This is a continuation of the post on “Easy ways to clean and optimize WordPress website”.
Install only the most basic plugins
Have you ever driven a car with too much inside and outside? Like a touch screen dashboard and xenon headlights. These additional features only make driving more dangerous. WordPress plugins are similar threats. Each plug-in installed, regardless of its function, will reduce the speed of a website. Delete all unused unnecessary plugins and keep only the most important ones.
Try to use well-coded, feature-rich plugins to reduce the number of plugins on the website. For any WordPress site, ideally, only need three types of plugins: security, SEO, optimization (including Images). Maybe there are Form, Marketing, and Backup plugins. All other content added is calculated risk. And it is hard to tell how the different plug-ins interact, which further exacerbates the speed dilemma of the website. This is one of the other reasons why it is helpful to use plugins by the same author.
Then there are security issues. The reason why WordPress is known as an insecure platform is mainly due to vulnerabilities introduced by unqualified plugins. The core of WordPress is quite secure, and key security issues can be resolved once marked, but the plugins, even the most popular ones, cannot be trusted.
Regularly update WordPress, plugins, and themes
The responsible owner will always keep the vehicle tidy, clean, and well maintained. As a WordPress website owner should do the same. WordPress is an open-source project for large-scale collaboration, and thousands of contributors are working to make it better. Therefore, it is frequently updated with new features and critical bugs and security fixes.
WordPress themes and plugins will also have their own updates. Keep all updates as a responsibility or hire someone to take over the role. Not doing so will not only make the site vulnerable to security threats but also make it slow and unreliable.
Optimize the site database
The internal parts of the car can become clogged with the passage of time. This is inevitable. Over time, oil filters, air filters, engine oil, and even the engine itself collect dust, dirt, and other sticky things. Similarly, the WordPress database is blocked by a lot of unnecessary information. Such as post revisions, post and page corruption, spam comments, transient expiration, unused tags, etc.
To improve the performance of the site, optimize its database to eliminate all this unnecessary information. This can be done easily using plug-ins such as WP-Sweep, WP-Optimize, and deleted database optimization.
Optimize uploaded image
The image is like a beautiful body kit for your car. They make the website beautiful and attract the attention of users, but they are also one of the heaviest assets on any website. According to the HTTP archive, the average size of all external images requested by the page is about 1 MB This is second only to video, which is more difficult to optimize. The large image makes web page crawl, thus giving users an undesirable experience. Therefore, optimizing the image to reduce its file size is a necessary condition to speed up the page load time. This is the secret that will make the WordPress site grow quickly.
Smush Pro automatically optimizes every image on the website. It aims to obtain the highest quality with the smallest size. If you are looking for a free plugin solution, you can use the award-winning WP Smush plugin. Other alternatives are reSmush.it and Imagify.
Use lazy loading to speed up page loading
Carrying fuel will greatly reduce the speed of the car. But it cannot be without fuel. Therefore, the racing team came up with an ingenious solution: only fill the necessary fuel before the car pit stops, and then refuel as needed.
Lazy loading is very similar. Every webpage has an off-screen image. These are images that the user cannot see when loading the page. They are not in the first place. In other words, the user must scroll to see them. Therefore, it makes no sense to download them as part of the initial page load. Instead, these images can be set to load on time when the user scrolls. This method is called lazy loading. According to the HTTP archive, this can reduce the page size of 262.9 kB by only lazy loading off-screen and hiding images. The average size of a web page is about 2 MB, so the page size is saved by more than 13%, which saves page load time.
Unload heavy media to an external platform
Optimizing the assets of web pages is critical, but optimizing the number of requests generated by these assets is also critical. Either way, every request generated by the webpage will have an impact on the performance of the entire website.
For example, if there is a webpage with 1,000 2 kB images per webpage, and another webpage with 2 images of 1 MB each, the latter will load faster because:
1) it must only load Images.
2) The server will not be stressed due to a large number of requests, thereby reducing the site speed of
all users.
If the site hosts a large amount of media, it is best to uninstall it completely to an external platform. Note that uninstalling is different from using CDN. With CDN, the original file remains on your web server. CDN only caches copies of these files on many servers around the world.
After the CDN’s cache expires, it will query the server again to obtain the latest copy of the site file. Although the CDN can retain the cache for a long time, as the cache expires on various PoPs, a large number of media files combined with a large number of points of presence (PoP) will generate a large number of queries.
For example, hosting a video file on an external platform such as YouTube or Vimeo, and embed it on the website when needed. Other highly recommended advanced alternative products are Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage.
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