The standard Lorem Ipsum passage, used since the 1500s
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

Section 1.10.32 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum”, written by Cicero in 45 BC
“Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?”

1914 translation by H. Rackham
“But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?”

Do you have a WordPress site that’s running slow? That’s not good.

There are many factors that can effect WordPress performance speed.

These include: Web hosting, WordPress configuration, image size, dodgy plugins and external scripts to name a few. These can also effect your search engine page ranking.

Below are a few tips, tricks and WordPress plugins I’ve picked up for 2018 that keep my WordPress sites running at optimum performance.

Choosing good WordPress hosting

Your WordPress hosting will play a role in your overall WordPress performance speed.

A good shared hosting provider will take extra measures to ensure your site is optimised for performance.

But on shared hosting you are effectively sharing the same room with other customers.

Therefore if one of your room mate’s site gets a lot of traffic, then it can have an impact on server performance, and of course your WordPress site.

If you really want to remove that factor, then you may wish to choose managed WordPress hosting so you know that it’s just your site with no other interference.

They should also offer automatic backups, WordPress updates and security features to keep your site safe.

Step 1 – Update your theme and plugins

Assuming you have a WordPress site designed and built, you’ll first need to check you are running the latest version of your chosen WordPress theme.

It’s also a good idea to update any plugins you currently have installed. And remove any unwanted or outdated versions too. This is good house-keeping.

If you don’t know how to do this then contact a freelance web designer to help.

Step 2 – Undertake a WordPress performance speed check

Before you can start to understand what’s wrong with your site, you’ll need to use some external software to identify the areas that are causing issues.

Head over to https://gtmetrix.com/ and enter your web address into the search field. Gtmetrix is a website optimisation checker and at the time of writing this article it’s free to use.

Hit “Analyse” and wait for the results. It’s more than likely at this stage that your site will produce results that are in the 60-70% regions.

We’re aiming for both the PageSpeed Score and Yslow Score to be in the 90s.

If you do have a score in the 90s, then well done. You can put your feet up! If not then read on.

In the example shown here, you can see the page speed has various items shown in green and orange. It’s the ones in orange we need to worry about.

If you wish, you can click on each of the areas to view the individual results.

Step 3 – Back up your WordPress theme, content, plugins and database

First thing is to head back to your WordPress admin panel and instal some backup software.

Whenever you undertake any major changes to your site, it’s important to run a backup just in case something goes wrong.

There are various great plugins to use such as BackupBuddy, and BackWPup. However I’ve used UpdraftPlus for many years and it works for me.

Assuming you have added UpdraftPlus, go to “Settings” in your WordPress sidebar and click on “UpdraftPlus Backups”.

Click on the “Settings” tab and choose your remote storage option.

I use Dropbox but there are a number of other options including Google Drive, Amazon S3 and FTP.

Go through the setup process (sign up to one of the backup options if necessary) and then you are good to go.

Click on the “Current Status” tab and hit the “Back Up Now” button. Make sure all the options are ticked and click ”Back Up Now”.

This will run the backup process which will take a few minutes depending on the size of your website.

Step 4 – Scale large images

If your GTmetrix report says you need to serve scaled images, it means that some of the images on your site are bigger than they need to be.

In general terms this means that when a page is loaded with a large image (eg. 2000 x 1500 pixels) you are telling the web browser to export it at maximum quality.

This results in unnecessary file size that slows your page download time.

So the basic rule is:

Small file size = Reduced download time = Fast page load

This is an easy mistake to make, but luckily it is fairly easy to fix.

If you want to get stuck in and sort your images out then GTmetrix have a good guide on how to optimise your images.

Step 5 – Optimise and compress images

Web servers can be slowed down by image file size as we know.

So using a simple compression plugin can strip out hidden bulky information and create smaller images that speed up your website load time.

There are numerous plugins that can help compress your images. Some of the best include EWWW Image Optimiser, ShortPixel Image Optimizer and WP Smush.

In this example we” use Smush – which is the one I like to use. Access the plugin settings and ensure “Auto-Smush Images on Upload” is checked.

This makes sure that any new images you add to your site will be optimised – Bosh!

But before you leave, smush any existing images in your media library by clicking the “Bulk smush Now” button.

You can only do this for 50 images at a time with the free version of the plugin.

If you have many images, you’ll need to refresh the page once the first 50 have been done.

Step 6 – Add a cache plugin

Why do I need this you may ask. A cache is part of a computer’s memory (RAM/CPU) that stores recent information.

When you visit a website that has a cached page, that information is stored on your computer’s hard drive. So every time you revisit that page it loads quickly.

Therefore, by using a cache plugin, it creates static files so your site no longer has to render pages again and again.

This speeds up your site for visitors which is a good thing.

In this example we’ll use WP Fastest Cache.

Once loaded go to the settings page and start checking the boxes as shown below. When you check the “create the cache of all the site automatically” box you’ll get a popup box.

Check all the boxes and click OK.

After all the items have been checked as per the example, click the “Submit“ bottom.

TIP: At the top of your WordPress browser you’ll see a Leopard icon. If you hover over it you’ll see two options:

• Delete Cache
• Delete and Minified CSS/JS

When you make any changes to your site such as adding a new plugin or modify the theme/CSS, it’s a good idea to delete the cache so your visitors get the latest version of your site loaded.

Step 7 – Analyse your site again. Like what?

Hopefully the changes you have now made will have improved your WordPress performance speed.

If the results are still not in the green, then look at the individual elements.

GTmetrix provides a brief explanation of what the issue is and how to fix it in each case.

You could also check out my other article on WordPress site optimisation for more tips.

Summary

• Choose a fast hosting package that is preferably in your country of origin
• Update your theme and plugins
• Run a WordPress performance speed check, and fix any issues
• Back up your WordPress theme, content, plugins and database
• Scale and optimise any large images
• Install a cache plugin
• Analyse your site again to check if things are fixed.

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1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

Site optimisation plugin

We kick off this article with one the best WordPress plugins. This is a really useful plugin for helping you to optimise your website for search engines. Once installed you can its inbuilt site wizard to help set your site up. This will guide you through naming your WordPress site and help with other basic setup features.

One of the most useful things with the Yoast SEO plugin is that it automatically sets up an XML Sitemap. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site and it allows Google to crawl your website’s structure correctly.

Now for the good bit. On every content page and post, you will now see an SEO panel which outlines the structure of your page. Both the good and the bad. The useful traffic light system is easy to follow – RED (needs fixing), ORANGE (could do with improvement) and GREEN (all OK).

The page analysis covers things like page title, keywords, links, images and meta information. You can also view snippet previews, which is basically the title and subtext for that page that a search engine will publicly display in search results. You’ll need to fill this in manually as the autofill feature is used only as a backup, and it’s not that accurate.

There is also a tab that displays the readability of the page. It provides information and advice on the structure of your page content. Yoast also provide a premium WordPress plugin version which adds various functionality. The website is also a great resource if you want to know more about SEO.

2. Google Analyticator by SumoMe

Google Analytics plugin

SumoMe are more well known for producing WordPress plugins for social media and email sign-ups. But Google Analyticator is less unique and one that I’ve only recently started using.

If you don’t have the time to scan over your more extensive Google Analytics account, then this is for you. It provides a handy snapshot of visits, page views, bounce rate, average time on your site and the percentage of new visits. You can also set the data to display the last 30-60 days results.

3. SumoMe

Social media and email sign-up plugin

I’ve already mentioned SumoMe above. Their main website plugin focuses on helping you gain more customers, more traffic and provides the ability to track site metrics. Most of the features are free, which is a great bonus. They also offer a premium paid version that provides even more functionality.

I currently don’t use most of the features but I have helped some of my clients setup social media share bars, email signup boxes and site visitor tracking. So if you are interested in building a following and encouraging visitors to signup to your newsletter, then give this a try.

4. UpdraftPlus

WordPress site backup plugin

If you haven’t thought about a backup plan for your site yet, do it now! There are numerous plugins available for site backup, but this is one of the better ones. Once you’ve installed the UpdraftPlus plugin you can select where you store your backups to: Dropbox, FTP, Google Drive, Amazon S3 etc. Setup how often you want to backup and how many copies to store – that’s it.

On the occasion when your site unfortunately gets hacked or disappears, you can simply upload a previous backup set and you should be good to go.

It also has a great feature where you can migrate a site from one server to another. This is especially useful for WordPress designers who want to transfer a development site to a live client server. You’ll need to purchase the premium WordPress plugin version for this feature though.

5. W3 Total Cache

SEO and site performance plugin

To really make the most of your WordPress experience it’s a good idea to instal a plugin that sorts your site performance out. W3 Total Cache is designed to set most things automatically but there some more advanced features if you know what you a re doing.

Essentially the plugin makes improvements to your page rankings, especially the mobile-friendly version of your site. It increases site performance and speed by a factor of ten. And it stores versions of your pages for repeat viewing (called caching) so visitors don’t have to wait so long to read your content. What’s not to like?

6. WP Smush by WPMU Dev

Image compression plugin

If you have a WordPress site that contains lots of images, then managing the size of your files is paramount. The WP Smush WordPress plugin allows you to compress the size of your images across the board. That means it creates numerous images versions to fit mobile, tablet and desktop platforms. So you’ll always have the optimum size available to help keep your website running smoothly.

With the free account you get to compress up to 50 images at a time. In order to continue with the next batch you have to log out and log back in again. Of course if this is too much of a pain, just upgrade to the premium WordPress plugin.

7. WP Broken Link Status Checker by Pau Iglesias

Broken link checker plugin

With the WP Broken Link Checker you can scan your site for (you guessed it) broken file links. It provides a comprehensive list of all your pages including: redirects, no follows and broken links. You then simply work through the list and fix away.

8. Redirection by John Godley

Link redirection plugin

At some point you’ll change page urls or move pages within your site structure. This can cause a 404 error. A 404 or Not Found error message is a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) standard response code, in computer network communications, to indicate that the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested. Basically the search engine couldn’t find that page.

They are not horrendous but they do need attention. Redirection for WordPress automatically redirects all 404 errors to any page using a 301 redirect for SEO. You simply locate the bad url via Google Webmaster Tools and within Redirect, insert the new url where you want visitors to go.

9. Spam Protection by CleanTalk

Controls unwanted spam attacks

Most websites will contain a contact message box and clickable email address. So to keep those pesky spam sprits from attacking you night and day, you’ll need a Spam Protection plugin. I’ve been using the premium version of this plugin for while now. One of the cool features is that it emails me a report once a week to let me know how many attacks I have survived. But more importantly it lets me know its working – so it’s definitely in my top ten for best WordPress plugins.

There is a free version of this WordPress plugin available as well as the premium paid version.

10. Disqus Comment System

Blog community plugin

Got a blog, then maybe you need to try the Disqus blog plugin. Pronounced “discuss”, Disqus is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.

You’ll need to create an account and API, but once done you’ll connect with other members on the system. It’s a good way to increase your reach and make new connections. It also keeps spammers away which is a bonus.

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