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In this article, we'll share a few tips to optimize your WordPress site, as well as speed it up for quicker load times.
The first thing you should do if you haven't installed a cache plugin. W3 Total Cache would be our recommended plugin. With a few basic tweaks, it'll greatly help to lower load times on your site and also consume fewer resources. Please see the short video below for the basic configuration needed:
Database caching is generally recommended.
Caching is useful if you are over on CPU usage, as it stores a snapshot of your website and can serve pages quicker. That means if someone has recently visited your site, most site data will be stored, so they don't have to retrieve it again from the server.
If you have many images on your pages, an image optimization plugin will help condense the file size of uploaded images to decrease loading times further. There are many plugins for this, but we'd recommend the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin:
Oftentimes, people go overboard with plugins. While plugins are useful in WordPress, their over-usage can slow down your site or otherwise cause excessive resource usage. When evaluating site slowness, we suggest the following:
- Take a look at the plugins you have installed.
- Remove the ones you don't really need or those that are particularly resource-intensive – such as backup plugins.
- Backups can be effectively accomplished through Shared Cloud Backups, which covers ALL of your files and has a full cPanel backup.
- To analyze your plugin resource usage, you can analyze the TTFB (Time To First Byte) and optimize your site.
- Using a different theme can also help, as some WordPress themes can have features that you do not need and may cause excessive page load times.
Written by Hostwinds Team / August 21, 2017