How To Improve WordPress Speed & Performance
Optimised Images
Poor image optimisation is one of the main reasons why your website doesn’t load quickly. In particular, larger images over 5000px or several MB in size can create greater page file sizes and significantly reduce load time. WordPress offers a range of plugins that help you improve site performance through optimised images.
Maintained Plugins
As a very general rule of thumb, it’s best to have no inactive and fewer than 20 active plugins. It’s also extremely important to make sure your plugins are updated to their latest versions so that they achieve maximum capacity. If you’re not sure how to do this safely, then our affordable website maintenance services are a great way to ensure your site remains up to date, secure and performance enhanced.
Maintained Theme
An optimised, updated theme is another sure-fire way to help you maintain website performance. Older themes, which often use deprecated coding and require more requests, may cause issues – so updating your theme will ensure your site is up to standard with most modern technology.
If you have any unused themes, it’s best to remove them and keep one default theme for potential issues. If your theme uses many scripts or requests, you might consider changing to a new theme.
Again, website maintenance services are critical when it comes to keeping your theme up to date and performance oriented.
Optimised Requests
When your site loads, it sends out a number of requests for files to load to keep your site looking as desired. These requests can increase your site’s load time.
By ‘minimising’ your code and markup in these files with minification, you’ll be implementing one of the best ways to improve your site’s performance and accessibility while also creating a better user experience (UX).
Even though there are many WordPress plugins out there that are able to assist with minification and streamlining your site requests, care should always be taken before carrying out any of the above. There have been many instances of clients ‘breaking their sites’ by trying to enhance them with generic minification plugins. If you’re not sure, contact DigitUX for help.
Outdated PHP Version
Maintaining the latest version of PHP ensures quick response and load times for your site. It also ensures that your site is running on the most secure version, so be sure to keep your site’s PHP updated to the minimum recommended version.
If your WordPress site is currently running on an outdated and insecure of PHP, you’ll be notified of this in your WordPress dashboard. From there, all you have to do is reach out to your web hosting company who can update your PHP to the latest and more secure version.
If you have any unused themes, it’s best to remove them and keep one default theme for potential issues. If your theme uses many scripts or requests, you might consider changing to a new theme.
Again, website maintenance services are critical when it comes to keeping your theme up to date and performance oriented.
Caching
Through caching, frequently served data is stored and recalled to improve speed and performance. Caching helps by serving static responses to users from your site’s cache, thus improving the page load time. While most platforms have default caching in place, you may need to install a plugin in some instances.
At DigitUX, we install and setup our SEO Clients with the premium version of WP Rocket in order to keep your site fast and give a boost from Google by addressing their Core Web Vitals.
Want To Improve Your Site's Performance? Contact Us!
If your site is loading slowly or not performing well, contact the team at DigitUX. We offer reliable, affordable SEO & digital marketing services tailored to the individual needs of Australian small businesses. For information on improving the performance of your website and small business SEO plans, call us today on (07) 3535 0633