20% discount on any WordPress theme or Theme Club.
Disclaimer: This is a guest post by Jaka Smid, UI/UX Designer & Co-founder at ProteusThemes. The opinions and ideas expressed herein are the author’s own, and in no way reflect Cloudways position.
Mustaasam Saleem
Mustaasam is the WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways. Where he actively works and loves sharing his knowledge with the WordPress Community. When he is not working, you can find him playing squash with his friends, or defending in Football, and listening to music.
