It’s high time to give consideration to your website optimization. If you’d like to make it run as quickly as possible, you’re in the right place! So, without much ado, just have a look at these five points to optimize your WordPress site!
From a programmer’s point of view, WordPress is considered rather fast as opposed to other platforms. However, WordPress sites can still be optimized thanks to basic web optimization techniques together with several decent WordPress plugins.
Point 1: Set an Expire Header for the Static Content
Setting the expire header to some date in the future will tell the browser that it’s possible to cache and serve this cached content before that time. You can set this header by making minor edits to your .htaccess file.
Point 2: Serve Static Content from a Domain Without Cookies
About 85% of the site’s response time to the user is spent loading page components: images, scripts, Flash, stylesheets, etc. Therefore, serving static content from a domain without cookies is the right approach for all sites, where even a small delay in loading something can lead to long lag times. Luckily, WordPress provides an opportunity to enable such a feature.
Point 3: Optimize Your Database
There are certain plugins that can enhance and maintain the WordPress database. Let’s just name a few of them, but if you go to the WordPress Plugin Directory, you will encounter many more:
- WP DB manager
- Yoast Optimize DB
Note that many big “optimizing/caching plugins” that help with caching are already doing their own optimizations. So if you have a caching plugin installed, this issue may already be resolved. To optimize their WordPress database, advanced users can simply use PHPMyAdmin.
Point 4: Declare a Constant for the Most Commonly Used Values in the Database
A useful tip for theme developers is to decrease the number of database queries. You need to use some WordPress functions that are used most often and more than once on a page.
For instance, to get the address of the home page, we usually use get_option (‘home’) ;. This function actually makes a query to the database and gets the value we need. We know that it will be the same in all cases and we may need this value in different places.
Tip 5: Caching Is the Key to Success
Caching is the most critical factor in optimizing high-traffic sites. WordPress has a lot of good plugins that serve this purpose. These plugins usually create .html files for each post or page and then serve those HTML files instead of making a database query each time. Here are some cool WordPress caching plugins:
- Hyper Cache
- WP Super Cache
- W3 Total Cache
The abovementioned plugins generate the HTML files for every post or page and serve them, but there is also a plugin that caches the result of a database query:
- DB Cache
There are many more tips and tricks out there, but we’ve tried to show some useful tips for anyone looking to optimize their WordPress site.