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How To Improve Your WordPress Operation: Tips and Tricks

Navigating WordPress can be quite simple at the basic level. However, some people may not know there are certain tips and tricks that can take your WordPress management to the next level! With just a little knowledge, it’s also possible to address issues without too much trouble.

WordPress hosting can be difficult to work around—especially if you don’t understand how it works. There’s an innumerable amount of things that could slow down your WordPress website. Regardless of the source, any problem can be fixed with the right knowledge and tools in hand!

To give you something to work with, here are some things you can do to streamline your WordPress website:

Reduce The Amount of HTTP Requests

Too many HTTP requests will slow down your website for sure. A single image, video, or JavaScript file is an HTTP request. Cut down on superfluous HTTP requests to speed up your website’s loading time.

Don’t Use Gravatar 

An active comments section is good because that means you have plenty of engagement on your site. But this might lead to too many HTTP requests due to Gravatar generating a profile picture for each unique commenter! You can either make use of a third-party commenting system that is more optimised than what WordPress has to offer, or you can go to your settings and disable avatars for your comments section.

Clear Your Database

All your settings and content gets stored in one place: your WordPress database. It could be slowing down your site if it’s full of information you no longer need. Regularly check your database for unnecessary content and delete it to improve your website performance.

Don’t Self-Host Video and Audio

While the option to host audio and video on your own website is available to you, it’s not ideal. This is because your server wasn’t built for this! 

Your best bet is to make use of existing websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, or the like to host your files. These sites are specialised to handle video and/or audio. By taking advantage of them, then it’s a simple matter of embedding the file onto your website!

Use a Faster DNS Provider

DNS is your domain name system. There are many different DNS providers—and some are slower than others. This could be the root cause of your website slowing down! 

Use a fast DNS service like Cloudflare, which is not only fast but also free. 

Optimise Your Code

JavaScript can slow down your website’s performance due to how it interacts with the rest of your code, such as CSS. Your website can be so busy trying to load JavaScript that it fails to load your images immediately. 

Make use of free plugins online to deal with this issue. Async JavaScript and Autoptimize can help you arrange your code such that the essentials load in first. There’s also WP Rocket, a paid caching plugin that has features you can use to optimise your website!

Minify Your Code

To minify your code means to shrink it by removing things that don’t change or affect its function. This means removing line breaks, spaces, and the like—things that were put in there to make it easier for the person coding it to parse the code. Plugins such as Autoptimize, WP Rocket, or WP Fastest Cache offer minification functions.

Conclusion

This isn’t a definitive list of all the possible problems you could be having with your WP website. If you’re WP hosting in Australia, you’ll have issues with American users, for example. If your problem wasn’t solved here, you’ll have to do further research on your own. Hopefully, this list helped in some way. 

Are you in need of WordPress hosting services in Perth? Contact Hosted WP today! We offer specialised WordPress hosting and management services.

About the author

David Sullivan
Owner of Hosted WP.

Personal Blog at https://sulli.blog