Plugins That Make Your WordPress Website Faster, Smoother and More Profitable
We live in a time of change. New technologies emerge and evolve, and with them, new ways of doing things. Website performance is no different, and the line between what is fast and what is slow has blurred. Even more notably, the speed at which you can perform certain tasks on a website has become a competitive differentiator. Website speed is critical to user experience, increasing conversion rates and improving your bottom line. With the right plugins, your site can be a speed demon that knocks its competitors off the internet. Let’s take a look at how you can achieve this streamlined experience on your WordPress site.
Get Rid Of The Bloat
Even before the pandemic, users had enough to worry about with regular website performance. Buffing, preloading, and other similar optimisations were commonplace in the quest for speed, along with a streamlined experience.
When the world went into lockdown, those optimisations became more important than ever. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, which is essentially a collection of plugins, you’ll see that the amount of time your website takes to load increases every year. Even after implementing the best caching techniques and optimised servers, your site will still take a while to load. Why? It’s because WordPress is a bloated monster, chock-full of plugins and additional code that makes it bigger, stronger, and faster.
The best part is that most of this additional code is inactive until you need it. Most plugins register a few simple callbacks that execute when you visit a specific URL or perform a certain action on your site. In other cases, they’re completely inactive, meaning you could be sacrificing storage in your WordPress blog for minimal gains. While it’s important to keep your website safe from malware and attacks, it’s also essential to keep your storage requirements low. To prevent yourself from going over your storage limit, activate the inactive plugins and deactivate the ones you no longer need.
Reduce HTTP Requests
Every day, your site makes a series of HTTP requests to different domains to load the essential content you need for the day. When users browse your site, they make the same requests, causing unnecessary strain on your server and bandwidth. To prevent this, you can use a plugin like CloudFlare’s 1Password.com to create short, random, one-time-use passwords that can be assigned to various users. If a user attempts to login with a stolen password, you can revoke their access immediately without having to ask for more information. This way, you’re reducing the number of HTTP requests your site makes without having to resort to a VPN or other more complex solutions. While this may seem like an advanced topic, it’s one that can pay for itself many times over in terms of increased performance and decreased bandwidth costs. Not to mention the convenience for your users.
Use CSS Files With Analytics And Caching
In addition to reducing HTTP requests, you can also use caching to improve the performance of your WordPress website. CSS files — the files that make up your site’s design — are essential to its appearance, so it’s important to keep them as up to date as possible. To do this, use a plugin like WP-Optimize that automatically optimises your CSS across all your site’s styling. This ensures you can always scale up your site’s performance without affecting its design. With caching, you don’t need to load the CSS file every time a visitor views a page, which can drastically improve the performance of your site. After all, the less time spent loading a particular file, the faster your site will load. If you want an even more streamlined experience, you can use a CDN (content delivery network) to cache static content like images, CSS, and JS files on high-traffic websites. A CDN is a service that acts like an online storage locker for your website. When a user visits your site, the CDN will retrieve the content from your server instead of having to re-load it, which can speed up page loads dramatically.
Reduce Plugin Dependencies
Even after you’ve removed the bloat and optimised your site, you won’t be able to improve its speed unless you remove the unnecessary dependencies. When a user visits your site, they may encounter unwanted or unexpected plugin errors that could affect your site’s performance. To prevent this, you can use tools like Debug Bar to track down and remove any plugins that are causing errors. While this may seem like an advanced topic, it’s one that can pay for itself many times over in terms of increased performance and decreased maintenance costs. When you identify which plugins are slowing down your site, you can either deactivate them or remove them completely.
Make Sure Your Cloud Hosting Is up To Date
As your site’s speed improves, you’ll notice the difference in both performance and user experience. To ensure you’re not only getting the best experience but also to keep your site up to date, you’ll need to make sure your cloud hosting is up to date. When you update your site’s cloud hosting, you’ll need to wait for the new version to be activated before you can use it. This may mean a few hours or days of downtime, but it’s worth it in terms of increased performance and convenience for your users.
Avoid Using One Plugin To Do Everything
When you use a single plugin to perform a number of essential tasks, your site’s speed will improve. When you activate multiple plugins simultaneously, each one will perform a specific task, and you’ll end up with an over-complex system that’s hard to manage. To keep things simple and easy to use, you should avoid using one plugin to do everything. If you’re looking for a one-stop shop for your website’s speed, take a look at WPMU DEV, a WordPress plugin developed by the folks at WP Engine.
Cache Static Content
Since your site’s load time will decrease as soon as you start caching, you should start caching as soon as possible to achieve the best results. To do this, you can use a tool like WordPress’ built-in file cache to cache your site’s static content like images, CSS, and JS files. To make sure your content is always up to date, you can use a plugin like WP-Optimize that automatically optimises your static content across all your site’s styling. This ensures you can always scale up your site’s performance without affecting its design. It’s also a good idea to use a plugin like CloudFlare CDN that caches your static content on their servers, reducing the strain on your server and bandwidth. This can improve the performance of your site by up to 75% in some cases.
Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is a service that acts like an online storage locker for your website. When a user visits your site, the CDN will retrieve the content from your server instead of having to re-load it, which can speed up page loads dramatically. To take advantage of this, you can use a plugin like WP-Optimize that automatically optimises your CSS across all your site’s styling. This ensures you can always scale up your site’s performance without affecting its design. After all, the less time spent loading a particular file, the faster your site will load.
Keep Your Page Loads To A Minimum
To improve the performance of your site, you should keep the amount of time spent loading a particular page to a minimum. The only way to do this is to remove as much fat as possible, which means you need to identify and remove any unnecessary plugins and blocks of code from your site. To ensure this, you can use tools like Debug Bar to track down and remove any plugins that are causing errors. While this may seem like an advanced topic, it’s one that can pay for itself many times over in terms of increased performance and decreased maintenance costs.
To keep things simple and easy to use, avoid using one plugin to do everything and make sure your cloud hosting is always up to date. In addition to all that, you should also consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to cache static content like images, CSS, and JS files on high-traffic websites. This can improve the performance of your site by up to 75% in some cases.