Dear WordPress Aficionado,
One of the good things about using WordPress is that there are a lot of plugins. And one of the bad things about using it is that there are a lot of plugins.
So the plugin variety is a blessing and a curse.
Yeah, I know…
I hate this “two-edged sword” stuff too, but think about it:
if you make the mistake of installing too many of them, your website wins membership in the club “Slow & Buggy.” Moreover, you’re always one bad plugin away from some disasters, like finding adult advertising all over your place.
So the first and most important thing when it comes to WordPress performance is the number and the quality of your plugins.
You must always think hard about do you really need yet another one and if that’s the case, you must choose very carefully. That includes deep research on the pros and cons of each available option.
Of course, some services and plugins are strongly recommended if you want your site to be fast.
Here are the most important:
Reliable Hosting
If your hosting server is not reliable or your plan doesn’t offer enough resources like RAM and CPU (processing power), then your website is doomed to underperform.
I will publish a whole article on this topic with a simple strategy for finding the hosting offer that suits your needs best.
Caching Plugin
When you try to open a web page in your browser, you send a “request” to a server, and that server uses its memory and processing power to generate an “HTML document.”
A good caching plugin saves that document in a file or memory, and now, every time someone makes the same request, they receive the saved document.
That way, the plugin saves a lot of resources for generating the HTML document again and again.
We will talk about all this with details in another article to help you find the best caching plugin for your WordPress site. It’s really important to get one, so don’t miss the blog piece.
CDN Service
If you get visitors from all over the world, then the loading speed of your website varies according to how far away they are from the data center.
A website hosted in a U.S. data center will load slower for users in Asia.
The first step to speed up the site is to subscribe to a CDN service. Basically, it’s a network of servers around the globe that cache all of your website’s images, CSS files, js files, and more.
And when the users request a page, the CDN network serves them those files from the closest server.
Again, there will be a detailed article soon…
Image Optimization
According to HTTP Archive images make up more than 60% of data loaded on web pages.
So it’s critically important for your images to be “optimized” if you want better loading speeds for your web pages. That means they must be resized and compressed as much as possible while their quality remains good enough.
You can achieve that with plugins, third-party services, or manually (my favorite choice).
As usual – I will spill out the beans in detail soon.
Minifying Plugin (Optional)
A minifying plugin takes your JavaScript and CSS files, merges them, compresses them, and then starts serving their minified version on request.
Depending on your caching plugin and CDN service, you may or may not need a minifying plugin.
We will talk about that later too.
There is much stuff to be covered, so now you understand why I didn’t start with services and plugins names from the beginning. We must do some research and carefully choose if we want to cater to the instant gratification crowd, i.e. all Internet users out there.
In the next few days, we will do exactly this…
Cheers,
Sashe Vuchkov
The Code & Marketing Combinator
P.S. I resumed work on my free SEO app; if you would like to receive important notifications about it or early access (I will soon release a beta version), then you can send the form on this page.
