WordPress Speed Optimization in 9 Steps
WordPress is one of the most preferred website bases by people who own websites. The reasons for this are its excellent search engine compatibility and its easy customization.
WordPress’s suitability for customization also offers significant advantages. Of course, in order to gain all these advantages, you may encounter errors and problems at times. In particular, slowing down its speed is one of the major problems. This situation directly affects both user experience and site performance.
Site speed may experience a slowdown problem over time as a result of the plugins used. Sometimes the plugins used on the site need to be updated. Updates made help to use the plugins more efficiently. In this way, negative situations that may cause the site speed to decrease can be prevented. This point is also emphasized in the WordPress optimization step. We will suggest 9 effective steps for site speed optimization. You can also increase your site speed with these steps.
Of course, you don't need to be a Webmaster to handle this situation. Let's just say that you need time and patience. You will also need a good source of guidance. This source is presented to you in this article.
WordPress Optimization In order to successfully complete the process, simply follow the instructions we have created for you below.
- Measure Your WordPress Speed
First of all, we do not start by measuring the current speed and performance values of the website we plan to optimize. Because determining how our website currently performs, the situations that cause it to slow down, and the factors that affect its performance will allow us to more easily determine the path to a solution. Monitoring site performance should be your starting point. First, you need to identify how the site is performing, the situations that cause slowness or the elements that affect performance. Then you can focus on finding a solution. There are various tools to measure site speed. You can measure site speed using these tools. The next step is to implement effective solutions for the problem.
You can use GTmetrix for this. It will provide you with a detailed performance analysis by combining your Google Page Speed and YSlow values. Then, if you need optimization, you can follow the next steps to control the situation.
- Get Rid of Unnecessary Burdens
We can understand that WordPress has an easily customizable structure from the plugins and themes that many developers offer for this web base. For this reason, we want to use new plugins and new themes to improve our website and make it more modern or more functional.
While doing this, we often come across that after a while our website turns into an incredibly dense plugin dump.
When website owners install a new theme, they may not remove the old one, or they may load the site with heavy loads by constantly installing plugins for renewal. To get rid of this situation, you will definitely need to identify and remove the plugins that are useless and no longer needed. This will reduce the load on the website and allow it to work with more performance.
Again, if you have made any theme changes, be sure to delete the old one. Many users try to make the site more special with plugins and theme selection. However, while trying to make the site more effective, they may make the mistake of installing a lot of plugins. Each plugin installed unnecessarily affects the speed of the site negatively. In fact, some site owners may not even need to delete the old theme when they choose a new theme. All these points cause the site to carry unnecessary load. As a result, the site speed may slow down.
To increase the performance of your site, you should get rid of all these loads. You can delete the plugins you do not use and remove the old themes you do not use if they are still on your site. When you reduce the loads on your site, you can observe that the speed increases even more.
- Minify Your HTML, Java and CSS Codes
You can replace the codes on the site with smaller ones that have the same function. The main purpose here is to use code accumulations that have the same function but are smaller in size. We can do this with plugins, as well as manually minimizing the heavy and large theme files of our website. This can be done by removing unnecessary spaces and characters. Codes that are free of unnecessary spaces and characters prevent your site's speed from being negatively affected. You can also do this with the help of plugins. Some plugins you will use scan the theme files on your site.
After scanning, high-dimensional codes on the site are detected and can be reduced to smaller sizes. The main plugins you can use in this sense are Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache. These plugins help compress your HTML, Java and CSS Codes.
- Enable Gzip Compression
In addition to reducing code structures, another way to increase site speed is to activate Gzip compression. Your site visitors can sometimes upload files they deem necessary to your site via a remote server. In this step, the larger the size of the uploaded files, the slower the site speed will be. To get rid of this situation, you can use the Gzip compression method. It is possible to reduce the size of files uploaded remotely with the Gzip compression method. WP-Rocket is one of the alternatives that can be used for the compression method.
Apart from minimizing various code structures, one of the most important WordPress speedup processes is to activate Gzip compression.
Users visiting our website must download the necessary files from a remote server. Therefore, the larger these files are, the slower the website will load.
We can reduce the size of these remotely uploaded files with the Gzip compression method. You can do this with a single click with the WP-Rocket plugin.
You can also perform this operation by adding the codes below to your .Htaccess file.
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
# For Older Browsers Which Can't Handle Compression
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
</IfModule>
- Optimize Images
If you do not pay much attention to the curvature of images when adding them to your website, this can be a big problem in the future. Since high-resolution images will cause high traffic on your website, you should definitely optimize the images on your site from time to time.
Image optimization is one of the important factors that affect site speed. If you do not pay attention to the size of the images you add to the site, site speed will be negatively affected. Especially large resolution images can take up more space in terms of size. However, this does not mean that you should include low resolution images on your site. You can optimize images with some plugins you will use.
While optimizing, you may be able to reduce the size of your images without compromising on resolution quality. Smush Image Compression and Optimization Plugin is a simple and useful plugin that you can use in this step. It helps you optimize the images on your site without compromising on quality. Smush Image Compression and Optimization Thanks to the plugin, you can optimize all the images on your website and reduce their size without compromising their quality.
- Split Your Long Content into Pages
One of the points you should pay attention to for website optimization is to divide the pages with long content. It usually helps to store the numerous comments coming to the content in a more valuable collective controlled manner. The steps to be taken to perform this process can be listed as follows:
- Log in to WordPress dashboard
- Go to Settings
- Enter the discussion section
- Set maximum number of comments per page
- Upgrade Your PHP Version
Never be afraid of upgrading your PHP version, because the benefits it provides can be a lifesaver for your website.
Upgrading the PHP version is also one of the steps that will be useful in increasing the speed of the site. Using an up-to-date PHP version can increase the speed of the site up to 2 times. PHP 5 sürümüne göre PHP 7’nin tam 2 kat daha hızlı olduğu bilindiğine göre, PHP sürümünü yükseltmeniz için hiçbir engel yoktur. Ayrıca WordPress PHP 7’nin bellek optimizasyonundan da yararlandığı için performansınızda yaklaşık %30 – %50 bir iyileştirme sağlayabilirsiniz.
- Use a Cache Plugin
Thanks to the cache system, you can provide your visitors with a faster surfing experience. Since cache mechanisms store their information in browsers, visitors will be able to browse your websites faster after their first visit. Again, this is one of the most effective methods for your WordPress sites to work more efficiently.
Thanks to the caching mechanism, the data stored in the browser allows visitors to browse faster during their next visit. This affects the performance of the WordPress site more positively. Similarly, you can use the WP-Rocket and W3 Total Cache plugins in this step. For this, you can use plugins such as WP-Rocket and W3 Total Cache.
- Using CDN
The use of CDN, which is the last step of the WordPress optimization process, is a life-saving importance, especially for websites with intensive content and functionality.
Thanks to the use of CDN, it allows the request to be made from the server closest to the current location of the visitor connecting to the web page. This will shorten the distance and allow your website to respond faster. Affordable CDN Service You can visit our page to purchase.
This step is especially vital for sites with very dense content and functionality. Using CDN allows site visitors to make requests from the server closest to their location. This step helps the site respond faster because the distance between them is shortened.
