WordPress Optimization
Let’s make your WordPress website faster & more scalable
Grow your online business on a rock-solid foundation.
Accelerate the growth of your online business by improving the speed and scalability of your website.
Better conversion rate
Studies made by Amazon, Google & others had shown clearly that faster websites have an improved conversion rate. The slower your website is, the less likely your visitor is to buy, contact you, or comment. 1 second slower equals 7% reduction in conversions.
Better ranking
Google loves faster websites. A faster site ranks better in the search engines leading to more visitors to your site. Sure, we cannot guarantee better rankings in the search results, however having a faster website will increase your chances for better rankings.
More pageviews.
1 second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer pageviews. The faster your website loads, the more likely your visitors are to spend a larger amount of time on your website. That’s more pageviews for you and more money from ads.
Save Money
A lightweight website will consume less server resources so it will be capable of sustaining higher traffic without the need to upgrade your hosting plan. So, if you have an optimized website you can host it even on a shared hosting plan and save money.
1.
Testing
Test how your website performs with several tools like PageSpeed Insights, YellowLab Tools & GTMetrix.
2.
Find bad plugins
Look for plugins that affect your website performance and replace them with better alternatives.
3.
Implement caching
Depending or your hosting environment, choose the best caching solution for your website.
4.
Reduce page size & requests
Identify what’s useless (like a contact form CSS file on a page without a contact form) and eliminate the bloat.
5.
Optimize images for the web
Optimize images for the web using a premium dedicated plugin (like Smush Pro) without losing quality.
6.
Clean up the WordPress database
A performance essential, cleaning up the database can massively improve WordPress speed.
7.
Other tweaks
Implement several small tips & tricks to tweak WordPress to perform better.
For a limited time, you can get our WordPress Performance Audit & Optimization service for a low price.
DIY – WordPress Optimization Tutorials
You can find information below to speed up WordPress by yourself.
From my experience optimizing WordPress websites, if your site is slow it is not because you don’t have a CDN or the CSS is not minified but mostly because of bloated code, bloated database, unoptimized images or a bad host.
The hosting
So, I would say that the first layer of a rock-solid foundation is web hosting optimized for your application – i.e., WordPress. If you’re on shared hosting it’s almost impossible for the provider to guarantee a consistent level of performance and you should move to a better hosting solution. Not a different shared hosting provider (although some are better than the generic-investment-fund-owned ones), but a different hosting solution altogether.
Like managed WordPress Hosting.
Next, the second layer of a rock-solid foundation is the code.
The strength of this foundation is given by the quality of the PHP code in WordPress themes and plugins. Bad code can sabotage your success and you might not even know it. You need to choose a well-coded theme & well-coded plugins.
The themes
If you’re looking for free WordPress themes, the WordPress.org theme directory is a good place to get quality themes as the code is being reviewed by the review team.
There is also a great deal of premium WordPress themes, it’s impossible to test every theme out there for performance, we like and use the Genesis Framework. From our experience, especially with shared hosting customers, those who used the Genesis Framework were able to handle higher levels of traffic before reaching their account limits.
What about Themeforest?
Most themes on Themeforest do not focus on performance. They are made for beginners, people who don’t have a clear objective of what they want to do with their websites so they choose WordPress themes based on beauty and ease of use.
Hundreds of features and ease of use means more sales for the developer but it also means more bloat for your website. If you want my personal opinion, I would stay away from easy visual drag’n’drop builder fluff & stuff.
I’m not saying all easy visual builders suck at performance, I’m just saying that if want your website to be successful you need to choose wisely and build it on a solid foundation.
A solid foundation means a well-coded theme made by respected developers, even if that means more work or a higher cost.
The plugins
Most performance issues are caused by WordPress plugins.
Just like themes, the plugins must have good, clean code. You only need one bad plugin to slow down your site. Each plugin you activate in your WordPress install will add extra MB to memory usage. Some plugins more, some less.
There are tens of thousands of plugins, free or premium, and many of them are not built responsibly. Being so many, it’s impossible for a site owner to know them all.
So, how do you choose the right WordPress plugins?
How do you know what plugin consumes too many resources, what plugins are well-coded, what plugins affect site performance?
In choosing the plugins I follow a few simple rules…
#1 presence on WordPress.org
Very rarely I choose plugins that are not listed in the WordPress plugin directory. I try to stay away from plugins from shady websites.
#2 who makes the plugin
I rarely choose plugins made by people that I haven’t heard of. Here’s a short list of plugin makers:
- Automattic
- Bill Erickson
- Nathan Rice
- Remkus de Vries
- Donncha O Caoimh
- Human Made Limited
- Kevin Weber
- Andrew Norcross
- Justin Tadlock
- Joost de Valk
- Brandon Kraft
- Thomas Griffin
- Syed Balkhi
- Ron Rennick
- Stefano Lissa
There are many good developers, it’s hard to list everyone.
#3 frequent updates
Another thing that I look for is the frequency at which the plugin is updated, I check compatibility with the latest version of WordPress and the developer’s willingness to answer support questions.
#4 plugin reviews
I search Google for reviews of the particular plugins I want to use. It’s a great source of information on how people used the plugin, if they had issues with it, etc. Keep in mind though that some reviews might be just affiliates marketing articles.
#5 test the plugin
Ultimately, I just test the plugin myself.
I install it on a test site, check all functionalities, how many JS and CSS files it loads, how much memory it consumes, how many queries it makes to the database, etc…
You can also check the plugins with Plugin Inspector, similar to the Theme Check for themes, it checks to make sure your plugins do not use deprecated or unsafe functions.
There’s also P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler), you can use it to see which plugins are slowing down your site. It is usually very useful in finding if a plugin is bad but sometimes it’s inaccurate and it doesn’t help much. In those cases I use Query Monitor – this is a useful plugin to view debugging and performance information on database queries, hooks, conditionals, HTTP requests, redirects and more. I find this a very useful plugin to identify if anything is dragging your website down.
Speaking of queries, Delicious Brains (makers of Advanced Custom Fields, WP Migrate DB Pro and WP Offload Media) have an interesting article on query optimization.
Recommended plugins
I have a list of plugins I use on almost every website I own and I recommend them to my clients.
To help you, we’ve published a list of recommended plugins. These are tested by us or are successfully used by our customers. We’ve also listed those that are not recommended, due to performance issues.
Also, WPEngine has a list of disallowed plugins. It’s a good resource to see which plugins might be too resource hungry and remove them from your website.
The tweaks
You can follow our free tutorials below to make your WordPress website faster.
1. Test & identify problems
To improve your website’s loading speed, you must first test thoroughly and identify what is causing the problem. There are several tools to test, follow our tutorial to learn more.
2. Install & setup a cache plugin
If you’re on shared hosting one of the easiest ways to improve WordPress speed and scalability is to implement a cache. There are many caching plugins for the job, follow our tutorial to see what we recommend.
3. Optimize your images for the web
One of the factors that might slow down your website is using big photos unoptimized for the web. Follow our tutorial to learn more about how to optimize your images.
4. Clean up your WordPress database
A slim database is crucial for your WordPress performance. From our experience, cleaning the database is one of the most useful improvements you can do.
Keep in mind, our objective for writing these tutorials is real performance, not just better grades on popular testing tools.
5. Keep Monitoring
Your WordPress website should be monitored, secured and updated.
If you want to spend your time elsewhere, let us take care of your website. We can provide better hosting, we can speed up your website with our optimization service, and our maintenance & monitoring services can give you peace of mind.