A website with fast functions and pages not only improves the usability and experience of visitors: speed is a factor of great impact for search engine positioning. Luckily, there are a variety of useful plugins on the market, as well as simple tricks to speed up WordPress and optimize its performance..
Before taking measures to optimize WordPress it is necessary to measure the performance of your website. There are many tools that help to find out how fast a website is and that show those aspects that can be improved.
The Google PageSpeed Insights tool measures the performance of web pages for mobile devices and for computers. Its analysis process falls into two categories: user experience and technical aspects. Part of user experience analysis is, for example, determining whether the mobile web fits the screen correctly. Technical aspects are analyzed in order to determine their influence on charging times. This tool does not report on overall load time, but it is helpful in that it offers suggestions for improvements. The report is made with an indicator in three categories:? Approved ?,? Recommended setting? or? adjustment needed ?..
At a glance, GT Metrix offers the user a comprehensive analysis of their website performance. The results are ordered by priority, which allows web page operators to speed up WordPress, working on those aspects that interfere with the correct loading speed of the web. For each criterion, the tool presents a brief comment in which possible actions are recommended. In addition to offering global values on the website, this tool also presents factor by factor results, as well as the possibility of directly comparing different pages on the same website.
The P3 Plugin Performance Profiler, which can be downloaded for free from the WordPress plugin directory, primarily looks at the influence of plugins on the performance of an entire WordPress page. The tool displays the total load time of all installed plugins, as well as the duration of individual installations exposing those responsible for poor performance..
The IONOS site also has a free tool to check the performance of a web page. IONOS Web Analysis checks the loading speed of a website, its general appearance, as well as SEO and security aspects. Once the process is finished, it presents the user with direct recommendations for optimization. Like the Google tool, the rating is divided into three categories:? Necessary improvements ?,? Recommended improvements? or? without defects ?.
A common cause of long loading times is oversized images. Reducing the size of the image will always have a significant impact on the loading time of the web. Ideally, images should be edited and optimized before being published. Programs such as Photoshop, with the "Save for Web" dialog box, or online tools such as TinyPNG allow you to make these types of adjustments without any problem. Also, some WordPress plugins facilitate automatic optimization of image files, such as WP Smush. Once enabled, it optimizes and compresses the images within the WordPress database.
Plugins for image optimization
The next item on the list is the optimization of CSS and JavaScript codes. It is often helpful to reduce extra spaces, line breaks, and indents to speed up WordPress. It is also possible to combine several files in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests, with programs like CSS Minifier.
Tools for optimization:
With each visit to a website, WordPress retrieves content from its database to display the entire website, resulting in longer loading times. Caching plugins generate a static version of the web, thus improving performance. Cachify, for example, defines specific parameters such as the validity or the caching location (that is, the database or the hard drive). Other tools such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache offer even more individual caching and configuration options.
Cache plugins for WordPress:
The speed with which a database responds to your queries is directly related to its size. Databases tend to grow gradually over time, as many web pages generally generate automatic backups . This means that it is very possible that unwanted data such as drafts, comments and even deleted articles, are still stored in the database. This hurts the performance of any web page. For this reason, regularly cleaning the databases is highly recommended, either manually or with the help of plugins.
Plugins for cleaning databases:
A great advantage that WordPress has is the large number of plugins available for optimization, although some of them are known to have a negative impact on the performance of a website. Every web administrator should periodically check which plugins are unnecessary or are no longer used; There are also alternatives to reduce the size of some extensions. The Performance Profiler Plugin , mentioned above, is perfect for identifying those aspects that interfere with the performance of WordPress.
Even the simplest actions can have a great influence on the performance of a web page. Accelerating WordPress and improving its loading times is not only important to have satisfied customers and decrease the bounce rate, it is also essential to achieve a better position in Google. In this way it is clear that optimizing WordPress is really worth it. There are hundreds of WordPress plugins to determine and improve the performance and loading speed of a website; These can also be used by users without experience or advanced knowledge in programming. Implementing these and other tools will go a long way to ensure that a website runs smoothly and offers a great user experience.