2022 was a year for optimising websites. It's clear that business owners are now becoming far more conscious of the need for their website to load quickly and efficiently, rather than just web professionals recommending it.
There's no reason to believe this won't continue into 2023 so we thought we give you a few tips to help optimise your Wordpress site.
As a business owner, you know that an optimised website is key to attracting and keeping customers. But if you're not particularly tech-savvy, the process of optimising your WordPress website can be daunting. never fear! We've compiled a list of 6 essential tips to help you get your WordPress website in tip-top shape.
- Choose the right hosting
- Audit your plugins
- Use a caching plugin
- Optimise your images
- Minify your CSS and JS files
- Install a security plugin
Your website is one of the most important tools you have for promoting your business, so it’s important to choose a website hosting service that can meet your needs. There are a few things to look for when choosing a website hosting service, including great support, personalisation options, and security features.
- Great support is essential for keeping your website up and running smoothly.
- Personalisation options allow you to make your website unique and customised to your brand.
- Security features help to keep your website safe from hackers and other online threats.
By choosing a website hosting service that offers all of these things, you can be sure that your website will be optimised for success.
As a WordPress user, you probably have a few plugins that you rely on to make your site work the way you want it to. But how often do you check to make sure those plugins are up to date? Or that they’re still being actively developed? Just like any software, plugins can become outdated and stop working properly. In some cases, an out-of-date plugin can even leave your site vulnerable to security threats. That’s why it’s important to audit your plugins on a regular basis. Here are a few things to look for:
- Make sure the plugin is up to date. Check the “last updated” date to see if it’s been awhile since the plugin was updated. If it has, there’s a chance that it might not work properly with the latest version of WordPress.
- Check to see if the plugin is still being actively developed. This is especially important for security plugins. If a plugin hasn’t been updated in awhile, there’s a chance that the developers have abandoned it and it might not be able to protect your site from the latest threats.
- See if the plugin has good support. If you run into problems with a plugin, you’ll want to know that there’s someone you can turn to for help. Check the plugin’s support page to see if there’s a active community of users who can help you out.
- By auditing your plugins on a regular basis, you can help ensure that your WordPress site stays up to date and secure.
If you’re running a WordPress site, one way to optimise your site speed is to use a caching plugin.
Caching plugins create a static version of your pages and serve them to visitors, which can reduce loading times. There are a number of different caching plugins available for WordPress, so be sure to do some research to find one that will work best for you. We use WP Rocket as our go to caching plugin of choice.
In addition to using a caching plugin, there are a number of other ways to optimise your site speed. For example, you can use a content delivery network (CDN) to deliver your content from multiple servers around the world, or you can minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to reduce their size.
By taking some time to optimise your site speed, you can provide a better experience for your visitors and improve your search engine rankings.
Images are an important part of any website – they can help to communicate your message, add visual interest, and make your site more engaging. However, large images can quickly eat up web traffic, and slow down your site’s loading time. As a result, it’s important to optimise your images for the web.
One way to do this is to save them in the webp format, which offers lossless compression while preserving quality.
Another way to reduce image size is to use an online image optimisation tool, like Kraken.io or TinyPNG.com, which can help you to compress images without losing quality.
By taking these steps, you can ensure that your images are fast-loading and high-quality – two essential ingredients for a successful website.
Javascript and CSS are two of the most common coding languages used on the web. They are also two of the most important coding languages to minify.
Minifying these languages means to combine and delay JavaScript and CSS files to reduce code. When these files are minified, it can help improve a website’s speed and load time. It can also make a site more responsive and reduce its overall size.
Minifying JS and CSS can be done manually or with the help of software. There are many benefits to minifying these coding languages, and it is something that all web developers should regularly do.
If you’re running a WordPress site, one of the best ways to protect it is to install a security plugin.
Security plugins can block unwanted traffic, protect against brute force attacks, and detect configuration errors that could lead to vulnerabilities. They can also help to identify 404s, so you can fix them before they become a problem.
While there are many different security plugins available, some of the most popular include Wordfence, Sucuri and our choice, iThemes. So if you’re looking to tighten up your WordPress security, be sure to install a security plugin.
We hope this blog post has given you some helpful tips on how to optimise your WordPress website.
By following the steps above, you can help to ensure that your site runs quickly and smoothly. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you for reading!