Performance is becoming a major ranking factor these days as websites which load quicker, hold a better rank than the one which is slow in comparison. If you have a website on WordPress or are planning to start one, there are few important factors to keep in mind. These techniques will drive more traffic to your site, thus providing strong chances of conversion.
Upgrade to PHP 7.1
The latest upgrade, PHP 7.1 powers everything from websites and mobiles to enterprises and the cloud. PHP 7.1 is recommended by many web design company in chennai. Bringing about explosive performance improvements, drastically reduced memory consumption, and a host of brand-new language features to make your site soar, this version is more than 2X faster than PHP 5.6.
Install WP Fastest Cache Plugin
Visit the WordPress repository and you’ll find many caching plugins suitable to run your website. However, after extensive research, we have found the best possible plugin (WP Fastest Cache Plugin) which does a really good job. Apart from compressing JS, CSS and HTML, it helps you improve the Google PageSpeed and YSlow scores and load pages faster. Here is the plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fastest-cache
Install Jetpack for Free CDN
Want a free CDN? Get Jetpack by WordPress. Apart from offering a free CDN named Photon, it comes with a lot more functionalities essential to run the website. Enable the Photon feature from Jetpack settings and serve static files including images, JS and CSS from WordPress.com.
Optimized Images
Are you aware that optimized images take lesser time to load? This image optimization is recommended by most of the SEO Training in chennai. Use Kraken.io to reduce the image size up to 60% – optimum quality assured; to do the same with already uploaded imaged, use WP Smush, a free plugin. WP Smush enables users to bulk optimize images.
Lazy Loading of Images
Love to share photos load time by with your blog articles? That is a great practice; however, the load time of the page could drastically increase because of the additional media files. Use the lazy load technique to avoid this scenario. Lazy load technique will load only visible images at the start. When the user scrolls the page, the other images will load. Use a3 Lazy Load, a free WordPress plugin for lazy loading.
Install AMP
Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to load pages fast on devices such as mobiles and tablets. It does so using fewer resources. Even Google search shows the AMP tag for websites that has this functionality. To make your site fast on hand held devices, it is advised to install this plugin.
Delete Revisions and Transient Memory
Want to speed up a WordPress site? Then, database optimization is essential. WordPress auto drafts revisions for posts as it consumes a lot of space in the database; this is helpful – if the blogger wants to replace the existing content with an old one, he/she can retrieve it easily by scanning the database.
Use Pre-fetch DNS Requests
Improve the load time of your site by prefetching your DNS. Are you loading files from external sources like CDN, Google API etc.? Edit the header.php, your theme and add the DNS prefetch line for the same.
Use SVG Icons rather than Font Icons
Use SVG icons rather than font icons for faster load time. You can create SVG icons manually or can pick this while selecting the best suitable WordPress theme for you.
Heartbeat Control
WordPress introduced Heartbeat API in version 3.6 which enables users to communicate with server and show you some real-time notifications such as, other authors are editing the post or taking control or auto-drafting the posts and so many things on dashboard. These issues arise when you are using a shared server. To take control of such API calls, disable the calls or delay it for large intervals or install the plugin named Heartbeat Control.
Use the aforementioned steps to improve your site’s speed significantly. 2017 is just around the corner; welcome the New Year and a new and improved WordPress.com