Whether you run a high traffic WordPress website on a shared host, you should optimize WordPress website and your server to run as efficiently as possible.
1. Use a Fast WordPress Theme
A design that has been coded badly, or uses high resolutions images throughout the design, will add unnecessary loads to your web page. Such a design could add a few seconds to your web page loading time. Choose a theme that has been optimized for desktops, tablets and mobile devices.
Unfortunately, theme developers optimize their preview website using caching, dedicated server and CDN. This makes is difficult to know how quick a WordPress theme is before using it yourself.
2. Monitor Your Plugins
Before you install any WordPress plugin on your website, check functionality of this plugin and ask yourself is this plugin necessary for website?.
3. Reduce Post Revisions, Trash, Drafts, Spam, Pingbacks and Trackbacks
It’s a good practice to optimize and maintain your WordPress website from time to time. Some plugins available which can take responsibility to optimize and maintain the WordPress website.
4. Optimize Your Images for the Web
Images can help break up long pieces of content and can help your articles readability. Therefore, pages that contain media images can take a long time to load page.
5. Minify and Combine CSS and Javascript
Compressing the Javascript/jQuery and CSS will give you a good improvement in website loading time. As compressing the JS and CSS files will decrease your page size. Merge the multiple files into single file will reduce the number of server request to your web server.
6. Caching is the Key to Success
Caching is the most important factor for the optimize your website. WP has various good plugins available. These plugins will create .html files for each post and page, and it will serve these html files instead of making the database queries every time.
Some most usefull plugins for caching in the WordPress like WP Super Cache, Hyper Cache, W3 Total Cache. This plugins generate the HTML files for the each web page and serves it, but we have one plugin which cache the database query result.
7. Use a Content Delivery Network
Using a CDN (Content delivery network) is the better option for the website. Almost CDN’s are paid and can be very costly. We have only one CDN which is free (CloudFlare).
8. Set an Expire Header for the Static Content
Setting the expire header to far future date will instruct your web browser to cache and serve those cached content until that expire date. You can set the expire header using some easy edits to your .htaccess file.
Optimizing your WordPress website is no longer an option. With SEO placing so much importance on the speed of websites, it is vital to your website’s success to have fast loading web pages.
There are many more hacks to go with this, but I’ve tried my best to present the best ways for anyone out there just looking to get started with WordPress.
