Creating sites on WordPress is very easy which is why WordPress has millions of users. We often find our WordPress website slowing down over the course of time or just lags out, which is why boosting WordPress is required time to time.
While maintaining WordPress site can be little concerning, in todays post we will discuss the brief about WordPress, best ways to maintain your WordPress, boost up the sites using various methods. Without a further do, lets dive in.
WordPress
One of the popular content management system WordPress has first released 19 years ago. Due to its friendly and ease of access, WordPress has become one of the most talked about CMS till date. Designing site on WordPress is like editing pictures on editor which means anyone can design to their will.
Building websites with template and adding tools and features using plugins is fine, but sometimes you notice it isn’t going well. That is a true fact one can tell if they have sites on WordPress previously. Lets checkout how a beginner can deal with this situation.
I have divided the methods in 2 parts, one is Maintaining WordPress and other is optimizing the WordPress site. We are going to take a look on it one by one.
Maintaining WordPress
Maintaining WordPress is necessary thing, reason being that it is less likely to cause issues if its optimized and well managed. It would prevent unnecessary complexities and help you stand clean. Below are few methods that are helpful towards maintaining the WordPress.
1) Minimizing the plugins and themes-
We begin our site with WordPress, we also try addons like plugins and theme to beautify it. Too much use of plugins and themes will backfire lots of processes on server. This ways if you are on shared server your site or WordPress might just have nothing but hassles.
You should take look on your WordPress admin dashboard and look for how many plugins or addons you are using. On an average 12 plugins are enough for your site to have everything. Minimize number of builders, no of plugins that deliver similar results.
2) Use premium site builder-
Yes you heard that right, using premium builder is costlier but it will be helpful in many ways. Now a days premium site builders do have many features that does work of 5 plugins just in one builder. I understand that you might be just wanting to begin your business but this investment will worth it.
Premium site builder provides bunch of premium templates, it provides bunch of premium tools and optimization. This way you would witness the performance of your WordPress and website as well.
3) Remove that’s not in use-
When we initially begin with designing sites, we often try other themes and multiple plugins that we then not use on daily basis. For example you have tried couple of themes to suite or tried best plugins. The themes or plugins you do not use must be removed. Unused addons such as plugin and themes are unnecessary burden server will have. It must be removed in order to keep things decent.
4) Everything up to date-
The last but not least method of maintaining WordPress is that you must regularly update WordPress. Set the app installer of your hosting to update your WordPress each time the new update pushed. One must keep the plugins and themes up to date as well. The PHP version of your hosting plan plays an important role as well. Always use convenient PHP version and do not directly switch to higher PHP version unless it is required.
Boosting the WordPress
You would hear this from many hosting providers to optimize the WordPress site if you run into lags. While it does sound unfair but I agree that WordPress sites need optimization every now and then. Below are few points to consider in optimization.
1) Use .user.ini-
An .ini file is a file which contains PHP configuration settings. This file can be used to configure WordPress settings as well. You can navigate to file manager of your hosting and create a .user.ini file if it is not present. In your .user.ini file put below code and save file.
upload_max_filesize = 1024M
post_max_size = 1024M
memory_limit = 500M
max_execution_time = 1000
max_input_vars = 5000
max_input_time = 1000
2) Use gzip compression-
gzip compression is a method of compressing and decompressing the files. The idea of using this compression method is to get boost load of site on browsers. Speedy loads and scroll of site is very important since visitors might not like lag sites.
Head over to .htaccess of your WordPress and input the code as below. If your hosting plan is based on Apache use below code
# BEGIN GZIP COMPRESSION
<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</IfModule>
# END GZIP COMPRESSION
If it is nginx server use below code on .htaccess file.
gzip on;
gzip_comp_level 2;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_min_length 1100;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6].(?!.*SV1)";
gzip_vary on;
3) Use lighter images-
To render sites even faster, using light images is best option. An instant load of site is always useful. There are many free online image editors present such as befunky. Using such editors you can design images for your blog posts lighter and convenient. Image editors also help you design creative images that can be eye catchy and could improve engagement.
4) Use of P3 and Perfmatters-
At last some selective plugins might really help to optimize website. The two plugins we are talking about is P3 and Perfmatters. The first plugin Performance profiler will help you understand cause of issues, what plugins are consuming lots of resources and much more. Another plugin which is worth knowing is called Perfmatters. This paid plugin will for sure speed up your site as it has been well knowns in market for quite a time.
Conclusion
We have seen best and easy ways that would help you improve overall performance of site. This concludes all about managing the WordPress and optimizing the site. If you use a method that works out for you in such cases, do comment that below in comment box. If you have any suggestions to share, do submit it here. Thanks you and have a creative designing ahead!
