Before we begin with how, let’s understand why exactly it’s important to focus on performance. After a line of experiments conducted over 4-6 weeks, it showed negative impact on number of clicks, revenue generated and user experience. The Google found that interaction below and above the fold reduces significantly with just milliseconds or time delays.
This makes it clear that time delays even under half a second can and will have impact on business metrics. In an effort for the betterment of user-experience as well as conversion rates, you need wordpress web development services to perform optimization. Below listed are the ways to go about it on the wordpress.
Hosting: If your site is going to be self hosted, you better ensure it’s on the right server. And, I know when something sounds too good to be true, the chances are increased that it actually is. There are actually no bad or good hosting providers, but there is a way of understanding which hosting provider will be right for you.
Theme and Homepage Performance: When the interface is faster, you feel good. And when it becomes the matter about when you feel in control. Perceived performance is all about letting your visitors believe that something is happening. A lot of these actually has to do with how faster your theme loads. A cleanly coded theme adds little-to-no bloat to overall page weight.
You can also go forward and optimize your homepage specifically, but I rather recommend going minimalistic. Keep it simple as well as sophisticated instead of stuffing the page with too many widgets and elements.
Content Delivering Network: Consider these as an army of servers spreaded over across the globe, all engaged in providing static cache files of your site to visitors closest to their respective locations.
For a real dramatic performance boost, go with CDN. Other than super fast speed, you’ll also get consistent performance and uniform global coverage: all these at very reasonable price. Remember, if you’re already using tools like Google analytics, facebook, etc in your WordPress website, you’re already using a CDN partly!
Database Optimization: Any website developed on wordpress knows and works with total of 5 languages: HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP and MYSQL. The last one makes your database which tracks and stores all your information that you uploaded on the internet through your website.
This database will become slow over time due to redundant post revisions, unapproved comments, duplicate metadata and others. Database optimization is all about cleaning the drive to make space for other things.
Image Compression: It’s rare that you do not have any image on your site, but I suggest to go without them, than to use grainy and pixilated ones that can ruin your website speed. Plug-ins like Compress JPEG and PNG images, EWWW image optimizer and WP smush helps to keep a striking balance between image quality and size.
Plug-in Diagnosis: The first reason why I stress on the importance to go for feature-rich plug-ins is because they serve more than one purposes. Some plug-ins might take longer to load than the rest. But, to find the culprits, use Plug-in performance profiler which is a plug-in itself. Check the reports to discover the misfits, if you discover any, then find their alternatives and replace them with lighter plug-ins.
End Note! Remember that much like staying fit, the performance optimization is a continuous effort. The practices may improve and change, but you’ll still require to devote time, resources and energy into it.
With advancements in the WordPress web development, the speed optimization may improve and change, but you will require to give your time and energy into it.