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Optimizing my WordPress website

Updated May 18th, 2021 at 09:41 BST

The following steps can help you optimise your WordPress site, so that it loads lightning fast:

1. Caching - WP Super Cache if you are on the Cloud or W3 Total Cache if you are with a cPanel account. Both plugins generate HTML files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. This will speed up your site significantly.

2. Optimise Images - The WP Smush.it plugin strips meta data from JPEGs, optimises JPEG compression, converts certain GIFs to indexed PNGs and strips the unused colours from indexed images . You could also download ImageOptim from imageoptim.com, this software optimises images by finding best compressions parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations.

3. Remove unused plugins - a plugin called P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) can help you identify the most problematic culprits.

4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) - you can check our Security Packages that include CDN as a feature.

5. Optimize your WordPress database - you can try WP-Optimize plugin

6. Minify JS and CSS files - this plugin can help you -> Autoptimize

7. Dynamic content has a big impact on site speed, so remove any unnecessary dynamic content from your site.

8. Compression and browser caching - Gzip compression works by finding similar strings within a text file, and replacing those strings temporarily to make the overall file size smaller. You can add the following to the .htaccess file to enable Gzip compression;

#Gzip

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript text/javascript

#End Gzip

9. Software, plugin and theme updates come with bug patches and enhancements, make sure you install any updates right away.

10. Database maintenance - The WP-DB Manager plugin allows you to optimise and repair your database. You can also backup the database, restore the database, delete a backed up database, drop tables and run selected queries. - The WP Optimise plugin allows you to optimise and clean up your database.

If you need further work to be done, you can approach your web developer or a third party agencies.