Optimize WordPress to get the best results and increase your chances of getting noticed on SERPs so as to increase your traffics and sales. As we all know, when there is no traffic, there is no sales.
WordPress here and there. Its popular enough to have caught your attention and here you are using it without second thought and well, here we are to help you with common troubleshoots.
As a matter of fact, WordPress is just another PHP software that has its own pitfalls. All software have it anyway. But the reality is that there are some common problems which users are usually hitting on because they are just there. Now, as of Wordpres 3.0, the software fixed many bugs which were present in the older model. As of now, the software is in its latest version 4.9.
Its fantastic and cool as we know it. Well, lets stop about WordPress and face the main issue.
Speed! Is a very important thing to websites and website visitors. Unless you are a Facebook affiliate that is offering a share of Mark Zuckerberg‘s wealth will your user wait for more than 5 minutes for your web page to finish loading.
Where am heading towards is that the world of the internet is filled with thousands of websites which provides information.
Now, while a potential audience looked for something and you showed up in the search result, there are hundreds of other options which he can consider if you aint responding to his request too soon. Hence, speed is a very fundamental asset to every successful internet owner or webmasters.
Now as we all know it though, WordPress is fast and cool. In fact, I will say wordpress is faster than other CMSs compared but there are sometimes your websites suddenly gets slowed down and this annoys a whole lot.
Either in the front end or the back end, it slows down and its bad. Well, there are always erasers to every wrong pencil designs anyway so be cool as this shouldn’t make you panic like a little kid that just broke his mama’s gold chain.
Considering the fact that there will and will always be malignant functions that slows down your website behaviours, this will make you eat up too many RAMs on your internet computer server and then reach some 500 error in some cases or 404 from your Admin panel.
This is very annoying especially since you dont know how much traffic you’ve just lost because that little problem so therefore, a solution needs to be measured up and finalised ASAP.
Well, if you are still here, then it will make 100% sense if we actually examine those crazy little things you don’t know slows down your website and this decreases your sales and potential marketing potentials.
Why your WordPress site is slow
To optimize WordPress, there are some things you must take into note and since this tutorial is aimed at anyone at any level of experience and expertise with web development or WordPress as a CMS itself, it will be a good idea to first identify potential problems which might slow down your website and then working towards modifying it for maximum result as possible. Below are some common problems most WordPress users encounter during while they’re using the software for content management and production.
#1 Problem: You use too many Plugins
Actually, WordPress is a modular system whose core functionality which is primarily article creation can be extended with plugins. Plugins are PHP software that changes or manipulates the way the core WordPress functions.
Now, if you run an all in one website which consists of too many types of functionality, then you are on the verge of slowing down your wordpress install.
How this happens is because of the fact that WordPress is a MySQL based software. This means that it stores and retrieves contents and information from the database.
So whenever any user loads a page, each of those plugins gets automatically loaded from the back-end with each making its call in the database and this might run you out of memory limit or consume the RAM or slow down your user’s http call especially if he is browsing your website in a rural area with bad network access.
Since you target a large number of audience, then this will create a sort of problem and especially if you are on a shared hosting and having a huge daily traffic.
There are some plugins that usually do some crazy loads which slows down you database and your website in general. So for this, i will first recommend using external software that offer those same functions. For example,
- Statistic or Analytics plugins: This types of plugins stores and retrieve information about the usage of your website by external visitors. Its useful anyway to measure up your traffic and know which of your blog is getting the most traffic but believe me, the request is usually regular and this consumes your memory and load time. Remember that there is Google Analytics which you can always use to measure up your website traffic. Its fullfledged and has everything that you so need so you dont need to waste your memory while there is a free service out there. There also is Alexa.com which is also like Google Analytics. so use any of these and get the best out of your website. This is a very easy lift off.
- E-Commerce Plugins: Well, you need this if you plan to set up your little store on your website and recieve payment and so it has its long advantage but hey, there is disadvantages too. I mean why not simply go on existing websites like Amazon and sell your products over there as this is easier than just having a sales market on your blog. This will also be a heavy lift off on your server side and it will improve your loading time.
- Javascript rich Plugins: At times, you might to alter the functionality of your website theme or some areas and so using a plugin becomes the solution. Well, you can actually find a way to override this either by creating those functions in the theme’s Function.PHP file or use an external library. Anyway, you should always look for alternatives before jumping head off into the pool off fansy plugins in wordpress.
- There are bunch other useless that does just one crazy function your blog can live without or the other. Believe me, you dont need as much plugin to make your website amazing and work like premium. But anyway, you should always find a better way to make things work out without selling your soul for it. Its cool that way.
Solution will then be: Uninstall all these plugins (Not only deactivating them) when you do, utilise external libraries that will work faster and better rather than hosting everything yourself.
Problem #2: Too big images (Unoptimized images)
In case you don’t know, images takes up 70% of your website rendering. Try downloading a webpage with many images and then remove the images and see how many kilobytes it remains…probably 27KB at most. Thats why image optimization is super important.
Uploading images from your Digital camera with a size nearing 15MB is too much and this will cause some crazy load time on your server side which will keep annoying both your server and your audience and thus will leave. So be smart enough to reduce your images so low to around 100KB at most.
Smaller images gets loaded quickly and this is very useful and helpful anyway. Other alternatives will be creating a gallery in a external library like Instagram, Flicker, Pinterest and then linking those images straight into your website. That way, it works better.
Solution will be: Download WP-Smush.it this plugin helps compress your images and renders it immediately while you upload it to your media library. This plugin is very awesome as it utilises the Smush.it API to do the functions.
Problem #3: You’re hosting your Videos
A website which host videos usually use thousands of petabytes of bandwidth especially if they are pulling in millions of traffic. Alright i know, you ain’t getting millions of visitors everyday but at least you getting thousands or closer.
Well then, you need to stop hosting your videos for whatever reason. Here is the tip, video streaming eats up lots of spaces and then consumes the entire memory which then cause a downfall to your server.
Well, I’m sure your host will contact you immediately with the warning. Well then, you need to understand that this attempt isn’t a very good practize.
The solution then will be: Create a Youtube account, its free and they offer you unlimited space anyway. You know Google is nice. But if your company is too big to be hosting videos on Youtube and you feel it degrades you, then i understand.
All you need to do is just go look for some cloud based CDN (Content Delivery Network) that feeds your videos straight from the cloud and not from your WordPress hosted database.
Probllem #4: WordPress stores revisions
I know you are a blogger like myself but you don’t really know that WordPress do some crazy task in the background to ensure that you write your content in the best way and yet still save previous versions of those you have written.
The revision is more or less a history for those posts you’ve created so anytime you think you make a mistake and ad more or reduce your posts, those revisions are saved up on your database.
This pills up and it will be so big that your database will weigh extremely big. So this can start slowing down since acquiring data from the background can be a little tricky. So it eats up your time of operation and its annoying.
Solution will be: In case you plan to remove the Worrdpress revision functionality, its easy as you simply need to log in to your FTP account either via your WebFTP client or third party like Filezilla and then get an access to your WP-Config.PHP file and then edit. So drop this line of code
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);
You can find the wp-config.php file in your FTP account. It will be in the primary folder for your domain.
If you still want to save some revisions, you can use the following code in place of the one above:
define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 120 ); // Default value is 60 seconds.
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3); // Number of revisions to save.
That limits the number of revisions to 3 and changes the auto-save value to every 2 minutes. You can change those values to something higher (or lower).
Now when you are through with that, you can decide whether to delete the entire revisions which have all been placed or stored in your database earlier.
In case that is your own matter then you can just follow it by going into your Host dashboard. Assuming you are using Dreamhost (Note: We are Affilitaed to Dreamhost and that is an affiliate link anyway)
Then click on the Goodies area by the left of your Web Panel and then go to MySQL Databases and then clicking on that opens the databases list for you where you can click on the exact database you want to work with.
Then click on the PHPMyAdmin dutton in front of it. This leads you straight to PHPMyAdmin interface. Click on the MySQL button like the image here and then a new window shows where you need to enter a MySQL querry. So Type in
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";
Remember to change the WP_ prefix to your very own so that you dont get some querry error. Well, the process is very fast and so will delete all the table from your DB. But remember to back up your DB first so in case you accidentally delete crucial areas of your DB. So be careful to reread what you typed in okay?
Problem #5: Your Theme is crappy
At first, i will advise you use simple and fresh themes which has its code straightened out. In case you use a theme that uses too many libraries (Javascript, JQuery, CSS, Fonts, Fansy images and animations) Then, there might be some little problem getting speedy.
Its not all free themes that are bad and its not all premium themes that are great. So its better to understand what you really want but in any way, you can always get your codes minimized in wordpress so that they don’t get loaded out while the user makes http request to your server.
The Solution will be: Download the wordpress GZIP Plugin which help compress your scripts and codes for maximum rendering. Or better still, you can change your theme for a well written theme. You can visit themeforest for best themes or still visit the WordPress Theme Library too. You’ll read comments and rating before you download any anyway.
Problem #6: You are getting Spammed
Yeah! In many cases, your blog is getting visited by a Spam bot or Scraping software which takes away your valuables all for free.
No 1 effect of this is that if Google didn’t index you before indexing the scraper, then you wont rank as you might be stamped Duplicate by their Search Bot.
Again, the effect is these bots are so much that they bloat out your load time while real human visitors are finding it hard to even load your simple HTML page. So be smart with better security practices to strengthen your install.
Solution: Download plugins like Wordfence, Spamshield, Google Captcha or AIO Security plugin all work with maximum power to fence your website off from bots and spammers.
Problem #7: You still using Free or Shared host
Yeah you are having 10K visitor daily and you think using a free domain will be standard enough to take that large number of visitors, nope!
You need to step up your game and then get yourself a better hosting plan. In case you need a better way to do this, you can use our Dreamhost Coupon for 25% off to get a standard hosting plan using the Dreamhost platform which is actually awesome and cool though.
Solution: Get a better hosting plan either by moving from a shared server to a VPS server or Dedicated server all for some cheap price. You can use our Coupon here for that low price anyway.
Problem #8: You need a CDN and a Cache plugin
Caching plugins such as W3 Cache Plugin for wordpress do a maximum job by delivering a faster version of your website to your visitors while it saves your server loading time.
You can always try a free Content Delivery Network like Cloudflare which offer some free service for beginners until things get upgraded later on though.
The duty of such services are to deliver contents nearer to users rather than loading contents straight from your server which is located in Alaska to a user in Melbourne, it simply utilise the server which is either in Australia itself for better rendering. That is awesome right? Yeah it is. So try it.
Solution….get a free Cloudflare account just in case you have any doubt and when your doubts are gone, then upgrade your service to a better one. Also, download wordpress’ W3cache tool. Its awesome.
Problem #9: Your website isn’t mobile responsive
Well, this might not alter your speed but its a safe practise to use a responsive theme or use free or premium plugins like WpTouch Plugin which all work fantastic in rendering your website in an awesome way.
Try them today and then just make sure its cool with you. Also, note that google don’t like websites that aren’t mobile responsive. So its a very important thing though.
What you get when you Optimize WordPress
Website speed is a ranking factor for good SEO checklists and aside from that, you cannot make big sales impacts when your product pages are very slow. With these common problems now solved, you should now see a huger spike in your traffic and sales assuming you follow the guide with your heart.
According to SEO experts and even Google’s Spam control division boss Matt Cutt, he made it known that Speed is absolutely one of the ranking factors the company’s algorithm consider while displaying results to end users. The advantages is way longer than said and this can be of advantage to you especially while you’re trying to make money from your blog as a business channel.