• Lower search engine rankings
• Increased bounce rates
• Decreased conversions
• Reduced customer satisfaction

The good news is that there are a number of things you can do to speed up your WordPress site and improve its performance. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the most effective WordPress performance optimization tips.

Understanding the Basics: What is WordPress Performance Optimization?

WordPress performance optimization is like tuning a car for better speed and mileage. It involves tweaking various elements of your WordPress site to ensure it loads quickly, runs smoothly, and keeps visitors happy. After all, a faster website means better user experience, higher SEO rankings, and more conversions!

Why Is Speed So Crucial?

1. User Experience: No one likes a slow website. If your site takes over three seconds to load, you might lose nearly half of your visitors.
2. SEO Rankings: Search engines like Google love speedy sites. The faster your site, the higher it could potentially rank.
3. Conversion Rates: A one-second delay in page load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. Speed matters.

Roll Up Your Sleeves: 10 WordPress Optimization Tips

1. Choose a Robust Hosting Provider

The foundation of WordPress speed optimization begins with selecting a reliable hosting provider. Imagine building a house on shaky ground! A strong host ensures that your website has the resources it needs to run efficiently. At WebDevStudios, we’ll work with you to select the right one.

2. Utilize Caching

Caching is like taking a snapshot of your web pages and serving them to your users. It reduces the load on your server and makes your site faster. There are plenty of caching plugins available. Pick one and see the difference.

3. Optimize Images and Media

Heavy images slow down your site. Compress your images and videos without compromising quality. Plugins like Smush or Imagify can do the job in a jiffy.

4. Keep Your Plugins and Themes Updated

Outdated plugins and themes are not only a security risk but can also affect your site’s speed. Regularly update them to the latest versions to maintain optimum performance.

5. Minimize HTTP Requests

Every element on your site – from images to scripts – makes an HTTP request. The more requests, the slower the site. Reduce these requests by simplifying your design and combining files where possible.

6. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN stores copies of your site on servers around the world. This means your content is delivered from the server closest to your visitor, reducing load times significantly.

7. Optimize Your Database

A cluttered database can be a speed bottleneck. Regularly clean up your database by removing unnecessary data and optimizing its structure.

8. Prioritize Above-the-Fold Content

Loading the content that users see first improves the perceived speed of your site. Prioritize above-the-fold content to make your site feel snappier!

9. Implement Lazy Loading

Lazy loading means only loading images and videos when they’re visible to the user. This reduces initial load times and makes your site faster.

10. Monitor Website Speed

Regularly check your website’s speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. Monitoring helps in identifying areas that need improvement.

Additional WordPress Performance Optimization Tips

In addition to the tips above, there are a number of other things you can do to improve WordPress performance optimization. Here are a few more tips:

• Minify your CSS and JavaScript files. Minifying your CSS and JavaScript files can help to reduce their size and improve loading speed.
• Update your WordPress core and plugins regularly. WordPress core updates and plugin updates often include performance improvements.
• Keep your WordPress database clean. A cluttered WordPress database can slow down your site. Delete any unused tables and data from your database regularly.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

While optimizing, it’s crucial to avoid mistakes that could hinder your WordPress Performance Optimization efforts. Don’t overstuff your site with unnecessary plugins, and avoid using unoptimized images. Most importantly, don’t overlook mobile optimization – a growing number of users are browsing on mobile devices!

Summing Up: Speed is Your Friend!

Optimizing your WordPress site might seem daunting, but with the right strategies, the results are well worth it! Implement these tips, and watch your site’s performance soar. Remember, a faster website isn’t just good for user experience; it’s a golden ticket to better SEO rankings and increased conversions.

If you need help improving the performance of your WordPress site, contact WebDevStudios. As a leading WordPress agency,  we can help you choose a good hosting provider, select a lightweight theme, optimize your images, reduce the number of plugins you use, and implement other WordPress performance optimization techniques.

We’ve only scratched the surface here; there’s a world of possibilities out there for WordPress speed optimization! So, are you ready to dive deeper and uncover more secrets to a faster, smoother, and more efficient website? Stay tuned, as we’ll be exploring more advanced techniques in our upcoming posts.

If you enjoyed these WordPress optimization tips, we think you’ll love the information provided in our free Guide to WordPress Performance. This is your opportunity to make your website stand out in the digital crowd. Speed up, optimize, and let your WordPress site shine.

The post Make Your Website Fly: 10 Essential WordPress Optimization Tips appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Below we’ll look at the evolution of the protocol and discuss how to evolve our asset delivery strategy to deliver CSS and scripts in the fastest way possible for the latest version.

1997 – HTTP/1.1 – History and Asset Loading Strategies

Implemented in 1997, HTTP/1.1’s main performance pain points were head-of-line-blocking and redundancy of the request header happening for each call.

Connecting to the server, transmitting headers, and requesting data was so time consuming for each file that we tried to get as much as we could into each file we called.

To do this, we preprocessed our scripts and styles in single file calls, inlined code, vulcanized, and made image sprites. It was paramount to limit the number of calls to the server. Much of the internet is still built this way.

2015 – HTTP/2 – Let there be multiplexing.

What is HTTP multiplexing?

From Stack Overflow:

Put simply, multiplexing allows your Browser to fire off multiple requests at once on the same connection and receive the requests back in any order.

As browser support became real in 2015, HTTP/2 offered compressed headers and multiplexing to a single TCP connection. This allows multiple assets to be loaded simultaneously, rendering the page faster.

While this is a vast improvement, there is still a catch.

If any asset being requested within that multiplexed TCP connection experiences packet loss, then the entire group of multiplexed streams after that point would be paused until the data packet could be corrected.

Because TCP doesn’t have any context on the multiplexed files to know which can move on and which can’t, packet loss can have HTTP/2 still dealing with head of line blocking.

HTTP/3 – Now and the Future

HTTP/3 seeks to solve the problems of HTTP/2 by not using the TCP at all and instead using QUIC. Because QUIC provides native multiplexing, lost packets only impact the streams where data has been lost.

But can I use it? Kinda.

Most browsers support it by default. However, (as of this writing) in Safari you need to activate it as an option on your device.

Implications

To take advantage of multiplexing we have to break out of the concatenation mindset where the focus was on limiting calls and have a more nuanced asset delivery strategy prioritizing assets crucial to render.

Most browsers and servers seem to default the concurrent connections to about 100. Smaller files delivered largely simultaneously can drastically improve render time and page speed performance.

Google Page Speed Performance Metrics

Largest Contentful Paint, First Input  Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift are Google’s strategy to help improve web performance; this is cumulatively named “Core Web Vitals.” The biggest enemy of scoring well in these metrics is render blocking assets.

Luckily HTTP/2/3 gives us ways to address render blocking issues much better than before.

Optimization Strategies

Google’s algorithms will down-rank pages that have pipelines with render blocking resources. However, unused JS and CSS resources are weighted almost as strongly.

Although Google only knows for sure (these algorithms aren’t public), it is likely because unused resources bloat a site’s payload and are often render blocking, resulting in causing the user waiting for resources that aren’t even used on a page.

Taking on the task of eliminating unused CSS and JS can also cut the file sizes of your minified assets. Seek out parts of your code base that aren’t used on every page/post/condition and find ways to dynamically enqueue the related assets.

For example ACF Gutenberg blocks:

It is common practice to be concatenating and enqueueing one large CSS and or JS file for all of your custom blocks. ACF block registration lets you enqueue related assets only if the block is used on a page eliminating unused CSS while not duplicating it by including it inline. This is a reasonably easy enhancement that provides a good result for minimal effort.

Another point of attack could be any global options set via the admin that might trigger a class or attribute change that you are then applying CSS or JS to affect (any global option affecting render). Those styles could be in their own sheet and the condition used to set the class or attribute could be used to enqueue the asset instead.

These kinds of strategies may require a more complicated preprocessing of files and JS route building, but the results will be substantial. You will serve less unused code and by pulling the conditional code out it will also make your concatenated files smaller and therefore less render blocking, leading to faster page loads and better Google ranking.

View the code on Gist.

Finding Balance

Knowing how much there is to be gained it’s easy to over simplify your asset loading strategy by loading every little file independently—going to the opposite extreme. There are limits, however.

Servers and browsers set their own restrictions for concurrent connections so we should focus on loading render driving assets first but related parts of your code base should still be concatenated and minified. Each project is different and will require a slightly different approach but HTTP/2/3 gives us the options to improve end user experience and make the internet generally more efficient.

The post HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 Flipped the Performance Optimization Script appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Why Start Now?

It’s still 2019, so why should you be concerned about what will be on-trend next year? The planning process is pivotal in successful website builds, which takes time. You want to ensure your site is at the forefront of the the changing landscape of the web and not playing catch-up against your competitors. The sooner you start planning, the faster development can begin to get your site become a trailblazer in the new year. 

Why Do Trends Change and Why Are They So Important?

It probably feels like it’s a never-ending cycle to keep up with the new trends and updates that come yearly for WordPress and the web in general, and you wouldn’t be wrong. With so many talented developers (many of which we have here at WDS) contributing to open-source platforms, trends and necessary features will always be changing in an attempt to find the next big thing for developers and consumers alike.

Some of these trends may be purely aesthetic, which are still very important in maintaining your brand’s image on the web, but many of them are imperative to ensuring your site remains secure, accessible, and provides a friendly user experience. You want to position your company as a leader in your industry, and your website is going to be the first reflection of that for many visitors. Let’s explore some of the ways you can improve your website for next year.

What Improvements Should You Make in 2020?

1. Make sure your website is mobile-first and thumb-friendly.

Due to the continued growth in the use of mobile devices, it’s not enough anymore to just make sure your site works on mobile. Since so many users will be interacting with your site on a mobile device (and in some cases, solely on mobile), it’s imperative to design for a mobile experience first. By keeping mobile at the forefront of your design, you’ll definitely see some of the following benefits.

• You’ll give users an improved customer experience with design elements meant to be displayed on a smaller screen utilizing touch interactions.
  
• Keeping the design “thumb-friendly” (since often times users hold phones in the palm of the hand using their thumb to scroll, click, and interact) ensures all the content is within easy reach.
• Search engines, such as Google, are starting to give preference in indexing mobile-first designs to serve up more relevant searches for mobile users.
  

2. Use motion in your design with micro-animations.

Users love feedback and emotional connections with websites. Micro-animations are becoming increasingly popular in providing users with a rewarding user experience while providing valuable user feedback. These may sound like small details to add to a site, but don’t underestimate how something so simple can help differentiate a site from ordinary to a stand-out. 

Micro-animations can provide beneficial feedback through elements such as:

• Showing visual progress – visually seeing the progression of a loading bar complete
• Directing user navigation – utilizing subtle direction arrows or colors to directional cues
• Making use of natural swipe tendencies – creating seamless transitions generate an interactive and smooth site flow
• Visual feedback for security – implementing a color bar illustrating the strength of a password
• And so many more!

3. Optimize your site for accessibility.

Just like many other facets of life, some individuals need to utilize the web in a different manner than as initially designed due to a disability. Therefore, although this one may be more difficult to implement than some other trends, upgrading the accessibility of your website is a crucial way to improve your website for next year because it allows you to reach a vast audience and, in some cases, makes sure you are in accordance with laws and policies.

Designing for accessibility includes a vast number of things to consider and can require some additional education in understanding proper code structures to do so. However, simple things can be done to make drastic improvements to your accessibility on your site, including:

• Adding closed captions to videos
• Using headers correctly
• Integrating tab navigation
• Utilizing high color contrast

4. Make use of audio and voice search optimization.

Going along with accessibility, users are exploring websites with more than just their finger tips now. With the increase in voice assistants, such as Siri, Google Home, and Alexa, more users are navigating the web utilizing their voice. 

Ensuring your site is set up for audio and voice optimizations comes down to how content is organized on your site and how easily a search engine is able to find it. Here are some key factors to keep in mind:

• Making sure that your important content is within HTML (not images)
• Use phrases similar to natural speech (not just keywords)
• Ensure your site has a quick load speed (since Google will search those first in its queries)

Positive Impact of These Trends

These are just a few of the trends to note, and by no means do you need to start incorporating every new one you come across. By keeping some of these in mind to plan for next year, you can ensure you are are positioning your site as a leader in the web landscape for 2020. Some of these improvements may give your site a visual edge that will attract a consumer’s eye. Some will ensure your site remains secure and safe, while others are working to make sure you are presenting the best user experience.

WebDevStudios Can Improve Your Website

Are you ready to make improvements to your website for the new year? We’d love to chat. Contact us today and let’s start 2020 right by building an updated and on-trend website for your business or nonprofit organization.

The post Ways to Improve Your Website for the New Year appeared first on WebDevStudios.

We often forget about our websites as life starts to get busier, especially if we don’t need to update our websites with any regularity. This time of year, more importantly for eCommerce website owners, site traffic will increase, and there are a few things we can do to potentially help your users our, as well as help, protect yourself.

I like to keep things clean and running smoothly with SOAP: secure, optimize, assess accessibility concerns, and prioritize updates. So, let’s get started.

Secure

Security, especially around the holidays, is essential. Even the smallest website could potentially put your users at risk if not adequately audited, configured, or updated. You don’t need a computer science degree to keep your website secure; you need to make sure you’re looking at a few key points.

Make sure your hosting provider has your back. Companies like WP Engine often release information about their ongoing security efforts to let you know that you’re covered. Hacks are happening all the time and often without your knowledge. It’s important to know that the hosting platform you choose is just as dedicated to staying safe online as you are. If they’re not, it might be time to find someone new.

Add a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate to your site. It used to be that the only sites that handled sensitive data like names or credit card numbers required additional security in the form of an SSL certificate. Now, companies like Google and Mozilla, to “secure the internet,” are requiring SSL certificate on every website. Sooner or later, your website visitors (and customers) may not even be able to see your website without first seeing this:

You can imagine how much that will affect your website traffic. Plus, an SSL certificate is an extra layer of security at little to no cost. Check out options like Let’s Encrypt before paying the big bucks to your hosting provider.

There are a myriad of other ways to keep your WordPress and non-WordPress website up-to-date and secure, but the aforementioned items are more than enough to secure most websites and protect yourself and others into the New Year.

Optimize

Optimization is a funny industry buzzword. I get the impression that the word “optimization” gets thrown around as the goal of any website without really understanding what optimization means or what limitations revolve around a truly optimized website. Not every website needs to be optimized to the fullest. The more site traffic or interaction you have, the more beneficial it is for you to make some optimizations, but you won’t know until you take a look at your site traffic to figure out who’s visiting, which pages they’re visiting, for how long, and on which devices.

There are a few easy ways to optimize a WordPress website. For example, keeping in mind that some hosts already handle a good number of these for you, Flywheel and WP Engine both handle server-side caching and have options for a CDN to serve up media. You can learn more about some of those optimizations by reading Best Practices for WordPress Website Image Optimization.

• Utilizing a CDN to serve up images and media will help speed up your website by using cached images rather than needing to download them each time the page loads, which is especially important if your users are typically on slower networks or utilizing mobile devices.
• Utilizing a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache are good options for automatic handling site caching on Apache websites. Nginx websites may need a bit more manual configuration.
• If your theme has changed or you’ve made updates in the past six months, you may want to rebuild all of your thumbnails to make sure that you’re using an image meant for space rather than an extra large image in an area that renders a small image. Regenerate Thumbnails is an excellent option for doing this efficiently without needing to access your server directly.
• Remove unused plugins, and deactivate those that aren’t in use. You can cut down on extra JavaScript or CSS files being loaded when you don’t need them. Things change from year to year, and we often forget about that gallery plugin that we replaced six months ago but never deactivated. It happens. Deactivate, remove, and enjoy a tall cup of coffee for a job well done.

Assess Accessibility Concerns

Accessibility refers to two things: a user’s ability to access your WordPress Admin and the ability for website visitors with special considerations to access your website. Both items should be addressed to help you in the new year.

For access to the WordPress Admin, update and audit your Users. People come, and people go, but we often forget to remove old users who can leave your site open to unexpected access. Removing unused users and keeping passwords secure and changing them frequently will help optimize your site, not for performance, but for organization and security’s sake.

Bonus tip: stop using one login for all of your users. You’ll thank me later.

For visitor accessibility (WCAG 2.1, for example), you may need to do more comprehensive updates. If your site is trafficked highly, primarily if your website sells a product, you may be dismissing users with any disability because they are unable to navigate your website with the keyboard or by sound with the help of text to speech technologies. Picking a theme that meets WCAG standards is a great place to start.

Keep in mind that not all eCommerce and WordPress plugins are created equal. WooCommerce places much importance on their plugin’s accessibility; so it might be worth switching if you don’t already use it.

If you’re curious, you can use an online service like WAVE Web Accessibility Tool (also a browser plugin) to audit your website’s accessibility status. You might be surprised.

Prioritize Updates

Keeping your WordPress website up-to-date is probably the most important thing you can do to keep your website optimized and secure. This includes your platform, plugins, and add-ons. Auditing them and removing unused ones is crucial, but it’s also important that the ones that remain on your site are updated.

• WordPress Core: Unless you’ve switched the option off, updates can occur automatically. Along with new features and performance improvements, these updates address potential security vulnerabilities as they’re found and go a long way to securing your data.
• Plugins: Keeping plugins up-to-date offer the same benefits as keeping the Core updated, in most cases, but I recommend that you make sure that the plugins are confirmed compatible with your current version of WordPress, are updated fairly regularly, actively installed, and rated highly. The little things make a big difference.

I get asked a lot about plugins that go through a development change or are no longer supported with the current version of WordPress, but yet the website owner is reliant on a specific feature that the older version of the plugin provides, causing them to not update the plugin or the WordPress core and continue to operate their website on an old version of WordPress. In other words, they simply refuse to update anything.

To them, I say this: it’s time to update! You’re out of SOAP!

You risk security vulnerabilities, are probably causing optimization issues, and ignoring accessibility considerations. Plus, because you’re out-of-date, living in the past, and not taking advantage of the newest technologies the internet has to offer, you and your website visitors (aka your customers) are missing out on all the things meant to make your life and the lives of your users better. Think about that.

To the Future!

So, let’s see if we can’t get your website updated, secured, and optimized. I appreciate it and bet your users will, as well. If you’re one of those that have just been sitting on an old version of WordPress to preserve functionality, why not reach out and see how we can help you bring that up-to-date?

The post Get Your WordPress Website Ready for the New Year: What to Do Now! appeared first on WebDevStudios.