WordPress sites can often face a a slow performance. There are two risks associated with websites that loads at a slow pace – visitors will get frustrated and leave the site before checking out on it and search engines will try to ding the site for being too sluggish. There are several easy ways through which WordPress websites can have some good improvements in speed. Whether the steps involve deleting files or more complicated procedures like opting for better web hosts is decided at a later stage.
First, let’s discuss three easy steps that can be used for speeding up the WordPress sites. These steps primarily focus on removing any type of unneeded data. If a caching program is not used, any of the WordPress information status can be easily pulled from the database every single time the page loads. However, remember, if there is a large amount of information being stored, then the WordPress sites will take longer to load. The easy ways to handle such a situation are discussed below:
Deleting all the unnecessary WordPress plugins
One must use the Plugins very sparingly because they are the ones that slow down the speed of a website. There are many users who install more plugins than what is required at a time. It is not that plugins are useless. Yes, they definitely have some use, but at the same time, not many are needed to be used at the same time. There are many unnecessary plugins that may harm the performance of a site. So, it is always better to double-check with the coder before installing and using a plugin. The coder may well be able to replace the plugin by including a code snippet for the site.
Deleting all the spam comments
A comment remains in the WordPress database even if the user has marked it as SPAM. The comment needs to be deleted from the database or else, thousands of spam comments will overpopulate the database and this as a result, will slow down the site’s performance. and loading capacity. Most of the sites feature a “Empty Spam” button in the Comments section. Simply click it to delete all the spam comments.
Deleting all the old posts
Storing old post revisions is a bad idea. In fact, there is no real purpose in engaging the space while keeping these old posts. Simply delete the older version of the page and also the posts manually. This will help in speeding up the process.
After carrying out all the above three steps, the user can now add a caching plugin. This is a highly effective plugin that will store a version of the site which can be easily accessed even without pulling from database.
Apart from the above mentioned steps, there is another strategy that can be quite effective in the website speeding up process. Optimizing the user images for the web is a very effective strategy that can reap great results. At times, it can be quite fruitful to use the large sized 24bit PNG images. But these image formats also require higher storage space than the JPEG or BMP formats. Optimizing the website database is also required. This is a process quite similar to disk defragmentation in a PC. To keep up the performance of a website, this should be done at least twice in a week.
Diana is a writer/blogger. She loves writing, travelling and reading books. She contributes to Bret Clark
