5 Optimization Techniques for WordPress Websites

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5 Optimization Techniques for WordPress Websites
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• Have you ever been confronted with slow websites?
  Did you like them? No, no doubt!
• Websites that take time to load annoy us. They
  greatly depreciate the user experience. Moreover,
  the statistics prove it. If your website is too
  slow, visitors may not have the patience to wait
  and sometimes prefer to go to your competitor!
• In addition, the search engines, especially
  Google, is very sensitive to website performance.
  Indeed, it uses this parameter for referencing
  its results. If you want to increase the chances
  of being on the first page of Google, you will
  have every interest to have a quick website! Of
  course, speed is not the only SEO criterion used
  by search engines, but it is still part of it.

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• Do you feel that your website is slow? There are
  various tools online allowing you to test the
  speed of it. Here are three
• Pingdom Tools
• GTmetrix
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• However, do not take their results as the
  absolute truth. Each of these tools uses
  different weights to test your website's
  performance. This is why there are sometimes huge
  differences in results between these platforms.
  Now let's move on to the 5 optimization
  techniques for your WordPress.

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WordPress Hosting

• Without a quality web hosting, getting a fast
  website is virtually impossible. For WordPress
  Hosting, I would say that there are 2 scenarios
• Scenario 1
• Either you know a little server and you install
  your WordPress website on an unmanaged hosting
  (including Shared or VPS hosting). This is the
  best value for money you can get and total
  flexibility on how you configure your server (PHP
  version, server-side caching, etc.). However, you
  will need the skills or a SysAdmin to configure
  your server.
• Scenario 2
• Otherwise, use the services of a quality web
  host as Cloudways  WordPress Managed Hosting 
  specializes in hosting WordPress websites. All
  their WordPress offers PHP 7, HTTPS/2, a
  pre-configured cache system (known as
  ThunderStack), and development environment so you
  do not have to make your changes on the live
  version of your website. For me, Cloudways has
  the best quality/price ratio of the market for
  hosting WordPress website and I advise you to
  take a look at their offers.

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WordPress Themes

• Your theme is the foundation of your WordPress
  website. If it's important for the aesthetic
  side, it's also fundamental to the loading speed
  and code quality of your website. WordPress is
  the most used CMS in the world and has an
  incredible number of themes (which is its
  strength). But this diversity is double-edged!
  There are also a lot of themes that look pretty
  on paper but are poorly coded and will only slow
  down your website.
• For this reason (among others) I use only Genesis
  Framework of StudioPress for all the themes that
  I develop (more details on why I choose Genesis
  Framework). I recommend you take a look at all
  Genesis compatible themes as they have all been
  developed to be fast with quality code.

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WordPress Cache Plugin

• There is also a whole range of cache plugins for
  WordPress (more or less good quality) that allow
  you to activate different things that I tell you
  in our guide like
• caching pages
• Gzip compression
• the browser cache
• the minification of files
• CDN integration
• possibly other options depending on the plugin
• Personally, I use Breeze, a free WordPress cache
  plugin on all the websites that I develop. This
  plugin is free, compatible with Apache and Nginx
  web servers and will allow you to configure all
  the elements I mentioned above in a minimalist
  way.

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WordPress CDN

• A Content delivery network (CDN) is used
  primarily to effectively disseminate the content
  of a website, whether the visitor is in any part
  of the world. The servers of the network being
  distributed all over the world, the visitor will
  always have a point that is close to him and who
  can provide the content more quickly, reducing
  the download time (latency).

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WordPress Plugins

• Plugins are great but do not overdo them. Each
  plugin can lower not only the security of your
  WordPress website but also and above all its
  performance. That's why I can only advise you to
  keep only those that are really essential to you.
• When installing a plugin, do not forget to look
  at the date of the last update. If it's been 2-3
  years since there was more, beware! It should not
  be up to date and there is, therefore, a strong
  risk that it is no longer optimized for recent
  versions of WordPress.
• To help you detect plugins that slow down your
  website, you can install Query Monitor. "Queries
  by Component" lists the plugins that are loaded
  as well as their speed.
• By applying these optimization techniques, you
  will already optimize much of your WordPress
  website compared to a normal installation. As you
  will see in the Pingdom Tools, GTmetrix,And
  Google PageSpeed Insights reports, there are
  still other ways to optimize a WordPress website.