Santa receives letters with wishes, and so does our WishDesk team. When it comes to letters from WordPress website owners, what do they most often ask about? They wonder if it is possible to speed their websites up. Of course, it is! Born to be light as a feather and airy as a meringue, WordPress sites can easily overcome gravity and fly. All they need is to have the drawbacks that are keeping them down successfully discovered and removed. This is through a WordPress speed optimization service, so no wonder it is one of our most popular WordPress support services. Let’s take a closer look at it.
"The biggest mistake in WordPress performance auditing is relying on a single tool. You need multiple testing tools and real user monitoring to get the full picture."
- Bob Dunn, WordPress Educator at BobWP
The steps of WordPress performance audit process
- First, our WordPress experts analyze your website using their experience, as well as powerful performance-testing tools (both multi-purpose ones and those specifically for WordPress).
- Then we offer you a list of our performance optimization suggestions. And, if you agree, we carefully bring them all to life using special WordPress optimization plugins and other tools.
- After the performance optimization, we test the results and present them to you. Congrats! Your WordPress site has become much, much faster!
Most common WordPress performance audit aspects
WordPress plugins
Often, performance issues lie in WordPress plugins. They can bring great features to your site, but can also bring your site down. We carefully study what each WordPress plugin gives you against the load it creates. The deactivation of certain plugins immediately makes websites breathe more freely. WordPress plugins also need to be kept updated to their latest versions, and we take care of this.
"The most common finding in our performance audits is plugin bloat. We regularly see sites running 40+ plugins when they could achieve the same functionality with 15-20 well-chosen ones."
- Chris Lema, WordPress Expert and VP at Liquid Web
WordPress theme
Your WordPress theme may contain elements that impact your website’s speed. We will discover and carefully deactivate them with no negative effect on any useful features.
Caching
Are you fully using the potential of such an extremely resource-saving invention as caching? It lets your site show content to users again and again with no need to load it every time. We will help you apply the caching mechanisms that suit your WordPress site best.
Image optimization
Optimized images are vital for performance. There are tools that let us optimize images while maintaining their quality. Optimization applies not only to existing images, we also take care of setting up automatic optimization for all images to be uploaded in the future. In addition, for faster rendering, it is useful to specify the width and height of images. To reduce trips to the server, there is also the opportunity to combine them using CSS sprites or other techniques.
JavaScript and CSS minification
Brevity is the soul of… great speed! To reduce the load on the server and make your website faster, JavaScript and CSS files should be properly minified — we will take special care with this.
JavaScript and CSS minification
Another secret of treating your JavaScript and CSS right is to group them together (aggregate them), so that requests to the server are kept at a minimum.
And more
These are just some important aspects of performance optimization. WordPress websites may also benefit from solutions like CDN usage, cookie size reduction, GZIP compression, getting rid of unnecessary redirects, putting CSS in <head> of the page, and many others. A performance audit will show which steps are needed in your particular case.
Wrap-up
Your wish to have a faster WordPress site will be fulfilled in a blink of an eye — just contact the WishDesk software development company. Both your users and search engines will be incredibly thankful for that.
Let your website lift off and start a long, fantastic flight!
