Themes, plugins, and life hacks for WordPress website optimization

Fast loading is one of the features that make websites user-friendly, and WordPress is not an exception. You won’t get a second chance to make the first impression on the user. It is very important to make sure that your visitors do not have any reason to leave the site before it is fully loaded or reasons why they will not want to return to your website. How to optimize your WordPress site, which themes and plugins to choose, and what mistakes to avoid? Read below to find out responses to these questions. For more web design ideas, visit the website. 

Suggested reading: Another alternative to WordPress is Wix. Not many businesses find it to be a suitable solution, but you can read a Wix Review and decide for yourself if it is a good option.

Selection of the WordPress Theme

Some WordPress themes can be very fast with well-written codes, while others are quite the opposite. When choosing a theme, pay attention to the loading speed of the demo page. This will give you an idea of how it will affect the overall loading speed of your site. You may also read WordPress hosting reviews to get a better idea. If you want to create a unique theme for your WordPress site, you have to approach any development company like Beetroot AB and discuss the details. 

Among the hundreds of available WordPress themes, we recommend you to consider the following options because they proved to be the most fast-loading:

•       Avada is one of the best-selling WP themes. It is also one of the fastest templates available today.
•       Astra is a speed-focused free WP theme. It is suitable for a blog, personal portfolio, corporate website, and WooCommerce online-store. You will be impressed by its lightning-fast loading and opportunities for further customization.
•       GeneratePress is a simple, super-fast, and flexible theme. By using many WP Customizer options, you can apply the GeneratePress to any business niche.
•       OceanWP is a fast and free multipurpose WP theme that gives you plenty of options to customize your website design in real-time.
•   Hello Elementor is a simple and quick theme specially designed for the Elementor Page Builder. It is lighter than most themes because it contains few styles and scripts, making it an ideal sample for the fast-loading website.

As you can see, the most popular WordPress themes are universal. If you want to have a quick website – it is better to choose among such options.

Useful Plugins to Work With WP

Installing a large number of plugins can take up free space and create unnecessary load on the site, which will make it slow. It makes no sense to install or store plugins that you don’t need. Checking them is a great way to speed the website up: those ones that are critical for the website must be kept, while all others should be removed. However, there are still some plugins that we could not imagine our website without:

•       Jetpack is a powerful plugin. It provides built-in statistics on page visits and will be especially useful if you do not want to install Google Analytics.
•       Akismet Anti-Spam is a nice solution to block spam.
•       Sucuri Security is a plugin that allows you to see unsuccessful log-in attempts to your site with certain IP addresses.
•   Yoast SEO is the most popular website optimization plugin.

We also recommend using as few activated plugins at the same time as possible. Such measures will make your browsing experience better.

Handy Tips to Facilitate Your Work with WordPress

Hosting choice has a huge impact on the website speed. Good hosting is the foundation. If you are working on improving the loading speed, the first thing to consider is hosting (even if the site is not on WordPress). Besides, we recommend to use the following tips:

1) Use Caching

Caching is the temporary storage of the content such as images and files that are involved in the rendering of the page. The page loads much faster when these files are requested again.

2) Compress the CSS and JS files

During the procedure, CSS and JS files are compressed to their smallest size, thereby increasing the loading speed.

3) Optimize Your Database

WordPress often saves almost everything. This junk data includes trackbacks, pingbacks, deleted files, unapproved comments, or comments marked as spam. Get rid of this info, and you will immediately notice the changes.

In Conclusion

Now you are well aware of the importance of themes and plugins and their effect on the website loading speed. Besides, the key factors are a proper choice of hosting, optimization of images and the site’s database, enabling the caching plugin and file compression, etc. We strongly recommend you to regularly review your website by the relevant parameters and enjoy its quick operation.