The latest versions of the Google algorithm reward all those websites that provide a better user experience, with the loading time of the website being one of the clearest objective indicators of said experience. Consequently, it will be necessary to reduce this time as much as possible to increase our visibility on Google. The weight of the page should never exceed 100kb, nor the load time of three seconds since a large percentage of visitors will leave your website if it takes longer to load. Therefore, creating lightweight pages without unnecessary content or code that slows down their loading, as well as reducing requests to the server will be the two key goals to achieve.
In this article, we will see how to increase WordPress performance optimizing the design and optimizing its loading time. For more information click here to WP Charms blog.
WordPress layout optimization
A simple design will favor access to our content by search engine robots. It is recommended to minimize Flash and JavaScript code, as well as avoid templates or designs whose navigation menus are not simple text. The text of these menus must contain keywords. Responsive or adaptive (multi-device) design also plays a crucial role in SEO. A light and functional template will be the most recommended. In this Hosting guide, you have a good selection with some of the best free templates available.
We must also think in advance about the architecture and taxonomy that will structure our site with WordPress. The system architecture presents a good base optimization since all the pages of the site are interlaced with each other. However, a poorly designed or poorly structured site can lose many positions in search results. Above all, the theme and navigation of our site must be simple, usable, clean and friendly. The content should also be perfectly organized by categories or sections and accessible as far as possible with just one click.
It is recommended to generate a not too high number of logical categories to classify our posts, and then assign a good number of tags when writing each entry. For static of permanent content such as contact information or corporate information, it is preferable to create pages.
Plugins to reduce loading time in WordPress
In addition to the aforementioned, to minimize the possible loading time and increase the performance of sites built with WordPress, it is recommended to use the following plugins:
w3 total cache
It is an essential plugin for optimizing the user experience. W3 total cache reduces server CPU load and usage by caching (static total copy in the visitor’s Brower) of various elements of the site, including the database. The plugin
s ‘Minify’ component compresses the site’s CSS and JavaScript files, increasing the total page load speed. For the correct performance of the plugin, it is essential to activate the options “Database Cache” and “Object Cache” in the configuration options of the plugin, without forgetting to deactivate the “preview” mode so that it starts working. W3 Total Caches will be even more effective with CDN (Content Delivery Network) server networks.
WordPress Gzip Compression
This plugin activates compression through the Gzip format in the web browser of our visitors, increasing the speed of loading the site and reducing the consumption of server bandwidth.
WP-Optimize
Plugin whose purpose is to optimize the database of our site with WordPress, reducing its size and consequently its loading time. WP-Optimize we can remove easily removed with extreme comments, spam and reviews posts that unnecessarily increase the size of our phpMyAdmin, it is certainly much easier to do using this handy plugin.
CW Image Optimizer
The excessive number of images in our library and the large size of the files will surely slow down the performance of our site. The CW image Optimize plugin reduces the size of our image files by means of compression technology without loss of quality, saving server resources and improving the loading speed of our pages. Another option to improve performance is to host the images of our site in services the serve as external servers, such as Dropbox, Pinterest of Flickr.
However, it does not hurt to recommend a regular review of the active plugins that we have running on our website to keep only the really essential ones since an excessive number of such plugins can suppose an overload of resources that negatively affects good performance from our site.
To conclude, it is worth remembering that WordPress works best on Linux-based servers since Windows servers are specially designed for their own applications. The good performance of the server is another factor that influences in a notorious way the positioning in search engines, so we have to keep this data in mind when hiring our web hosting, since a slow server or with frequent falls will seriously harm our ranking.
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