How to Optimize WordPress
Truthfully, 99% of bad wordpress sites are because of poor plugins (or just to many of them) and images that are not optimized causing your page size to be to large. Now these sites may look great, but they take 10+ seconds to load or eat up all your server resources! Who’s going to wait 10 seconds for a website or who wants to deal with a crashed server? My approach to optimizing wordpress has these crucial steps.
- Deactivate any plugins that are not essential to your site
- Optimize your images.
- Tune up your CSS, HTML, and JS
- Install w3-Total-Cache and set it up correctly
Step One, you should only have plugins that you absolutely need. Sometimes people put so many plugins on their wordpress site when they really don’t. I’m a minimalist when it comes to plugins, only use those that are absolutely necessary.
Step Two, you need to optimize your images.
Step Three, you’ll need to tune up the CSS, HTML, and JS on the site. I really like the Autoptimize plugin, it does a great job taking care of it.
Step Four, time to properly set up W3 Total Cache. Now depending on what server you have, there is a different process. I really only recommend Total Cache when you are on a Shared Server, if you have a VPS or Dedicated Server I recommend enabling memcached and tuning your server.
After doing this, you are going to see much better results on your sites.