How to optimize a WordPress website and make it faster:

WordPress will be a little bit slow when you have uploaded your contents to the website. You can make the CMS more stable and speed by optimizing the CMS. Commonly there are various tweaks to make the website much faster. Here we are providing some tweaks on the common factors of the website. Some of the factors that influence the speed of websites are listed below, So if you configure the websites by going through these steps your website will be optimized and will load much faster.

Most important factors in increasing the website loading speed:

– Selecting proper theme for the website
– Proper optimization of images
– File compression
– Make use of expires header
– Make use of cache

Steps for optimizing the website:

– Optimizing the landing page
– Hotlink protection should be enabled
– Proper optimization of the databases

1. Selecting proper theme for the website

As you know the website theme has it’s own importance in website speed. Choosing the theme depends on the type of the website, if you are going to construct a website expecting a huge number of visitors and having blog in it. Then it’s highly recommended to make use of a well optimized and lighter theme for the website.

2. Proper optimization of images

The main aim in the optimization of images is to decrease the image size. There are some plugins available to integrate with the website that helps in decreasing the size of images. The plugins EWWW Image Optimizer and WP Smush.it are examples of that.

If you have installed any of the plugins then you can manage that from your website admin page. Also in the time of optimization it will use more memory for the process, so it is recommended to do it when the traffic is very low. The other thing you need to know is this process will also reduce the quality of images while doing image optimization.

3. File compression

In cPanel server, there is an option for compressing files. This will work with the mod_deflate module of Apache for compressing the contents. By using this function the files will be compressed and sent to the browser.

In your cPanel search of the option ” Optimize Website” after selecting the option you need to choose “Compress all content”

4. Make use of expires header

For the static contents of the website we can use some caching Technics, so it will store the recently loaded static contents in cache and use it for the next time. This can be done in a timely fashion, that is you can specify a period of time for caching the contents on external browsers.

You can see more about how to configure leverage browser caching from here

You will be able to change the values as per the type of your website and as per the requirements.

5 . Make use of cache

For caching you can use any of the WP caching plugins like W3 Total Cache. The use of cache will increase the website loading speed.

6. Optimizing the landing page

The main page of the website is the landing page, as you need to gain attention from the visitors most of the websites are loaded with various widgets etc. But this will cause negative effect and will take more time to load the page. Here the best idea is to make the website more catch-able by arranging the home page as a user friendly page. From the home page you can go to inner pages for  fetching more contents. This will make home page to load faster. So avoid adding more elements and widgets to the home page.

7. Hotlink protection should be enabled

This is one of the most important factor that needed to avoid, if Hotlink protection is not enabled the links from other websites will be redirected to your server if they use any direct links to any images hosted on your server on there websites. So it is recommended to enable Hotlink protection.

For enabling this option, you can choose the Hotlink protection function from your cPanel.

 8. Proper optimization of the databases

As you know, databases are one of the important modules of a website. Mostly all the data related to the websites, user data etc are stored in database. As that website and user’s grow higher the database also become more size. For a WordPress website optimization of databases will improve the performance of the website.

You can do optimizing the database from the phpMyAdmin of your account itself. For that first open phpMyAdmin and you can see the list of all databases in the window. From the list you need to select the database and select all the tables in the database then click on Optimize table.

This will optimize all the tables in the database.