WordPress is one of the most popular and market leader in the content management system for developing WordPress websites in the world. There are many great reasons for its popularity and progress. The share of WordPress CMS is about 59.4% of all websites based on different CMS platforms. The estimated number of people who manage websites using WordPress is about 75 million.
A large number of WordPress developers and research and development engineers is aggressively engaged in contributing to different types of themes, plugins, and libraries to improve its features and capabilities. Numerous WordPress website builder services are available in the marketplace for a very little fee.
With the help of a large community working for the improvement of WordPress capabilities and features, the latest versions are released on a regular basis. The current WordPress version 5 was released just a few months back. Just within a few months of a new version release, numerous additional features and capabilities have been added to it. All these statistics make it the leader in the CMS marketplace.Checking WordPress Website Performance
The major categories of WordPress based websites include blogs, eCommerce, retails, media, wikis, business directories, and social networking. WordPress CMS offers a very simple interface to create, test, and manage a website through an attractive WordPress dashboard. Additionally, you can use numerous third-party tools and plugins for checking the performance and other parameters of the websites. A few very important tools used for tracking WordPress websites are mentioned below.
#1 Yoast SEO Tool
Yoast is a very popular and most powerful tool to check for the SEO friendliness of the website. This helps you figure out the major on-page SEO problems and offers the solution to achieve the best results that are in line with the latest SEO standards. This tool focuses on the white-hat SEO strategies and makes your website better for the search engine ranking.
#2 WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the most powerful and most popular WordPress website caching plugin, which improves the loading time of the website by minifying CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. This plugin adapts the lazy loading feature for the images so that the performance is not affected at the initial loading of the page. WordPress blog search becomes super fast and images are loaded when they are supposed to be displayed on the visitor browser.
#3 String Locator
While working with the WordPress website, you work with different themes, plugins, and third-party codes. Some text strings normally hardcoded with the files of plugins and themes appear consistently; those strings are required to modify. String locator helps you find those hardcoded text strings and modify directly through clickable links.
#4 Wordfence Security
The security of any website is one of the most crucial aspects. The hackers normally exploit the security vulnerabilities in the website codes. So, you need to check for any security vulnerabilities to make sure your website will run smoothly. Wordfence security plugin for WordPress is the best option for this purpose. It has a malware scanner and endpoint firewall. It offers full security on malware attacks as well as malicious traffic attack on the website.
7 Ways to Speed a WordPress Site
According to the latest research studies, more than 57% of the people leave the website if it does not load within 3 seconds. If so, more than 80% of those visitors don’t turn around to that website again. That means slower speed is killer on the internet highway. How do I update my WordPress website to improve the speed and other critical performance parameters? Let’s find out the 7 most important ways to speed a WordPress website.
#1 Maintain Lower Number of HTTP Requests
The website loads through HTTP requests and responses. If your WordPress site uses content at different URLs, uses different redirects or other configurations that increase the number of HTTP requests to load a website, your WordPress website will slow down. It is always recommended to maintain a lower number of HTTP requests for loading your website. You can use different types of website request checker to identify the number of requests to load your website.
#2 Minifying CSS and JavaScript Files
The sizes of the websites are continuously increasing due to the use of different kinds of styling sheets and JavaScript files. Loading the CSS and JavaScript files without compression takes longer time. Always minify the CSS and JavaScript files. This technique improves the loading speed of your website. You can also merge multiple CSS and JavaScript files into longer files. This will also improve the performance of your website.
#3 Reduce Redirects
Redirects are killer to the speed of your website. If your WordPress website is using so many plugins and it is not optimized for redirects. The number of redirects and redirect chains will increase. If the number of redirects increases the number of the HTTP request to fetch the information will also increase. Thus, the overall speed of the website reduces. You should check your website for the website scripts using different code checkers to make sure your website uses the lesser numbers of redirects for loading the pages.
#4 Use CDN Network
As we know, images, videos, and other types of heavier content are used in modern websites to increase the outlook and user experience. Loading of heavy content files takes a long time that increases the website loading time tool. So, the best way to counter this problem is the use of content delivery network CDN, which uses different servers located at different parts of the world for the delivery of the content at the doorstep of the website request. This improves the loading time significantly. For example, loading an image of 5MB from the USA server takes longer than the Tokyo server for the website request to load in Tokyo.
#5 Use Lesser Possible Number of Plugins
Using different types of WordPress plugins make your website highly featured and great, but there is a downside of using so many plugins on your website. They reduce the speed of your website. Many plugins refer to their own JavaScript files and the CSS style sheets, which increase the number of the HTTP request and consequently the time to load the website. It is recommended to install plugins that you need. Disable all plugins that are not in use.
#6 Activate Compression Algorithms on Servers
The loading of the website will take a longer time if the files that the client requests are not compressed. The size of the uncompressed files will be larger, which will result in a long time to download. To improve the speed of your WordPress website, use compression algorithm on your hosting server. Normally, good hosting service providers use compression tools on their servers. One of the most popular compression tools is gZip compression. You can ask your web hosting provider for that.
#7 Optimize the Website Images
Optimization of the images is very critical for improving the speed of your WordPress website. According to the latest Kinsta research report, about 21% weight of the website is constituted by the images at an average. The images take a substantial amount of time to load. Change high-resolution images into JPG or PNG formats, which are better for both speed and experience. Don't load raw images on your server this will kill the speed of the website; so resize and upload images always.
Most Common Mistakes While Developing a WordPress Website
The most common mistakes made by the WordPress development team may include the following:
- Using the default settings and configuration for the website
- Installing a large number of plugins and themes
- Selecting that theme that is not right for the website
- Not updating the WordPress CMS platform
- Setting no website data backups
- Improper use of tags and categories
- Choosing permalinks or URL structure incorrectly
- Downplaying with the security best practices
- Ignoring the cleaning of demo content
- Loading raw images without optimization
- Ignoring setting up the Google analytics and search console
- Customizing parent themes instead of child themes
- Applying updates when the website is live
- Ignoring themes and plugins updates
- Ignoring SEO best practices
How to Benefit from Your WordPress Website Mistakes?
The mistakes make us learn. So, you learn from your mistakes on your WordPress website. It is a very common conception that you don't learn without making mistakes. When you find out that you made some critical mistakes on your website, you should immediately learn to remove those mistakes and use the automation tools to automate the processes that are hurting your website performance. So, by taking a proactive approach, you can change your mistakes into opportunities to learn and become a master of it. You should always remain positive to counter the mistake by implementing proper policy.
How to Automate WordPress Website Performance Parameters?
You can automate the different performance parameters of your website by using numerous types of tools. The most important tools to automate the performance parameters of your website are listed below:
- Use Yoast to automate SEO automation
- Use Akismet for detecting malicious links and malware
- Use Updraft WordPress plugin for website backup
- Use Google analytics for business intelligence
- And many other automation tools are available to use
Final Takeaway
WordPress is the leading platform with over 59.4% of the CMS market share. Normally, developers make certain mistakes while developing WordPress websites, which can be converted into benefits if the automation tools are used properly. The major mistakes and their solutions have been elaborated and the automation tips for a best-performing WordPress website are mentioned in this article.