TIPS ON OPTIMIZING WORDPRESS FOR SPEED. – ForceWP

An optimized site is…

Fast. Pages and media load quickly.
Stable. There are no error messages or broken elements.
Secure. It’s protected from malicious exploits.
Enjoyable. It’s pleasant and easy to use across all devices.

In this article we’re going to explore some helpful suggestions for optimizing your site, ensuring that you’re creating the best possible experience for your site visitors and users.

Improving Site Speed

Enable Caching
Building cacheable sites allows our system to load static content — e.g. images, CSS, and Javascript files — from a dedicated caching source. Loading this content from the cache is much faster than loading it directly from the server.

You can learn more about caching in our article Tips Improving Site Cacheability.

Enable CDN
Another easy way to increase the speed of your site is by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

A CDN is a collection of servers located all around the world. When a browser loads static content, the request is automatically routed to the server geographically closest to the browser. This helps the content load much more quickly.

In addition, because your content is loaded from many servers in separate locations, bursts of traffic are less likely to cause issues, because the burst is spread out over hundreds of servers, rather than just one.

Force WP offers the ability to put all of your static content on a CDN with little to no configuration required:

We manage distributing the content and rewriting URLs in the code.
We give you control over enabling or disabling the CDN as needed.

In short, you just manage your site as usual, and we take care of making it faster and more scalable.

More information on how to enable CDN is available in this article: How does a CDN work?

Use a Minification Plugin
Minification speeds up your site by reducing the number of CSS and JavaScript files that need to be downloaded. Multiple CSS files are combined into a single CSS file, and multiple Javascript files are combined into a single Javascript file. The combined files are also reduced in size, so they take less time to download.

You should take a backup of your site before using a minification plugin. That way, if something goes wrong — e.g. your theme, and other JavaScript from plugins, isn’t compatible with minification — you can quickly restore a working version of your site.

We recommend the Autoptimize minification plugin.

Compress Site Images
Large images can be a real drag on site performance. If you have large images on your site, we recommend using an image compression plugin.

Image compression plugins will automatically reduce the file size of the images on your site in a lossless fashion. This means there’ll be no perceivable loss of quality in the image, even though the filesize has been greatly reduced.

We recommend the Smush.it plugin to compress site images found here.
There are some limitations to consider when using these types of plugins. For example, the Smush.it plugin has a 1MB cap on the size of images it can compress leaving larger images uncompressed.

Stability & Security

Keep Themes & Plugins Updated
Keeping your plugins up-to-date ensures that you will reap benefits from improved performance, increased security, and other enhancements on offer from the theme or plugin developer. Out of date themes and plugins can cause issues that adversely affect site performance.

To update your plugins, follow these steps:

Log in to your WP Admin dashboard
Wish Dashboard selected in the left nav, click ‘Updates’
Under the Plugins section, you will see checkboxes next to the plugin name, or a Select All checkbox at the top and bottom. Select One/Many/All of the plugins you wish to update, and click the ‘Update Plugins’ button located above and below the section.
Confirm selection, follow prompts to complete

Alternatively, you can also find the plugins that have updates under the ‘Plugins’ section in the left nav:

Log in to your WP Admin Dashboard
Select ‘Plugins’ from the left nav
Under the page title, ‘Plugins’, there are categories pertaining to your plugins Click ‘Update Available’
Select ‘Update Now’ below plugin description
Confirm selection, follow prompts to complete

Please be aware: not all plugins offer update functionality built in to them. If you have purchased plugins from a vendor, it is a best-practice to validate the version on the vendor’s site and check for updates there.

To update your theme, follow these steps:

Log in to your WP Admin dashboard
Wish Dashboard selected in the left nav, click ‘Updates’
Under the Themes section, you will see checkboxes next to the Theme name, or a Select All checkbox at the top and bottom. Select One/Many/All of the themes you wish to update, and click the ‘Update Themes’ button located above and below the section.
Confirm selection, follow prompts to complete

Alternatively, you can also find the themes that have updates under the ‘Themes’ section in the left nav:

Log in to your WP Admin Dashboard
Select ‘Themes’ from the left nav
Under the page title, ‘Themes’, there are categories pertaining to your themes Click ‘Update Available’
Select ‘Update Now’ below plugin description
Confirm selection, follow prompts to complete

Please be aware: just as with plugins, not all themes offer update functionality built in to them. If you have purchased themes from a vendor, it is a best practice to validate the version on the vendor’s site and check for updates.

Disable and Remove Inactive Plugins
If you have plugins that are no longer used by your site, you should disable and remove them. Plugins that may not be in use but remain active can still have hooks into your WordPress install, causing additional load on your site.

To disable a plugin, follow these steps:

Log in to your WP Admin Dashboard
Select ‘Plugins’ from the left nav
Under the page title, ‘Plugins’, there are categories pertaining to your plugins Click ‘All’
Under the plugin name, there are actions for that plugin. Click ‘Deactivate’
Confirm selection, follow prompts to complete

Use a Security Plugin
Security plugins add an additional layer of protection to your WordPress site.

User Experience

Responsive Theme
Using a responsive theme ensures that your site will display properly across all devices, because the theme will adapt to the size of the screen. There are also plugins that will incorporate responsive image resizing as well, like hammy.

Mobile Plugin
If your theme is not responsive, you can still make your site adapt to mobile devices through the use of plugins such as WP Touch.

Redirect Broken URLs
If you’ve changed the location of a popular post or page, consider creating a URL redirect from the old URL to the new URL. This way if anyone tries to access the old URL they’ll be taken to the new location of the same content.

You can learn more about URL redirects in our article Setting Up Redirects.