5 Optimization Techniques for WordPress Websites
Tags: webdev, beginners, discuss
Published: 2018-09-24 10:12:39

---
title: 5 Optimization Techniques for WordPress Websites
published: true
description: Have you ever been confronted with slow websites? Did you like them? No, no doubt! 
tags: #webdev #beginners #discuss
---

Have you ever been confronted with slow websites? Did you like them? No, no doubt! 

Websites that take time to load annoy us. They greatly depreciate the user experience. Moreover, the statistics prove it. If your website is too slow, visitors may not have the patience to wait and sometimes prefer to go to your competitor!

In addition, the search engines, especially Google, is very sensitive to website performance. Indeed, it uses this parameter for referencing its results. If you want to increase the chances of being on the first page of Google, you will have every interest to have a quick website! Of course, speed is not the only SEO criterion used by search engines, but it is still part of it. 

Do you feel that your website is slow? There are various tools online allowing you to test the speed of it. Here are three: 
<ol>
<li>Pingdom Tools</li>
<li>GTmetrix</li>
<li>Google PageSpeed Insights</li></ol>

However, do not take their results as the absolute truth. Each of these tools uses different weights to test your website's performance. This is why there are sometimes huge differences in results between these platforms. Now let's move on to the 5 optimization techniques for your WordPress.

<strong>1. WordPress Hosting</strong>

<img src="https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/5dqoor8284gnsatvi3q5.png">

Without a quality web hosting, getting a fast website is virtually impossible. For WordPress Hosting, I would say that there are 2 scenarios:

Scenario #1
Either you know a little server and you install your WordPress website on an unmanaged hosting (including Shared or VPS hosting). This is the best value for money you can get and total flexibility on how you configure your server (PHP version, server-side caching, etc.). However, you will need the skills or a SysAdmin to configure your server.

Scenario #2
Otherwise, use the services of a quality web host as Cloudways — <a href="https://www.cloudways.com/en/wordpress-cloud-hosting.php">WordPress Managed Hosting</a> — specializes in hosting WordPress websites. All their WordPress offers PHP 7+, HTTPS/2, a pre-configured cache system (known as ThunderStack), and development environment so you do not have to make your changes on the live version of your website. For me, Cloudways has the best quality/price ratio of the market for hosting WordPress website and I advise you to take a look at their offers.

<strong>2. WordPress Themes</strong>

<img src="https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/qxczu5wg33rx1opfh5mh.png">

Your theme is the foundation of your WordPress website. If it's important for the aesthetic side, it's also fundamental to the loading speed and code quality of your website. WordPress is the most used CMS in the world and has an incredible number of themes (which is its strength). But this diversity is double-edged! There are also a lot of themes that look pretty on paper but are poorly coded and will only slow down your website.

For this reason (among others) I use only Genesis Framework of StudioPress for all the themes that I develop (more details on why I choose Genesis Framework). I recommend you take a look at all Genesis compatible themes as they have all been developed to be fast with quality code.

<strong>3. WordPress Cache Plugin</strong>

<img src="https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/vmspyl808jyswdpb0z4p.png">

There is also a whole range of cache plugins for WordPress (more or less good quality) that allow you to activate different things that I tell you in our guide like:
<ul>
<li>caching pages</li>
<li>Gzip compression</li>
<li>the browser cache</li>
<li>the minification of files</li>
<li>CDN integration</li>
<li>possibly other options depending on the plugin</li></ul>

Personally, I use Breeze, a free WordPress cache plugin on all the websites that I develop. This plugin is free, compatible with Apache and Nginx web servers and will allow you to configure all the elements I mentioned above in a minimalist way.

<strong>4. WordPress CDN</strong>

<img src="https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/8yqzs516h1lukuoyukju.png">

A Content delivery network (CDN) is used primarily to effectively disseminate the content of a website, whether the visitor is in any part of the world. The servers of the network being distributed all over the world, the visitor will always have a point that is close to him and who can provide the content more quickly, reducing the download time (latency).


<strong>5. WordPress Plugins</strong>

<img src="https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/vip7f6w0uectqdtcosx7.png">

Plugins are great but do not overdo them. Each plugin can lower not only the security of your WordPress website but also and above all its performance. That's why I can only advise you to keep only those that are really essential to you.

When installing a plugin, do not forget to look at the date of the last update. If it's been 2-3 years since there was more, beware! It should not be up to date and there is, therefore, a strong risk that it is no longer optimized for recent versions of WordPress.

To help you detect plugins that slow down your website, you can install Query Monitor. "Queries by Component" lists the plugins that are loaded as well as their speed.

By applying these optimization techniques, you will already optimize much of your WordPress website compared to a normal installation. As you will see in the Pingdom Tools, GTmetrix,
And Google PageSpeed Insights reports, there are still other ways to optimize a WordPress website.