How to Optimize Your WordPress Website?

WordPress Web Optimization

WordPress powers more than 24% of the web-a figure that rises every day. The entire world is transforming into a digitized ambiance step-by-step. From simple websites to blogs, to complex portals and enterprise websites, and even applications are built with WordPress. WordPress combines ease for the users and publishers with under-the-hood difficulties for the developers. This makes it flexible while still being easy to use.

What sense does it make to have an enchanting theme and a killer portfolio that doesn't search engine optimized? Google and the other search engines could care less about your appealing images and web design. They actually focus on ALT tags, file names, keywords, and other boring techno-savvy aspects. However, those “boring” elements are loved by search engines.

To subsist in this hard-hitting ambiance, it is very requisite to influence the audience in some jiffy. When an individual lands on the website for the first time, you have a few seconds to grab their heed to convince them to hang around. If your webpage is slow, the visitors will turn away in troops. The chances are very high that they even click on the ‘close’ button before your website will load. Moreover, the factor-page loading speed is already considered as an important ranking signal by Google.


Tips to Optimize Your WordPress Website

·        Content At Its Best!

The search engines can’t see a site. They can only “read” a site. How a site is looking is not the element that a search engine considers. What “talks” to the search engine are the words or the content, the components in the site that explain, share, educate, and babble. Most WordPress themes are designed with the content as close to the peak of the unstyled page as feasible, keeping sidebars and footers towards the bottom. Ensure that your Theme puts the content near the top.

·        Manage Your URL Structure

Set up the pretty permalinks. A permalink is the structure of the URLs produced when you publish a new page or post. WordPress has the default setting for this, but don’t use it, as it reveals nothing about what your page or post will be about. If you can’t read or understand it properly, then no search engine bothers you about that. But, don’t worry; WordPress makes it facile to choose the permalinks that are SEO friendly.

For e.g.- 

1.    Bad Permalink- www.yoursite.com/?p=3423 (Default option in WordPress)

2.    Pretty Permalink- www.yoursite.com/this-is-easy-to-read (Post Name Option in WordPress)


·        Enable Browser Caching

A website has some larger files that rarely change. This includes CSS files, JavaScript files, the website's logo, etc. One way to take benefit of this is to allow browser caching. It simply allows internet users to speed up the loading time of their beloved sites by storing a cached copy of your website locally.

This will eventually reduce calls to your server and save the user from downloading the same files again. Moreover, if the files get expired, then they will be re-downloaded. 

·        Use a CDN

CDN or Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network is beneficial for pretty much everyone, as it distributes your data across the globe. Generally, CDN boosts page load speed by taking the pressure off of your server.

KeyCDN is the alternative CDN provider. It provides a step-by-step WordPress integration guide on its support page. You can also consider MaxCDN, which is a pay-per-usage CDN. These two are the most affordable CDNs and effective enough to beat the pricing of competitors like Amazon.

·        Monitor Your Plugins

Plugins are the most influential parts of WordPress and can be the strongest rationales for WordPress websites being slow. Therefore, it is pivotal to analyze before installing any plugin, is this plugin indispensable?

The more plugins you install without more research, the more likely you will face performance issues. However, the sheer number of plugins you have installed is not a reason for the slowness of the WordPress website.


·        Enable Gzip Compression

Use Gzip compression for your images, CSS, and JavaScript files to reduce the size of data that is to be transferred between your server and your visitors.

Gzip can be enabled via the WordPress options page. You can find this page at www. yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/options.php. Simply, change the value of the Gzip field from 0 to 1, to enable Gzip. 

·        Minify Your JavaScript and CSS Files

The PHP5 application Minify combines CSS and JavaScript wraps into a single file. This greatly reduces the number of HTTP requests. Plus, this also intends to remove the unnecessary data from double spaces, empty new lines, comments, etc., and thus lowers the size of the files.

A number of tools are available online. You can use WP Minify or Better WordPress Minify. 

·        Use Fast Search Engine Optimized Themes

In the past few years, many WordPress theme authors have stepped up to the plate to create themes that are SEO optimized. Code and Speed are the two significant parameters. Besides these, some more factors can be taken into account:

1.   Correct use of the canonical URL meta tag.

2.   Proper use of heading and meta title tags.

3.   A clean structure that uses proper and valid HTML

A theme can load fast, but as you add the plugins and other elements to a web page, it can change swiftly. However, a good theme for SEO should be lightweight.


·        Optimize Your WordPress Database

It’s a good practice to optimize your WordPress database after a certain span of time. Consider it as running a Disk Defragmenter on your local hard disk. It also plays an equivalent imperative role in making your WordPress website manageable.

Wrapping It Up

Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin is one of the most efficient SEO plugins to make your WordPress website optimized. With over 70 settings available to optimize your website, the plugin is easy to use and apposite for both beginners and advanced users.

Simply have fast-loading web pages and unique, quality, and relevant content, the rest will be automatically a cakewalk.

Feel free to share more tips to optimize WordPress websites.


Aarif Habeeb
Aarif Habeeb is a Digital Marketing Strategist and Technical Content writer in an Indian digital marketing agency. You can also find him on Twitter.


Gangadhar Kulkarni

Gangadhar Kulkarni is an internet marketing expert and consultant having extensive experience in digital marketing. He is also the founder of Seogdk and Director at DigiTechMantra Solutions, a one-stop shop for all that your website needs. It provides you cost-effective and efficient content writing and digital marketing services.

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