WordPress Optimization: 12 Essential Tips.

1. Choose Fast WordPress Theme:

If you opt for a theme having loads of PHP, Iscript, Javascript then the slowing of speed will be inevitable. A heavily coded framework and theme with lots of additional features that are not actually necessary should be avoided. The default themes of WordPress are easily customized, light-weight, well-coded and fast. A well coded theme with a good balance of content and images will fasten the loading time of website by avoiding the excessive load.

2. Select a Trustworthy Web Host:

Don’t choose a slow host server, no matter how economical or attractive their hosting plan seems to be. Usually, people opt for shared hosting as it exerts a lesser load on the pocket, but they are famous for slowing down the speed of websites. Forget about improving the speed of loading of the website; it actually makes it slower. Therefore, it is recommended to choose a reliable host server which offers an extensive range of services.

3. Give a try to Content Delivery Network (CDN):

If we reduce a load of the primary server by offloading the static resources of the website, like images, videos, CSS files, scripts, then the speed of the site will increase significantly. By using a Content Delivery Network, we can load these resources faster to display in front of the visitors. Generally, CDN servers serve the resources to the users by the server closest to them. MaxCDN is the most widely used CDN for WP.

4. Optimize WordPress (WP) Database:

MySQL has a widely accepted database in the market, but its biggest disadvantage is the difficulty encountered while cleaning spam comments, auto-saved drafts, spam comments, etc. An optimized database surely enhances the performance of a website, but it is actually a time consuming and one of most dreadful tasks. Therefore WP offers several plugins like WP-Optimize, WP-DBManager to optimize the WP database. It helps in fast response for a database-driven software. This will aid you to ensure better WordPress Optimization.

5. Install Useful Plugins only:

For better WordPress Optimization, one should install well optimized and latest versions of plugins available on WP. Though WP offers a wide variety of plugins not all of them are well coded to increase the efficiency of a webpage.
Too many plugins will definitely decrease the performance and speed of a portal. Therefore it is advised to use necessary plugins only. A special plugin P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) monitors the performance and impact of other plugins on the loading time of the site.

6. Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks:

Pingbacks and Trackbacks are the modes of communication between various websites. They are particularly beneficial for the bloggers. By default, WP is designed to make interaction with other blogs which support these features. However, whenever someone links to a portal, a trackback gets created which uses the server and database resource. This reduces the loading time of the portal. Hence it is a common practice to disable the trackbacks and pingbacks.

7. Install WP Rocket Plugin:

A caching plugin supports static HTML files instead of dynamic ones. Thereby, caching improves the loading speed of the pages. It serves users the cached copies of any webpage. It reduces the number of PHP requests, MySQL database access, server access for static resources, etc. Installation of plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache helps to load the sites faster.

8. Optimize Loaded Images Automatically:

Before uploading an image, it is better to specify the maximum dimensions of thumbnail and images beforehand. In order to adjust the image in the specified dimension, it is not necessary to degrade the quality of an image. The WP Smush.it plugin allows the creator of portal to upload an image without changing its look or visual quality. It is a lossless tool and doesn't alter the quality of the
original picture.

9. Enable gZIP Compression:

It is evident that a file which is lesser in size can be easily loaded. Therefore, it is a general practice to serve the compressed versions of any site to the visitors so that they can be loaded faster. The gZIP compression offered by the cPanel on a shared server or plugin like W3 Total Cache can be enabled to compress the content of a portal on the server, before transferring it to the browsers.

10. Delete or Control Post Revisions:

WP often saves the drafts of the portal we develop. It continues to save each version of the draft after revision gets completed. This chunk of useless data consumes a considerable amount of storage space and slows down the webpage. Once a draft gets published, its draft versions will hardly be needed. Still, they continue to remain in the memory for forever. This is why do we need “WP Revision Control Plugin”. It allows the developer to set an upper limit to the number of drafts that should be stored for every post.

11. Reduce Spam:

Spam comments are not only a nuisance but also occupies a lot of space in the database which will slow down the website inevitably. Deleting thousands of spam comments manually on a regular basis is practically not possible. Therefore, it is advised to make use of the Askimet plugin. It has the ability to filter out spam messages from the normal ones and thus saves a lot of time and human effort. It also helps to clear the disk space which improves the performance of the portal further.

12. Minifying WP Website:

As the title suggests, it minimizes the size of the coding file of the website or portal. It reduces all the extra spaces and makes the files smaller and convenient to download. Instead of removing the extra spaces manually, the  Autoptimize plugin; not only removes all the unwanted white spaces but also combines the related CSS and JavaScript files into one file.