5 Optimization Techniques for WordPress Websites
                     
5 Optimization Techniques for WordPress Websites 



5 Optimization 
Techniques for 
WordPress 
Websites


Have you ever been confronted with slow websites? Did you like 
them? No, no doubt!
Websites that take time to load annoy us. They greatly depreciate 
the user experience. Moreover, the statistics prove it. If your 
website is too slow, visitors may not have the patience to wait and 
sometimes prefer to go to your competitor!
In addition, the search engines, especially Google, is very sensitive 
to website performance. Indeed, it uses this parameter for 
referencing its results. If you want to increase the chances of being 
on the first page of Google, you will have every interest to have a 
quick website! Of course, speed is not the only SEO criterion used 
by search engines, but it is still part of it.


Do you feel that your website is slow? There are various tools online 
allowing you to test the speed of it. Here are three:
 Pingdom Tools
 GTmetrix
 Google PageSpeed Insights
However, do not take their results as the absolute truth. Each of 
these tools uses different weights to test your website's 
performance. This is why there are sometimes huge differences in 
results between these platforms. Now let's move on to the 5 
optimization techniques for your WordPress.


WordPress Hosting

Without a quality web hosting, getting a fast website is virtually impossible. For WordPress 
Hosting, I would say that there are 2 scenarios:
 Scenario #1

Either you know a little server and you install your WordPress website on an unmanaged 
hosting (including Shared or VPS hosting). This is the best value for money you can get 
and total flexibility on how you configure your server (PHP version, server-side caching, 
etc.). However, you will need the skills or a SysAdmin to configure your server.
 Scenario #2

Otherwise, use the services of a quality web host as Cloudways — 
WordPress Managed Hosting  — specializes in hosting WordPress websites. All their 
WordPress offers PHP 7+, HTTPS/2, a pre-configured cache system (known as 
ThunderStack), and development environment so you do not have to make your changes 
on the live version of your website. For me, Cloudways has the best quality/price ratio of 
the market for hosting WordPress website and I advise you to take a look at their offers.


WordPress Themes

Your theme is the foundation of your WordPress website. If it's 
important for the aesthetic side, it's also fundamental to the loading 
speed and code quality of your website. WordPress is the most used 
CMS in the world and has an incredible number of themes (which is 
its strength). But this diversity is double-edged! There are also a lot 
of themes that look pretty on paper but are poorly coded and will 
only slow down your website.
For this reason (among others) I use only Genesis Framework of 
StudioPress for all the themes that I develop (more details on why I 
choose Genesis Framework). I recommend you take a look at all 
Genesis compatible themes as they have all been developed to be 
fast with quality code.


WordPress Cache Plugin

There is also a whole range of cache plugins for WordPress (more or less good 
quality) that allow you to activate different things that I tell you in our guide like:
 caching pages
 Gzip compression
 the browser cache
 the minification of files
 CDN integration
 possibly other options depending on the plugin
Personally, I use Breeze, a free WordPress cache plugin on all the websites that I 
develop. This plugin is free, compatible with Apache and Nginx web servers and 
will allow you to configure all the elements I mentioned above in a minimalist 
way.


WordPress CDN

A Content delivery network (CDN) is used primarily to effectively 
disseminate the content of a website, whether the visitor is in any 
part of the world. The servers of the network being distributed all 
over the world, the visitor will always have a point that is close to 
him and who can provide the content more quickly, reducing the 
download time (latency).


WordPress Plugins

Plugins are great but do not overdo them. Each plugin can lower not only the 
security of your WordPress website but also and above all its performance. That's 
why I can only advise you to keep only those that are really essential to you.
When installing a plugin, do not forget to look at the date of the last update. If it's 
been 2-3 years since there was more, beware! It should not be up to date and 
there is, therefore, a strong risk that it is no longer optimized for recent versions of 
WordPress.
To help you detect plugins that slow down your website, you can install Query 
Monitor. "Queries by Component" lists the plugins that are loaded as well as their 
speed.
By applying these optimization techniques, you will already optimize much of your 
WordPress website compared to a normal installation. As you will see in the 
Pingdom Tools, GTmetrix,
And Google PageSpeed Insights reports, there are still other ways to optimize a 
WordPress website.