WordPress is one of the most popular and Content Management System and the first choice for the website development. It’s easy to use, build, manage and free of cost feature offers it to be the most popular among the website developers and website owners. WordPress also offers many themes and plugins which makes it fun, creative and secure to use. It has a market share of about 31% as the first choice of CMS among many others and hence empowers most of the website running successfully across the world.
WordPress optimization is the process of enhancing, tweaking and customizing the WordPress website set up to help in improving the website performance and security. It also helps in improving the website speed and hence makes it faster and more discoverable. WordPress optimization has so many components like right configuration, updating WordPress, database, plugins management and many more. These all contributes to making the WordPress website more efficient. Let us learn about them in detail here:
- Right System Configuration: WordPress, unlike other software, has its system requirements regarding hardware. Here is the list of these
- PHP Version 7.2 or higher
- MySQL version 5.6 or higher
- MariaDB version 10.0 or higher
- HTTPS Supports
Hence these are the must-have been as a system specifications for the WordPress. The simple alternative to this is going for the WordPress hosting as these specifications will already be there.
- Updating all the WordPress Plugins and Versions: Outdated versions of the WordPress are really very bad for your website. This not only affects the website performance but give a negative impact on the website security also. Not updating your WordPress versions and long with the security updates makes your website falls prey to the hackers. Thus it is highly recommended that your website should be regularly updated with the most recent updates. Updating the WordPress plugins is also very important along with the themes. This ensures that there are no backward and forward compatibility issues. Also it is highly recommended to keep the plugins that are in use and delete the ones that you no longer require.
- Optimizing Database: The database holds all the important files and folders that are essential for running a website. It includes pages, posts, forms, data files, plugins, themes setting, repositories and many more. Over the period as the WP Database grows it becomes heavy and gives sluggish performance. Due to this the overall speed of the website becomes slow. Hence to avoid this it is important to optimize your WP database periodically. There are some ways to manually do this along with some plugins to help do the same. These are WPOptimize, Advanced Database Cleaner and many more.
- Optimize Speed: Website speed plays a crucial role in giving a great user experience. Also, a fast loading website helps in getting a good organic visibility. There are tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse to help you understand the Speed performance of your website along with the scope of improvement. Some basic things that can help are:
- Enabling Gzip on the Server
- Compressing and optimizing the images and the videos
- Using sprites to deliver images and using the server-side and browser caching.
- Security: Security should definitely the first and foremost must have for everyone. Nobody wants to go through the pain of recovering the website in case of data breach of a cyber attack. Hence optimizing the WordPress website is really important, you have to ensure that the WordPress is updated and has the proper SSL Setup. Ensuring that the directories like WP-content and WP-upload has limited and restricted access. Also make sure to set up the major security tools like SiteLock and Codeguard as the standard WordPress+Security plans are crucial.
These five steps should serve as the starting point of WordPress optimization, and you can gradually improve on this over time.