Improving Speed and Performance as Part of Site Maintenance
Improving performance in WordPress has recently become a particularly hot topic, following Google’s core updates, which define your site’s speed as a critical parameter for ranking in Google search results.
Likewise, the variety of visitors to your site who are interested in the information contained on your website – and it’s important to note that today they want it here and now, so it’s best to be fast.
In addition, it’s important to know that there are various ways available for us to improve the performance and loading speed of your WordPress site or WooCommerce store. In the following article, we have compiled the leading tips for you.
Why is it Important to Improve your Site’s Speed?
There are a wide variety of reasons that require us to improve the speed of our sites and reduce their loading time in a more quality and professional manner. We have narrowed down the two main reasons for you:
- Google prefers it – As mentioned, due to the core updates that Google’s search engine underwent, Google will prefer to rank faster sites higher. This is because it’s a value that improves the user experience on the site and serves the needs of the search engine, as well as you, the site owner, and the visitors coming to your site. Therefore, if you are doing organic promotion and even paid promotion for stores in particular or sites in general, it is recommended that you improve your site speed – an action that will serve you for search engine optimization of the site.
- People don’t like to wait – A wide range of studies on the subject show that the loading time of the site, when it’s higher than a few seconds, can cause up to half of the visitors to abandon it even before it has loaded and risen. The data is even higher when we talk about browsing through smartphones. In other words, it is recommended that you ensure high internet site speed if you do not want half or more of the visitors to leave the site before it has even loaded.
Leading Tips for Improving Performance on your WordPress Site or Store
As mentioned, there are a wide variety of ways in which you can improve the response time of your WordPress site in terms of site speed and performance. We have compiled the most important tips for you:
1. Choosing quality and fast hosting for your site – One of the most important parameters directly affecting your site’s speed is the hosting server where you host the site.
When the deal is very cheap or offers a wide variety of unlimited services for site visitors, it can be said unequivocally that it’s a good deal, and all that’s left is to compare the price.
Really? In the vast majority of cases, it’s actually a shared server that won’t provide you with more than a reasonable loading time, simply because you’re not alone on this server and therefore it’s less recommended in terms of security. If you do want to settle for the cheap server, one of the most recommended hosting companies today is Hostinger – a company that offers high-level performance along with very reasonable costs compared to other companies in the market.
But if you’re not satisfied with little, or if your site experiences large traffic loads and it’s important to you that it be available and fast 24/7, we recommend not compromising on any server other than Cloudways hosting server, which is especially suitable for those who are in more advanced stages. It’s a company that offers private hosting through an advanced cloud and therefore has unprecedented speed.
2. Using a Cache plugin – In the WordPress plugin repository, you can find a large variety of cache plugins. The plugins are free, but most also provide a premium route for maximum optimization and support for external services.
To save you time searching for the ideal cache plugin – we recommend the WP-Rocket plugin, which is indeed a paid plugin, i.e., premium only, but it’s the best in all aspects. And in general, when it comes to performance, it’s recommended to work with a premium service that also provides support and assistance when there are malfunctions, problems, or questions regarding plugin setup, new features, support for other plugins and services, and more.
It’s important to note that most of the various cache plugins can be a bit complex for the average user, and additionally, there’s no guarantee that the plugin will provide significant enough results, or any at all, in terms of improving site speed.
The WP-Rocket plugin provides a balance between the complexity level of the plugin itself and performance improvement in WordPress – as it’s important that you ensure correct installation of the plugin in a customized manner for your site. At your disposal is a rich variety of guides on the company’s website and fast, quality support up to the code level, meaning you can give support temporary access to the site to help solve problems.
3. Use a CDN network – Another thing you can do for the maintenance and loading improvement of your WordPress site is to use a Content Delivery Network – CDN which is a network composed of a large number of different servers located dispersed around the world, through which you can route traffic directly to your site based on the visitor’s location and transfer the desired information in a more accessible way to all visitors.
One of the most prominent advantages of using a Content Delivery Network – CDN is the ability to store cache versions of different pages on your site – on those servers that are dispersed around the world, so that when a visitor comes to your site from a certain geographical location and tries to enter, they will immediately receive the cache version from the server closest to them.
By using a CDN, you can actually equalize the browsing speed on your site for all visitors from around the world. Here we recommend the CDN from Bunny.net which provides their good and fast service at the lowest cost in the market, a price we define as a joke price or almost free.
This service is highly recommended for sites that have global traffic or from several different countries, but also for local sites with a lot of traffic.
4. Removing Unnecessary Plugins – It can be unequivocally stated that WordPress sites gain great popularity due to the wide and diverse range of plugins that can be installed on them. Every plugin you install on your site can provide functionality, whether it’s in terms of appearance or in terms of the site’s operation itself.
It’s important to remember that a common side effect of sites that incorporate a large number of plugins is a significant slowdown in the site’s ongoing performance, often unnecessarily.
Take for example the popular plugin Elementor Pro, a plugin designed for creating websites in a more visually convenient way. Just by having the plugin installed on the site, it can be said that it adds weight and requests on the server across all pages of the site, even if you haven’t used Elementor Pro on another page.
In other words, using Elementor as a multi-functional plugin is completely recommended and it’s probably the last plugin we would be willing to remove from our site, but it’s important to remember that for any site with installed themes and plugins, and even sites mostly written in code, when the site is already live and receiving traffic, it’s important to perform an optimization process and maintain it on an ongoing basis.
Additional Tips for Improving Speed in WordPress or WooCommerce
Manage DNS records only through Cloudflare. This has many advantages that we might expand on another time, but in the bottom line, it’s faster and more secure, and will save you many server resources, especially when there’s high traffic on the site.
Use an image optimization plugin, we recommend ShortPixel but there are at least 3-4 other plugins that will do the job excellently. Additionally, you can significantly reduce the size and weight of images by proper export from editing software such as Photoshop, Figma, XD and others.
Sounds too complicated? Feel free to contact us for a price estimate on the work. We’ll be happy to help 🙂 You can contact us here.
