Having a WooCommerce store can be a game-changer because it allows you to reach a global audience, showcase your products or services, and conduct business transactions with ease. However, the digital marketplace is intensely competitive, and the success of your WooCommerce store hinges not only on your product offerings but also on the performance of your website.

A fast and efficient online store is not just a luxury; it’s a necessity. To help you ensure your WooCommerce store operates at its peak, we’ve assembled a comprehensive list of 12 actionable tips that can make a substantial difference in your store’s performance. 

From choosing the right hosting provider to optimizing images and minimizing external scripts, we’ve got you covered. Let’s dive deep into the world of WooCommerce optimization and empower your online store to reach new heights!

Importance of optimizing WooCommerce speed

Your website’s speed can make or break your success in the highly competitive eCommerce landscape. From the moment a potential customer lands on your website, every second counts.

Consumers are accustomed to instant gratification and seamless experiences. They have little patience for sluggish or unresponsive pages, and they expect websites to load rapidly.

Why speed matters for an online store?

The significance of boosting the speed of your WooCommerce store cannot be emphasized enough. It directly impacts the following aspects of your site:

User experience

A fast website keeps visitors engaged, encourages them to explore more products, and increases the likelihood of conversions. This fosters a positive user experience, leading to customer loyalty, repeat business, and word-of-mouth recommendations.

Search engine rankings

Search engines like Google consider page speed as a ranking factor. Websites that load quickly are more likely to rank higher in search results. 

This means that by enhancing your WooCommerce store’s speed, you improve your search engine optimization (SEO), chances of attracting organic traffic, website traffic, and sales.

Mobile responsiveness

With the increasing use of smartphones for online shopping, having a fast-loading, mobile-responsive website is imperative. Slow websites on mobile devices can deter potential customers, resulting in missed sales opportunities. 

A research done by Google states that as web page load times on mobile devices go from one second to six seconds, bounce rates increase by 106%.

By optimizing your WooCommerce store for speed, you ensure that it performs well on both desktop and mobile platforms, catering to a broader audience.

Conversion rates

Conversion rates are a critical metric for eCommerce businesses. The faster your website loads, the higher the chances of turning visitors into customers.

In fact, a study conducted by Unbounce reported that 70% of online shoppers are influenced to complete their purchases or not based on the website’s speed. What’s more, according to a report by Potent, web pages that load within one to two seconds harness the highest conversion rates. On the other hand, each additional loading second after the four-second mark drops conversion rates by an average of 4.42%.

By investing in speed optimization, you can significantly increase your conversion rates and, ultimately, your revenue.

Competitive advantage

If your competitors have faster websites, they are more likely to capture your potential customers. By optimizing your WooCommerce store’s speed, you gain a competitive edge. 

A fast website not only attracts more visitors but also keeps them engaged and satisfied, giving you an advantage over slower-loading competitors.

The 12 techniques to enhance your WooCommerce performance

1. Choose a reliable hosting provider

Your hosting provider is essentially the foundation upon which your online store is built. It influences your website’s speed, stability, security, and overall user experience.

If your hosting is subpar, your website may suffer from slow loading times, frequent downtime, and security vulnerabilities. All of these issues can drive potential customers away, resulting in lost sales and a tarnished reputation.

Selecting a reliable, high-quality hosting service is paramount. Shared hosting plans may be cost-effective, but they often lack the resources necessary to handle the demands of an eCommerce site. To maximize your store’s performance, consider managed WooCommerce hosting or a dedicated server.

Managed WooCommerce hosting services are specifically tailored to meet the needs of WooCommerce stores. They offer optimized server configurations, automatic updates, and expert support, ensuring your store runs smoothly. Popular managed WooCommerce hosting providers include Liquid Web, Kinsta, and Flywheel.

If you prefer more control over your hosting environment, a dedicated server might be the right choice. Dedicated servers provide you with the entire server’s resources, eliminating potential performance bottlenecks caused by sharing resources with other websites. Companies like SiteGround and Bluehost offer dedicated server hosting options suitable for WooCommerce.

Key factors to consider when choosing a hosting provider

• Identify your hosting needs: Keep in mind aspects such as the size of your store, expected traffic, and budget. This initial assessment will guide your decision-making process.
• Check for WooCommerce compatibility: Not all hosting providers are optimized for WooCommerce. Ensure that the hosting provider you choose explicitly supports WooCommerce, offers WooCommerce-specific features and optimizations, and provides managed WooCommerce hosting.
• Assess performance: Look for hosting providers that offer fast and reliable server performance. Consider providers that utilize content delivery networks to optimize loading times and reduce latency.
• Consider scalability: As your business grows, your hosting needs will change. Choose a hosting provider that offers scalable plans, allowing you to upgrade your resources easily as your website traffic increases.
• Examine uptime guarantees: Uptime guarantees indicate the percentage of time your website will be accessible. A hosting provider with a high uptime guarantee, typically 99.9% or higher, is preferable to ensure minimal downtime.
• Evaluate security features: Ensure that your hosting provider offers SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates, regular backups, and robust firewall protection. Additionally, check for options to implement additional security measures, such as a Web Application Firewall (WAF).
• Review customer support: Prompt and knowledgeable customer support can be a lifesaver when technical issues arise. Read reviews and consider reaching out to the hosting provider’s support team with questions to assess their responsiveness and expertise.
• Read user reviews and recommendations: Online reviews and recommendations from other WooCommerce users can provide valuable insights into the hosting provider’s performance and reliability. Pay attention to both positive and negative reviews to get a balanced perspective.
• Budget wisely: While cost is a significant factor, it should not be the sole determining factor. Balance your budget constraints with your hosting requirements. Remember that investing in reliable hosting is an investment in the success of your online business.

2. Choose lightweight themes and plugins

The design and functionality of your WooCommerce store rely on the themes and plugins you choose. However, using overly complex or resource-intensive themes and plugins can slow down your website. 

Opt for lightweight, well-coded themes and only install plugins that are essential to your store’s operation. Choose a WooCommerce-compatible theme that is optimized for speed and performance. Themes like Astra, GeneratePress, and OceanWP are known for their lightweight nature and WooCommerce compatibility.

Also, carefully evaluate each plugin’s necessity before installing it. Unnecessary or redundant plugins can bloat your website and negatively impact performance.

3. Keep your WordPress and plugins updated

Regularly updating your WordPress core and plugins is essential for maintaining a secure and high-performing WooCommerce store. 

Updates often include bug fixes, security patches, and performance enhancements. Outdated software can lead to compatibility issues and vulnerabilities. 

Set up automatic updates if possible or create a routine for manually checking and updating your WordPress and plugins.

4. Optimize images and media files

Images and media files can significantly impact your site’s loading speed. To ensure your WooCommerce store performs well, follow these image optimization best practices:

• Resize images: Before uploading images to your website, resize them to the appropriate dimensions. Use image editing software or online tools to ensure your product images are not larger than necessary.
• Compress images: Utilize image compression techniques to reduce the file size without compromising image quality. WordPress plugins like Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer can automate this process for you.
• Lazy loading: Implement lazy loading for images, which loads images only as users scroll down the page. This can dramatically reduce initial page load times.
• Choose the right file format: Select the appropriate image file format for your needs. Use JPEG for photographs and PNG for images with transparency. Avoid using BMP or TIFF formats, as they tend to be larger in size.

5. Optimize your WooCommerce database

The database is the heart of your WooCommerce store, storing product information, customer data, and order details. Over time, the database can become cluttered, leading to slower website performance. 

Here are some tips for optimizing your WooCommerce database:

• Regularly clean up data: Remove unnecessary data such as old orders, unused product variations, and customer records. Use the built-in tools in WooCommerce or consider using database optimization plugins like WP-Optimize.
• Optimize database tables: Optimize database tables to improve query performance. You can do this manually from phpMyAdmin or use plugins like WP-DBManager or WP-Optimize to automate the process.

Highly important to note here, consider enabling HPOS for your WooCommerce store.

High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) is a new database schema for WooCommerce. Its purpose is to make order data storage, retrieval, and editing simple and reliable. HPOS also emphasizes scalability, as it’s designed to handle a lot more traffic without affecting the speed and efficiency of your online shop.

Instead of storing the order data in the wp_post and wp_postmeta, WooCommerce will now save this information across 4 new tabes:

• Main order table (wp_wc_orders)
• Order addresses table (wp_wc_order_addresses)
• Order operational table (wp_wc_order_operational_data
• Order meta table (wp_wc_orders_meta)

This way, WooCommerce queries will be faster and more aerodynamic. 

Keep in mind that as of August 2023, all new WooCommerce stores will be installed with HPOS as the default database for order data storing, retrieving, and managing. 

Here’s how to enable HPOS on your WooCommerce shop and sync your data from the past post/postmeta tables to the new HPOS schema:

1. From your WordPress admin dashboard, navigate to WooCommere > Settings > Advanced > Features.
2. Select the High performance order storage (new) and check the Keep the posts and orders tables in sync (compatibility mode) box.

Be cautious that with the release of WooCommerce 8.0, data synchronization with the old posts/postmeta tables will be disabled. You’ll also need to ensure compatibility with your existing plugins and themes before making this switch.

As a rule of thumb, always perform any modifications to your site in a staging/testing environment first, and always keep an up-to-date backup on hand in case something goes wrong by accident.

In this optimization scenario, hiring a Codeable WooCommerce expert is highly recommended. Our professional developers will know exactly their way around WordPress, WooCommerce, and HPOS, and will deliver efficient and effective solutions catered to your specific requirements.

6. Enable caching

Caching involves storing frequently accessed data, such as HTML pages, images, stylesheets, and scripts, in a temporary storage location. This allows for faster retrieval when a user requests that data, reducing the load on your server and speeding up page loading times. 

To elaborate further on this point, let’s explore caching in more detail:

6.1 Page caching

Page caching is a fundamental aspect of web performance optimization. It refers to storing entire HTML pages generated by your WooCommerce store so that they can be served to users without generating the page dynamically every time it’s requested.

When a user visits a page on your website, the first request triggers the server to process PHP, query the database, and compile all the necessary data to create an HTML page. The resulting HTML page is then cached and stored in a special directory on the server or in memory (if using object caching).

Subsequent requests to the same page by other users or even the same user result in the cached HTML page being served directly, skipping the resource-intensive process of dynamically generating the page.

To enable page caching for your WooCommerce store, you can use popular caching plugins like:

• WP Super Cache: This plugin offers easy-to-configure page caching options, making it suitable for users of all technical backgrounds.
• W3 Total Cache: This plugin is a comprehensive caching plugin that provides page caching along with various other optimization features.

6.2 Object caching

While page caching focuses on caching the entire HTML page, object caching deals with storing frequently accessed database queries and objects in memory. This helps reduce the need to fetch data from the database repeatedly, further improving your WooCommerce store’s performance.

When a request requires data from the database, it’s first checked against the object cache. If the data is found in the cache, it’s retrieved from memory, bypassing the need to query the database. If the data isn’t in the cache, the query is executed, and the result is stored in the cache for future use.

To implement object caching for your WooCommerce store, you can use caching solutions like:

• Memcached: Memcached is an in-memory key-value store that can be used as an object cache. It’s particularly effective in reducing database load and speeding up data retrieval.
• Redis: Redis is another in-memory data store that can be used for object caching. It’s known for its speed and versatility and is compatible with many WordPress caching plugins.

6.3 Browser caching

In addition to server-side caching, it’s essential to leverage browser caching to further improve your WooCommerce store’s performance. Browser caching instructs a user’s web browser to store certain website assets locally on their device. 

These assets include images, stylesheets, JavaScript files, and more. Here’s how it works:

When a user visits your website, the server sends instructions to the browser on how long it should store specific assets. The browser caches these assets locally on the user’s device, typically in a temporary storage location. On subsequent visits to your website, the browser can retrieve these cached assets instead of re-downloading them from the server, resulting in faster page loading times.

To enable browser caching, you can add cache-control headers to your website’s .htaccess file, such as the following, changing the time frame to your preference:

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month"
</IfModule>

Many popular caching plugins also provide options for setting browser cache expiration times for different types of assets.

7. Implement Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

CDNs are designed to distribute website content, including images, stylesheets, scripts, and other static assets, across a network of strategically located servers around the world. This distribution optimizes content delivery to users by reducing the physical distance between the server and the user’s device.

Here’s an in-depth look at how to implement and leverage a CDN for your WooCommerce store:

7.1 Selecting a CDN provider

Among the most popular providers are:

• Cloudflare: Known for its ease of use and a free plan that provides basic CDN services.
• Amazon CloudFront: Offers seamless integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and provides a vast network of global edge locations.
• StackPath: Known for its security features and extensive server locations.

When selecting a CDN provider, consider factors such as network coverage, pricing, performance, security features, ease of integration, and the specific needs of your WooCommerce store.

7.2 Content distribution

The primary role of a CDN is to distribute content from your WooCommerce store to users around the world. Here’s how it works:

• Edge servers: CDNs have a network of edge servers located in different geographic regions. When a user requests content from your site, the CDN automatically routes that request to the nearest edge server.
• Content caching: CDNs cache static assets like images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files on these edge servers. When a user accesses your site, the CDN delivers these assets from the nearest server instead of your origin server. This reduces latency and speeds up page loading times.
• Dynamic content: While CDNs excel at caching static content, they can also accelerate dynamic content. Some CDNs can cache and deliver dynamically generated pages with the help of server-side caching and page rules.

By selecting the right CDN provider, configuring it properly, and monitoring its performance, you can optimize content delivery and ensure your WooCommerce store operates at peak efficiency, regardless of your users’ locations.

8. Minimize HTTP requests

 HTTP requests are made by a web browser when it needs to retrieve resources (such as images, stylesheets, JavaScript files, and fonts) from the web server to load a web page. Each HTTP request adds to the load time of your web page, as it involves establishing a connection to the server, requesting the resource, and then receiving and processing the response.

Reducing the number of HTTP requests is essential for faster loading times, and it directly impacts the user experience. 

HTTP/1.1 vs. HTTP/2: Which to choose?

Choosing between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 can have a significant impact on the performance of your WooCommerce store, especially concerning HTTP requests.

HTTP/1.1

This is the older version of the HTTP protocol. It typically loads resources sequentially, meaning one resource is requested and loaded at a time.

To reduce the overhead of multiple requests, techniques like domain sharding (using multiple subdomains) and asset concatenation were employed.

HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is a more recent version that offers several performance improvements. It uses multiplexing, allowing multiple resources to be requested and loaded simultaneously over a single connection.

Header compression reduces the size of request and response headers.

Server push allows the server to proactively send resources to the client before they are explicitly requested.

In most cases, it’s advisable to choose HTTP/2 for your WooCommerce store due to its performance benefits. However, make sure your web hosting provider supports HTTP/2, and enable it in your server settings or through a hosting control panel.

9. Enable Gzip compression

Using Gzip compression is an effective way to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store by reducing the size of web page files, which results in faster loading times. 

Gzip is a compression method that works by finding repeated strings of text in a file and replacing them temporarily with shorter placeholders. When a user’s web browser requests a page that’s been compressed with Gzip, the server sends the compressed file, and the browser decompresses it for rendering.

This results in faster page loading times, particularly for text-based content like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Most modern web servers support GZIP compression, and you can enable it through your server settings or with the help of plugins.

10. Conduct regular performance testing

Performance testing helps you identify bottlenecks, assess the impact of changes or updates, and ensure your website can handle varying levels of traffic.

Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom can provide valuable insights into your site’s performance. Regularly test your site and address any issues or recommendations that arise from these tests.

Types of performance testing

• Load testing: Load testing involves simulating expected levels of user traffic to determine how your WooCommerce store performs under typical conditions. It helps you identify any performance degradation as the number of concurrent users or transactions increases. Tools like Apache JMeter and LoadNinja are commonly used for load testing.
• Stress testing: Stress testing goes beyond load testing by pushing your store to its limits. It aims to find out how your website performs under extreme conditions, such as sudden traffic spikes or surges. Stress testing helps you uncover potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities that might not be evident during regular usage.
• Scalability testing: Scalability testing evaluates your website’s ability to scale up or down in response to changes in traffic. It helps you determine whether your hosting infrastructure can handle increased load without performance degradation. This type of testing is crucial for planning server upgrades or migrations.
• Peak performance testing: Peak performance testing focuses on determining the maximum capacity of your WooCommerce store under ideal conditions. It allows you to understand the upper limits of your website’s performance and ensures that it can handle peak traffic without significant issues.
• Browser compatibility testing: As users access your store from various web browsers, it’s essential to test how your website performs across different browsers and browser versions. This type of testing ensures a consistent user experience and helps you identify any browser-specific performance issues.
• Mobile performance testing: With the increasing prevalence of mobile commerce, testing your store’s performance on mobile devices is necessary. Mobile performance testing assesses page load times, responsiveness, and usability on smartphones and tablets.
• A/B testing: Experiment with different website elements, such as product page layouts, checkout processes, and call-to-action buttons, to determine which versions perform better in terms of speed and conversions.

11. Use minification (with caution)

Minifying refers to the process of reducing the size of files, particularly JavaScript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), by removing unnecessary characters, whitespace, and comments without affecting their functionality. 

Minification is a critical step in optimizing the performance of your WooCommerce store because it can significantly reduce the time it takes for browsers to download and process these files, ultimately leading to faster page loading times and improved user experience.

Here are some key aspects of minifying JavaScript and CSS files in your WooCommerce store:

11.1 Whitespace removal 

In programming languages like JavaScript and CSS, whitespace characters such as spaces, tabs, and line breaks are used for formatting and readability. 

However, these characters are not required for the code to function correctly. Minification tools remove these extraneous whitespace characters, which can reduce the file size considerably.

Before minification (JS):

function add(a, b) {
    return a + b;
}

After minification (JS):

function add(a,b){return a+b;}

11.2 Comment removal

Code often contains comments for documentation and explanatory purposes. While these comments are essential for developers, they are unnecessary for the browser to interpret and execute the code. 

Minification tools strip out these comments, further reducing the file size.

Before minification (JS):

// This is a comment explaining the function
function add(a, b) {
    return a + b;
}

After minification (JS):

function add(a,b){return a+b;}

11.3 Variable shortening 

Some minification tools also shorten variable and function names to their smallest possible form without causing conflicts. 

For example, renaming a variable from totalPrice to a can save characters and reduce file size. However, this should be done carefully to avoid readability issues.

Before minification (JS):

function calculateTotalPrice(subtotal, discount) {
    return subtotal - discount;
}

After minification (JS):

function calcTotalPrice(subtotal,discount){return subtotal-discount;}

Some popular minification plugins and tool

• UglifyJS: A widely used JavaScript minification tool that can be run from the command line or integrated into build processes.
• CSSNano: A CSS minification tool that removes unnecessary whitespace and performs other optimizations on CSS files.
• Webpack and Babel: If you’re using Webpack as your build tool and Babel for JavaScript transpilation, you can configure them to minify your code during the build process.
• WP Super Minify and Autoptimize: These WordPress plugins can automate the minification process for both JavaScript and CSS files in your WooCommerce store.

Minifying JavaScript and CSS files should be done carefully. After minifying your JavaScript and CSS files, it’s essential to thoroughly test your WooCommerce store to ensure that the minification process hasn’t introduced any errors or broken functionality. Sometimes, minification can cause issues, especially if the code relies on specific formatting or comments for proper execution.

12. Optimize WooCommerce product pages

These pages are where customers make purchase decisions, so ensuring they load quickly and provide a seamless shopping experience is paramount. Let’s delve into more detail on how to optimize WooCommerce product pages:

• Limit the number of products per page: Displaying too many products on a single page can overload the server and slow down page load times. Consider limiting the number of products displayed per page, commonly to 8, 12, or 24, to strike a balance between product visibility and page performance.

• Use product pagination: Implement product pagination to divide large product catalogs into multiple pages. This approach not only improves load times but also makes navigation more manageable for customers. Users can easily browse through pages to find the products they’re interested in.
• Product descriptions and content: Keep product descriptions concise and to the point. Excessive text can overwhelm users and slow down page load times. If you have detailed information, consider using tabs or accordions to display it in a user-friendly way. Also, make sure to use clean and well-structured HTML for product descriptions.

• Remove unnecessary elements: This could include excessive widgets, social sharing buttons, or external scripts that aren’t essential for the shopping process. Streamline your product pages to focus on what matters most to your customers: the products themselves.
• A/B testing: Consider conducting A/B tests on your product pages to assess the impact of different designs, layouts, and content arrangements on user engagement and conversion rates. Continuously refine your product page design based on data-driven insights to improve performance and user experience.

Remember that performance optimization is an ongoing process, so stay vigilant, adapt to changing circumstances, and continue to fine-tune your WooCommerce store for maximum efficiency.

Take action for better WooCommerce performance and increased revenue

In the fiercely competitive world of eCommerce, WooCommerce provides a robust foundation for your online store. However, to truly succeed and stand out, you must prioritize and continually work on improving performance.

By following the strategies outlined in this comprehensive guide, you can boost your WooCommerce store’s speed, optimize user experience, enhance security, and position your business for growth.

But what if you don’t have the time or expertise to implement all these performance-boosting strategies on your own? That’s where Codeable comes in.

Codeable is a platform that connects you with a network of highly skilled WordPress and WooCommerce experts who specialize in performance optimization. Our professionals have a deep understanding of WooCommerce’s inner workings and can tailor their expertise to meet your specific needs.

Here’s why we are more than just an ideal solution for WooCommerce performance optimization, but a partner:

• Expertise on demand: With Codeable, you have access to a diverse pool of WooCommerce specialists who can tackle any performance-related challenge. Whether it’s speeding up your website, optimizing your database, or fine-tuning your server, you’ll find the right expert for the job.
• Customized solutions: Our experts take a personalized approach to WooCommerce performance optimization. They assess your unique business needs, current website setup, and performance bottlenecks to develop a tailored strategy that maximizes your store’s efficiency.
• Time and cost efficiency: By outsourcing your WooCommerce performance optimization to us, you save time and resources that you can reinvest in growing your business. Our Codeable’s experts work efficiently, ensuring that your store performs at its best without unnecessary delays.
• Ongoing support: Performance optimization is not a one-time task but an ongoing process. We provide long-term support to ensure that your WooCommerce store continues to perform at its peak. Whether you need regular maintenance, updates, or troubleshooting, our developers are there to assist you.
• Peace of mind: You can rest easy knowing that your WooCommerce store is in the hands of seasoned professionals. Our experts go through an intensive six-step vetting process, and they have a proven track record of delivering results. That’s why we stand behind their work with a satisfaction guarantee.

So, if you’re ready to take your WooCommerce store to the next level and outshine the competition, consider partnering with Codeable. With their expertise and your ambition, there’s no limit to what your eCommerce venture can achieve. 

Submit your project to Codeable today and watch your WooCommerce store thrive like never before!

The post Boost Your WooCommerce Performance with These 12 Tips appeared first on Codeable.

If you’ve found yourself in this frustrating situation, rest assured, you’re not alone. Slow loading times have been a perpetual headache for website owners, and they can have far-reaching consequences.

In this article, we’ll dive into the common causes of slow WordPress websites dragging and, more importantly, provide you with actionable steps to get your site back up to speed. Even better, you’ll be introduced to Codeable – a pioneering platform that connects you with top-tier experts possessing a deep understanding of all things WordPress. 

Let’s tackle the bottlenecks and transform your online presence into a high-speed WordPress website that keeps them coming back for more!

Understanding the factors behind a slow WordPress site

Did you know that one additional second in page load time may cost Amazon 16 billion in yearly sales?

When it comes to websites, speed matters because visitors have little patience for slow-loading pages. But what is causing your site to be sluggish?

• Bloated themes and plugins: While using resource-heavy themes and plugins may look visually appealing, they often carry a lot of unnecessary code, images, and features that can significantly slow down your site’s loading time. Choose lightweight themes and only essential plugins to keep your site running at optimal speed.
• Unoptimized images: Images are a crucial component of any website, but large, unoptimized images can be a major drag on performance. Uploading high-resolution images without compression can consume valuable bandwidth and increase loading times.
• Inadequate hosting: The quality of your hosting service can make or break your site’s speed. Opting for a cheap or shared hosting plan might save you money, but it can lead to slower loading times as your site competes for resources with others on the same server. Invest in a reliable and robust hosting provider that offers optimized servers for WordPress sites.
• Caching issues: Caching is a technique that stores static versions of your site’s pages, reducing the need for server processing and database queries for every request. If your caching system is not properly configured, it can lead to slower loading times.
• Excessive external HTTP requests: External resources, such as scripts, stylesheets, and fonts, can enhance your website’s functionality and appearance. However, relying on too many of these external sources can also cause delays if those resources are slow to load.
• Database bloat: Over time, the WordPress database can accumulate unnecessary data, such as post revisions, spam comments, and transients. This database bloat can increase the time it takes to fetch and display content.
• Lack of content delivery network (CDN): A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers distributed across different locations worldwide. It helps serve your website’s static content from the nearest server to the user’s location, reducing the physical distance and improving loading times.

A fast-loading website not only keeps visitors engaged but also positively impacts search engine rankings and conversion rates. Take the time to analyze your site’s performance, make the necessary adjustments, and watch your WordPress site soar to new heights of speed and efficiency.

How to determine if your WordPress site is slow

Determining if your WordPress site is slow can be a bit tricky, as various factors come into play. Here are some key indicators and techniques that will help you identify whether your WordPress site needs a speed boost:

• Assess page load time: Visitors expect pages to load almost instantaneously, and any delay might lead them to abandon your site. To assess page load time, use online tools like GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights. These tools provide valuable insights into the performance of your site and highlight areas that need improvement.

• Observe bounce rates: A high bounce rate can indicate that visitors are leaving your site soon after arriving. Slow-loading pages are a common culprit behind this problem. By analyzing your website’s bounce rate, you can gauge if there is a correlation between slow load times and visitors leaving prematurely.
• Monitor server response time: Server response time refers to the time it takes for your web server to respond to a user’s request. Slow server response times can significantly impact your website’s overall speed. Use tools like Pingdom or WebPageTest to check your server response time and take necessary actions if it exceeds acceptable limits.

• Test mobile responsiveness: Slow-loading pages on mobile devices can lead to a subpar user experience and affect your search engine rankings. Utilize tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to gauge your website’s responsiveness on mobile devices.
• Examine plugin impact: Unoptimized or poorly coded plugins can strain your server resources and cause delays in page loading. Regularly audit your installed plugins, deactivate any unnecessary ones, and opt for lightweight alternatives when possible.

Remember, a fast site not only pleases your audience but also wins favor with search engines, potentially boosting your SEO rankings and expanding your online reach. 

Improving your WordPress site’s speed: 4 key strategies

A visually stunning website is essential, but not at the cost of sluggish load times. Embrace these strategies, and your WordPress site will be well on its way to providing an engaging and lightning-fast user experience.

1. Choosing high-quality website hosting

A high-quality hosting service can significantly boost the loading speed of your site, making it a pleasurable experience for your visitors. The are various aspects of website hosting that can impact your site’s speed, such as the following, which can be catered to by top-notch hosting solutions.

Server performance and resources

The performance of your website heavily depends on the server’s capabilities and resources provided by your hosting provider. Shared hosting, although cost-effective, means you’re sharing server resources with multiple other websites. This can lead to slower load times during peak traffic hours or if other sites on the server experience spikes in activity.

On the other hand, premium hosting services, such as virtual private servers (VPS) or dedicated servers, offer dedicated resources, ensuring that your WordPress site has the processing power and memory it needs to deliver faster response times.

Data center location

The physical location of your hosting provider’s data center plays a vital role in determining your website’s speed, especially for a global audience. 

If your target audience is predominantly from a specific region, selecting a hosting provider with data centers in or near that region can reduce latency and speed up your site’s loading times for local visitors.

SSL encryption

SSL (secure socket layer) encryption not only ensures the safety of your website and its users but can also improve your site’s speed. 

Google and other search engines prioritize secure sites, and SSL certification is now a ranking factor. That’s why many premium hosting providers include free SSL certificates, allowing you to encrypt data and enjoy the performance benefits that come with it.

Customer support and technical expertise

Reliable customer support and technical expertise are crucial when it comes to resolving any hosting-related issues promptly. A high-quality hosting provider should offer 24/7 customer support and a team of experts to assist you whenever needed. 

Swift resolution of technical problems can prevent downtime and ensure that your site maintains its optimal speed and performance.

2. Implementing caching

WordPress, being a dynamic content management system, generates web pages on the fly for each user request. This dynamic nature, while flexible and powerful, can lead to increased server processing time and database queries, resulting in slower load times. Caching plays a crucial role here, as it can significantly reduce the number of requests reaching the server.

Caching refers to the process of storing frequently accessed data or web pages in a temporary storage area. By doing so, the server can deliver the requested content faster, as it doesn’t have to recreate the entire page every time a user visits it.

To leverage the power of caching on your WordPress site, you’ll need a reliable caching plugin. Fortunately, the WordPress ecosystem offers a plethora of caching plugins, both free and premium. Some popular options include WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and WP Rocket.

3. Utilizing Cloudflare and content delivery networks (CDNs)

Integrating Cloudflare and a content delivery network with your site can be a game-changer in terms of speed and user satisfaction.

Cloudflare is a reputable content delivery and DDoS protection service that acts as a reverse proxy between your website visitors and your hosting server. It works by caching static content, optimizing images, and routing user requests through the nearest data center. As a result, Cloudflare can significantly reduce the time it takes for your website to load, leading to a faster and more reliable user experience.

On the other hand, a CDN is a network of servers distributed across various geographical locations worldwide. The primary goal of a CDN is to store and deliver static website content, such as images, CSS files, and JavaScript, from the server closest to the user’s location. This proximity reduces the data travel distance, minimizing latency and loading times.

4. Compressing and optimizing images for speed

Images play a central role in modern web design, enriching content and captivating users. However, their larger file sizes can lead to sluggish website performance. When users encounter slow-loading pages, they are more likely to abandon the site, resulting in reduced engagement and conversions. Furthermore, search engines consider page load times as a ranking factor, making image optimization essential for search engine optimization (SEO).

Image compression involves reducing the file size of an image without losing its quality significantly. There are two main types of image compression techniques: lossless and lossy compression.

• Lossless compression: This technique reduces the image size without sacrificing quality. It achieves this by removing unnecessary metadata and redundancies within the image file. Common formats for lossless compression include PNG and GIF. Lossless compression is ideal for images that require pixel-perfect accuracy, such as logos and graphics, but it may not provide the best results for photographs or images with complex details.
• Lossy compression: Lossy compression further reduces file size by selectively removing some image data. While this results in a smaller file size, there is a slight loss in image quality. Formats like JPEG are commonly used for lossy compression, as they offer a good balance between size reduction and visual fidelity. To ensure the best compromise between file size and quality, it is crucial to carefully adjust the compression level based on the image content.

Additionally, you can implement these image optimization techniques and best practices:

• Choose the right format: For graphics, icons, and images with transparency, PNG format is a suitable choice due to its lossless compression. For photographs and more complex visuals, JPEG format is typically preferred. Modern image formats like WebP and AVIF offer superior compression capabilities.
• Resize images: Use image editing tools or content management systems to resize images to the exact dimensions required on your webpage. This step prevents the browser from rendering large images and automatically scaling them down, leading to unnecessary data transfer.
• Utilize responsive images: Implement responsive design techniques to serve different image sizes based on the user’s device and screen resolution. This prevents mobile users from downloading unnecessarily large images meant for desktop displays.

Tools like TinyPNG/TinyJPG, ImageOptim, Compressor.io, Kraken.io, and Gzip are excellent tools available for compressing and optimizing images to improve website speed. 

Optimizing your site: Disabling unused plugins

Every plugin installed on your WordPress site introduces additional code and functionality. While well-crafted plugins can be efficient and well-optimized, others may not be as streamlined, leading to slower page loading times and decreased performance. 

Additionally, plugins can sometimes conflict with each other, causing errors or unexpected behavior that can adversely affect the user experience. Even inactive plugins can present security risks. Even though they are not currently active, they still reside on your server, and if left unattended, they might become susceptible to vulnerabilities. 

By taking the time to disable unused plugins, you can significantly improve your WordPress site’s performance, security, and user experience. A leaner website with only the necessary plugins will load faster, function more smoothly, and be less vulnerable to security breaches. 

Always back up your site before making any changes, and be proactive in performing regular plugin maintenance.

How HTTPS can improve site speed

The adoption of HTTPS, the secure version of HTTP, is no longer a mere suggestion – it’s a necessity. 

Beyond security benefits, HTTPS can significantly impact the speed and performance of WordPress sites. Here’s why:

• SSL handshake and connection time: HTTPS relies on SSL or transport layer security (TLS) protocols to encrypt data transmitted between the server and the user’s browser. While SSL handshakes can add negligible overhead during the initial connection, it establishes a secure and encrypted channel, ensuring minimal impact on website performance.
• HTTP/2 protocol support: Implementing HTTPS opens the door to HTTP/2 support, the latest version of the HTTP protocol. HTTP/2 significantly improves website speed by allowing multiple resources to be loaded simultaneously over a single connection. This feature, known as multiplexing, drastically reduces latency and speeds up the rendering of web pages.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): Google, the leading search engine, encourages the adoption of HTTPS by using it as a ranking factor. Websites that utilize HTTPS are more likely to rank higher in search results. Since site speed is also a critical factor in search engine rankings, combining HTTPS with other performance optimization techniques can give your WordPress site a competitive edge.

Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS may require some initial effort, but the resulting improvement in speed and user experience makes it well worth the investment.

Frequent questions about slow WordPress websites

 For WordPress website owners, encountering performance issues is not uncommon, and there are often many questions surrounding this concern. 

Is my WordPress theme causing the slowdown?

Your WordPress theme can indeed impact your website’s speed. 

Opt for lightweight and well-coded themes, preferably those specifically designed for performance. Switching to a different theme and retesting your website’s speed can help identify if the theme is the cause of the slowdown.

How can I optimize my WordPress database?

WordPress databases can accumulate unnecessary data over time, leading to slower performance. You can optimize your database by:

• Deleting spam comments: Regularly clear out spam comments that may clog your database.
• Removing unused plugins and themes: Uninstall plugins and themes that you no longer use.
• Cleaning post revisions: Limit the number of post revisions saved in the database.
• Optimizing database tables: Use plugins like WP-Optimize or WP-Sweep to optimize your database tables.

Will using too many plugins slow down my WordPress website?

Yes, using an excessive number of plugins can slow down your WordPress website. 

Each plugin adds extra code and functionality, increasing the processing load on your server. It’s essential to choose and use only necessary tools and ensure they are well-coded and regularly updated. 

Remove any unused or redundant plugins to optimize your website’s performance.

Can a poorly coded theme affect my website’s speed even if it’s lightweight?

Yes, a poorly coded theme can still impact your website’s speed even if it claims to be lightweight. While a lightweight theme can be beneficial for performance, poorly optimized code can introduce inefficiencies that slow down your site. 

Choose themes from reputable developers known for producing optimized and well-coded designs.

How often should I monitor my website’s speed and performance?

Regular monitoring is essential to maintain optimal website performance. Consistent monitoring helps you detect and address any performance issues promptly. 

It’s best to monitor your website’s speed at least once a week, especially after making significant changes, such as installing new plugins or updating your theme. 

Can a slow internet connection affect my perception of my website’s speed?

Yes, your internet connection can influence your perception of your website’s speed. If you have a slow internet connection, it may take longer to load websites, including your own. 

Therefore, it’s essential to test your website’s speed using various tools and on different devices to get a more accurate assessment of its performance.

Speed up your WordPress website with Codeable

Having a fast-loading website is paramount for success. Whether you run a personal blog or a WooCommerce store, visitors demand swift and seamless browsing experiences, which can sometimes be hindered by various factors like poor WordPress hosting, unoptimized images, heavy themes or plugins, and more.

The speed of your website directly impacts user experience, search engine rankings, and overall online visibility. 

This can be a daunting obstacle to tackle if you aren’t tech-savvy. However, there is a solution that can help you optimize your WordPress website’s speed and performance – Codeable!

Codeable is a leading platform that connects website owners with a pool of over 700+ talented WordPress experts. Unlike traditional development agencies, Codeable boasts a handpicked team of seasoned WordPress developers, each vetted for their expertise and experience.

The benefits of harnessing Codeable for all your WordPress and WooCommerce projects are endless, including:

• Expert consultation: After submitting your project details, you receive personalized recommendations and an estimated timeframe for completion. Codeable’s experts guide you through the entire process and answer any questions you might have.
• Customized solutions: Codeable’s developers tailor solutions to your specific needs. This personalized approach ensures that the optimizations made align with your website’s unique requirements.
• Plugin and theme audit: Codeable’s developers conduct thorough audits to identify and replace any problematic elements.
• Performance-focused coding: Codeable’s developers optimize the codebase of your WordPress site to improve loading times and overall responsiveness.
• Time and cost-effective: By working with Codeable, you gain access to skilled developers without the overhead of hiring an in-house team or committing to long-term contracts.
• Guaranteed results: Codeable’s developers are committed to delivering tangible speed improvements, providing you with peace of mind.

Say goodbye to loading lags and embrace a faster, more efficient online presence with Codeable’s top-notch speed optimization services. Submit your task and leverage the prowess of Codeable today to transform your WordPress website into a blazing-fast digital powerhouse!

The post Why is my WordPress Site so Slow? How to Identify and Fix Slow WordPress Website Issues appeared first on Codeable.

✅ Register a domain 

✅ Develop a great-looking website 

✅ Hit publish 

Test your website’s speed…

It’s frustrating and demotivating. 

We know. 

Especially after you’ve done all the right things. 

Luckily, we’ve collected a list of optimizations that will allow you to transform your bad PSI score into…

But before that, there are some foundational insights (pun intended) you should know about Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

How to Navigate Your PSI Report (The Latest Version)

Millions of people use Google’s PSI – from website owners with zero technical expertise to experienced web developers. Hence, its UI must be easy to navigate and provide granular data simultaneously. 

And it sure does. 

Here are the main elements of your PSI report:

1. Mobile and Desktop Performance

When 53.74% of the total web visits are mobile, monitoring your site’s performance on desktop and mobile is essential.

In PSI, you can easily switch between both:

2. Core Web Vitals Assessment

In 2021, Google introduced the Core Web Vitals (CWV) – a set of three metrics measuring your page’s load time, visual stability, and page interactivity. 

Basically, they are Google’s way of sizing up your page’s overall UX. 

The respective metrics are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – measures how long it takes for the largest above-the-fold element to load on a page.

• First Input Delay (FID) – measures the delay between a user’s first interaction and the moment the browser can respond.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – measures how much unexpected layout shifts affect the user experience on a page.

In the widget, there are three other notable metrics:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP) – measure the time it takes for the browser to visualize the first piece of DOM content (e.g., image, SVG, non-blank canvas element) on a page.

• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – records the latency of all interactions throughout the entire page lifecycle.
• Time to First Byte (TTFB) – measures how long it takes for a client’s browser to receive the first byte of the response from the server.

They don’t play a part in your Core Web Vitals assessment. However, each measures an important aspect of your site’s loading process, so you should aim to achieve a good score on all three. 

Note that the CWV widget shows data for the last 28 days. This means you will not see an immediate improvement in your Core Web Vitals after applying some optimizations.

And one more thing…

From the top right corner, you can switch between “This URL” and “Origin”:

• “This URL” shows Core Web Vitals results for the specific web page you’re testing.

• “Origin” provides data about your site’s overall Core Web Vitals score.

What if PSI doesn’t show CWV data?

There are two reasons for that to happen:

• Your property is new in Search Console (it might take a few days before CWV data is shown)

• There is not enough data available in the CrUX report to provide meaningful information for the chosen device type (desktop or mobile)

3. Performance Score & Opportunities and Diagnostics

The next section is your Performance score, followed by the Opportunities and Diagnostics panel.

In a recent update (Oct 2022), Google has added three more scores in addition to Performance. The added categories are Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO.

• Accessibility – measures your site’s availability to users regardless of impairments or operational diversity. 
• Best Practices – evaluates if your website adheres to guidelines regarding trust and safety, JavaScript, images, source maps, etc.

• SEO – measures how well your web page follows basic search engine optimization advice.

Then, you have the metrics that build your Performance score:

And at the bottom, you will see the Opportunities and Diagnostics panels.

In a nutshell, they provide you with a list of optimizations that, once applied, will improve your PSI score and Core Web Vitals. 

Each improvement suggestion is expandable, providing you with more granular data, an explanation of the warning, what improvements you can expect, and affected metrics.

And here’s a nice trick…

By clicking on each score, you will be redirected to the specific optimization suggestion that will affect it. 

On the other hand, you can switch between audits relevant to specific metrics – FCP, TBT, CLS, or LCP.

What Do You Consider a Good PSI Score for a Web Page?

A score of 90 or above is considered good. 50 to 89 is a score that needs improvement. Аnd below 50 is considered poor.

The good thing is that Google’s PSI uses a tri-color scoring system, so you shouldn’t bother remembering the exact thresholds. 

The only things you should remember are that:

• Green = Good Performance
• Orange = Needs Improvement
• Red = Poor Performance

And you will find the tri-color system used all over your PSI report:

How is My Site’s Performance Score Calculated?

Your Performance score is a weighted average of these six metrics:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP)
• Time to Interactive (TTI)
• Speed Index
• Total Blocking Time (TBT)
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Each metric has a different weight and, respectively – a different impact on your score:

Important note from Google:

“In general, only metrics contribute to your [Lighthouse] Performance score, not the results of Opportunities or Diagnostics. That said, improving the opportunities and diagnostics likely improve the metric values, so there is an indirect relationship.”

Why is My Score Different Each Time I Test?

You’ve probably noticed that your PSI score can fluctuate without applying any changes to your website.

Like the last time you ran a test and accidentally closed the tab, so you had to rerun it.

And all of a sudden, your score has changed. 

Don’t worry, you’re not crazy, nor is there a problem with your website. 

There are a lot of underlying conditions and variables that impact your Performance score. Including:

• A/B tests or changes in ads being served
• Internet traffic routing changes
• Testing on different devices (a high-performance desktop vs. a low-performance laptop)
• Browser extensions that inject JavaScript and add/modify network requests
• Antivirus software

In fact, there’s in-depth Lighthouse documentation on variability, zoning in on the different factors that play a role in your site’s score and its fluctuation.

Make sure to look them up, and remember – don’t jump to conclusions about your site’s performance after a single-page speed test. Run tests regularly and use other testing tools as well.

Now, let’s move on to the next most baffling question about PageSpeed scores.

Why is My Mobile Performance Score Lower Than My Desktop?

These are the three main reasons:

• Mobile devices have slower processors
• PageSpeed Insights run mobile tests on a slower network 
• Mobile devices have device-specific CSS rules (re-sizing images, viewport size, etc.)

Let’s delve deeper into each reason.

Firstly, although today’s mobile devices are advanced, we can agree they cannot be compared to the latest Mac or custom-built PCs. Hence, they have less computing power which leads to slower page rendering.

Secondly, PSI uses a slow 4G throttling when testing your site on mobile:

The truth is mobile networks are unstable.

For instance, you’re surfing at full 4G or 5G speed on your way to the subway. After a few minutes, you’re already under the ground, and suddenly, your connectivity worsens. 

Hence, the browsing experience gets slower. 

To recreate these scenarios accurately, Google runs a mobile test on a slower network.

Lastly, mobile devices resize the various page elements, such as images. This is referred to as mobile CSS language rules. These processes take a toll and slow down your site’s performance. 

So the next time you test your site and see a difference between the mobile and desktop score, remind yourself there are reasons for that outside of your control.

How much does the Google PSI score matter?

Not as much as you think.

Here’s the truth:

Your Performance score is based on lab data.

The lab data is provided by Lighthouse. It’s collected within a controlled environment with a predefined device and network settings.

Put simply, a 100/100 score does not mean that your visitors have an excellent experience browsing your website. 

You do not need to over-obsess with reaching a perfect score. That’s not how Google PageSpeed Insights is meant to be used. 

You should instead focus on implementing all suggestions in the Opportunity and Diagnostics panel. That will lead to much greater benefits for your website. 

Like…

Passing your Core Web Vitals. 

The Core Web Vitals assessment we mentioned earlier is based on field data (also known as Real User Monitoring).

“Field data is determined by monitoring all users who visit a page and measuring a given set of performance metrics for each one of those users’ individual experiences. Because field data is based on real-user visits, it reflects the actual devices, network conditions, and geographic locations of your users.”

The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) provides information for the Core Web Vitals section in your PSI report.

Another harsh truth is that:

Your PageSpeed score will not affect your ranking. Core Web Vitals will.

Passing them is what boosts your site in the SERP and leads to more conversions.

For example, Rakuten 24 increased revenue per visitor by 53.37% and conversion rate by 33.13% after improving their Core Web Vitals.  

Another one would be The Economic Times which reduced their bounce rates across their website by 43% after optimizing their Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layoutshift (CLS) scores. 
То summarize:

Use the Performance score for testing and debugging purposes. Don’t waste your time chasing the perfect score. While it looks good on paper, it doesn’t do much in the real world. A lot of websites have 100/100 PSI scores but fail their CWV. In fact, according to the latest CrUX results – only 41.6% of all tested websites have good Core Web Vitals.

How to Improve Your PageSpeed Score on Both Mobile and Desktop (Checklist)

We’ve prepared a list of the optimizations that will have the most significant impact on your PageSpeed score and real-world performance.

1. Add a caching layer

Having a caching layer on your website is one of the fundamental steps towards improving your performance, reducing your server’s load, and providing visitors with an exceptional experience.

Next steps: Use a world-class caching tool that automatically adds a caching layer to your website.

2. Optimize your images

99% of websites rely on visual content to engage their visitors. However, unoptimized images can seriously hinder your site’s performance, leading to unsatisfactory results.  That’s why it is important to apply the respective optimizations.

Next steps: Choose the right image format (JPEG, WebP, PNG, etc.), compress them before uploading to reduce their file size, and use a CDN.

3. Compress and minify your code

Reducing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript file size is crucial to speeding up your website. You can make your site’s code lighter by compressing or minifying it. Applying code minification will remove unnecessary parts like whitespace and comments from the code, on the other hand – code compression will apply algorithms to rewrite the files’ binary code, using fewer bits than the original.

Next steps: Apply code compression and minification (manually or using a tool).

4. Eliminate render-blocking resources

Some CSS and JavaScript files can be “render-blocking.”

When the browser encounters them, it must download, parse, and execute them before doing anything else, including rendering.

To optimize the rendering process, you can apply techniques such as Critical CSS, delay third-party scripts by using async and defer, and apply code optimization and splitting.
Next steps: Implement Critical CSS, defer third-party scripts, and apply code optimization (manually, ask a developer or use a tool).

5. Minimize main-thread work

The Main Thread is where the browser does most of the work needed to display a page. Long-running JavaScript tasks can block the Main Thread, leading to slow load times, unresponsive pages, and a bad user experience. 
Next steps: Remove unnecessary plugins, implement Critical CSS, reduce unused CSS, and delay or remove third-party JavaScript.

6. Reduce the impact of third-party code

Most websites rely on third-party scripts. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s a thin line between helping your site and hurting it. That’s why it’s essential to minimize their negative impact while still utilizing their valuable features.
Next steps: Lazy load third-party scripts, try self-hosting some of them, establish early connections using prefetch, or remove entirely the ones that don’t serve you.

7. Bonus Advice: Use CDN to serve your content

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) consists of multiple geographically distributed servers at various points of presence (PoP) all around the globe.

Relying on a CDN will shorten the physical distance between your users and your content (web servers). It’s a great way to speed up your site while doing business internationally. 
Next steps: Find a CDN provider with a large network of servers distributed all over the globe.

Wrapping Up

Regularly testing your website will allow you always to know how your website’s performing. 

However, avoid focusing solely on your PageSpeed score.

Instead, knuckle down and start implementing all improvement suggestions. Everything else will follow. 

You will see an immediate boost in your Performance score, but more importantly – you will be on the path toward passing your Core Web Vitals. 

We know that standing in front of a long list of improvement suggestions can be frightening.

But the good news is you can deal with them automatically!

As an all-in-one solution, NitroPack combines 35+ optimizations to improve your site’s performance. No need to write or change a single line of code. 

Install, connect, and NitroPack starts applying improvements on its own.
You can see your site with NitroPack before installing, and there’s a 14-day money-back guarantee if you don’t see immediate results.

The post How to Fix Low PageSpeed Insights Score (2023 Checklist) appeared first on Codeable.

In this post, we’ll show you a series of steps you can take to diagnose the most common problems that cause a slow WordPress admin panel.

What is the WordPress backend?

The WP Admin is the backend in WordPress. It’s the control panel or interface you use to manage your WordPress website and contains all the tools you need to run and maintain your site – from adding new posts and pages to managing comments and plugin updates. The WP Admin also contains your site settings, design options, and individual plugin settings.

Why is it important to have a fast WordPress admin dashboard?

When the WordPress backend is slow, you’ll spend more time making changes to your site. Apart from draining your time and energy, a slow admin dashboard is also frustrating to use. As it’s the part of your site where you’ll likely be spending the most time, you want to fix its inefficiency as soon as possible!

There’s also the matter of your site’s performance. While it’s crucial to have a fast front-end from a site visitor’s perspective, it’s also essential to have a fast admin dashboard where you can make quick changes to ensure a good site browsing experience.

A fast WordPress admin dashboard makes it easy for you to manage your website. Conversely, if your admin dashboard is slow, it will affect the performance of your site, as well as make it disheartening to carry out simple site management tasks.  

How to fix a slow WordPress backend (step-by-step)

The speed of the WordPress admin panel can be affected by a number of reasons. Through the steps below, you can diagnose why your WordPress backend is slow, which will help you identify the right solution to bring it back to full speed in no time.

Note that it’s a good practice to backup your WordPress site before embarking on any of these steps. If you’re in doubt about carrying out any of the following steps, consider hiring a vetted WordPress professional with Codeable. They will be able to carry out backend speed optimization risk-free for you.

Make sure WordPress is updated to the newest version

WordPress frequently rolls out new versions of the software, which contain bug fixes, performance upgrades, and security patches. If the WordPress admin dashboard isn’t running at optimal speed, it could be that you haven’t updated to the newest version of WordPress.

Checking whether you’re running the latest version of WordPress is simple – if you’re not, you’ll get a notification to update from within your WordPress admin area. You can also log in to your WP dashboard and click on ‘Updates’ on the left-hand column to see the current WP version you’re using and a message telling you whether you have the latest version or not.

Another best practice to follow as a WordPress user is to update all your plugins to the newest version. Vulnerable plugins are open to attacks, and updates are rolled out to fix vulnerabilities when they come to light.

Make sure to backup your site before updating your WordPress version. If there are functionality issues caused by the updates, you can restore your site back to the previous version. 

Check your PHP version

PHP is the open-source scripting language that the WordPress core files run on. It also contains the classes, hooks, and functions that ‘join the dots’ to make your website work.

PHP versions are regularly updated for security and performance. So it’s always a good idea to check whether you’re running a supported version of PHP, which receives bug and security fixes up to two years after its initial stable release. After two years have lapsed, only critical security issues are addressed. 

WordPress hosts generally remove unsupported versions of PHP when they reach end of life (EOL). Most are offering PHP version 7.4 or greater, and the updates are automatic. In any case, you can check your PHP version. Go to Tools > Site Health. Click the ‘Info’ tab, then ‘Server’, and look for your PHP version. You can check whether it is one of the currently supported versions of PHP, or whether it’s in the list of unsupported PHP branches.

From the performance point of view, the latest PHP versions are faster. In a test, PHP 8.1, currently the latest version, was able to handle 163.43 req/sec, making it 47.10% faster than PHP 8.0. On the other hand, PHP 7.4, which has security support until 28th Nov, 2023, managed 110.24 req/sec. Previous versions were still slower.  

It’s possible that an older, supported version of PHP is the cause if your WordPress backend is slow. You can update to a higher or the latest version from the ‘Tools’ menu of your hosting dashboard, or the cPanel if your host uses it. You can also update PHP manually on your server, which is a wholly technical affair. 

Disable high CPU plugins

Some plugins can cause high CPU usage in WordPress websites. You can deactivate all your installed plugins one by one as you test your WP Admin speed. Or you can use plugins that show you how your different plugins are affecting memory usage. For example, you may find that a plugin is making over a hundred queries to admin-ajax.php, the file establishing a connection between the client and the server using Ajax. 

The next step is to replace the plugins impacting speed with their lightweight alternatives. It’s also a handy exercise to deactivate the plugins you no longer need. Doing this will  help you improve the load times of your entire site, not just the backend.

Troubleshoot individual plugins

If the above step still doesn’t solve the problem, you can troubleshoot each plugin to see if any of them is causing the problem. The best way is to download the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin by WordPress. Then, go to Tools > Site Health > Troubleshooting and select ‘Enable Troubleshooting Mode’.

If your backend speed issues are solved, then you know a plugin is responsible. From here, go to your ‘Plugins’ page and reactivate each of your plugins one by one to uncover the culprit!

Once you’ve identified why your WordPress backend is slow, you can uninstall the faulty plugin and replace it with another that offers the same functionality. You can also request a fix from the plugin’s developer, and it’s possible that they’ve already started working on a hotfix!

Optimize your database

Your WordPress database is where your website content is stored. It gets bloated with comments, posts, user information, spam and transients over time, causing a drag on performance. 

You can use a plugin like WP-DBManager that drops/empties tables and repairs your WordPress database. Make sure to back up your WordPress database so that you don’t lose any data if something goes wrong. It’s faster when you use a third-party plugin  like VaultPress, BackupBuddy, or BlogVault.

Another way to free up space in your database is to delete the content you no longer need, such as obsolete or duplicate content. Check if you need all the Drafts and Pending posts. You can also delete the Trash folder of your pages and posts. When you delete a page, post, or comment in WordPress, it is automatically placed in the Trash folder and permanently deleted after 30 days. But you can always get rid of this folder at any time to make your database less resource-heavy.

Also, check for taxonomies you don’t use, i.e., tags and categories in the Posts menu. Removing duplicate tags and categories not only allows you to free up space in your database but also helps improve the findability of posts and your overall SEO.

Another option is to optimize your database tables in phpMyAdmin, provided you have the technical chops for it! You’ll need to run the OPTIMIZE TABLE or REPAIR TABLE query from the phpMyAdmin menu to repair a possibly corrupted table.

Disclaimer: None of the plugins mentioned are affiliated with Codeable.

Upgrade your hosting

A slow WordPress backend is a common problem with sites that use shared hosting. If you have gone through all the other steps in this guide, then a final one is to check if you need to upgrade your hosting to a more powerful hosting provider. Consider using a dedicated cloud server for optimum performance, or a managed hosting company designed with WordPress in mind, such as Kinsta or WP Engine.

Take note that migrating a site manually can cause problems if not carried out correctly. Common problems encountered during site migration include a drop in search engine rankings, customers facing issues logging in to the new site, and a loss of important files. 

If you do opt for this route, consider the services of a dedicated WordPress professional through Codeable. The expert may also be able to identify other parallel issues why your WordPress backend is slow, and restore it to optimal speed quickly.

Increase your WordPress memory limit

You may get the “Allowed memory size exhausted” error when performing tasks like uploading large images or installing large plugins to WordPress. If that’s the case, you might need to increase your website’s PHP memory limit. 

If you are using a shared hosting provider, your site’s memory limit will depend on your plan. Hosting companies need to allocate memory across their sites based on the total storage capacity they have on their servers.

Our first recommendation is to choose a hosting plan that gives you enough memory. For example, Kinsta users on all plans enjoy a default memory limit of 256MB, which is ample for any action you’d want to take on WordPress. If you’re not sure what your site’s memory limit is, or if you’re not sure how to increase yours, it’s best to talk to your host.

In some cases, it could be that your site is set to a lower memory limit than the maximum amount provided by your host. So, it could be your site is set to 128MB, but you could actually increase it to 256MB depending on your plan. 

To do this, you’ll need to edit the main WordPress configuration file, which is called wp-config.php. Find the wp-config.php file, either through an FTP client or the File Manager in your cPanel or WordPress hosting provider dashboard. Make sure to create a duplicate of the file first, and then input the following code in the line before ‘Happy Blogging’:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', ‘XM');

Replace ‘X’ with the megabyte limit of your choice. We wouldn’t recommend increasing this to more than 256MB. So, in this case, the line of code to input would be: 

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', ‘256M');

Keep in mind that this might not solve the problem. You can’t override the memory limit set by your host, so if your max is 128MB, you can’t change it to a higher number manually. 

Hire an expert

Handing off your WordPress support and maintenance to an external expert rather than managing it in-house is recommended if you aren’t savvy about WordPress. Trying out something new from online articles and YouTube videos is a bit risky as any issues will affect your site’s user experience and hurt your sales.

Engaging external help may not be necessary if you know the ins and outs of WordPress and have broad technical knowledge relating to coding, migrating sites to a new hosting provider, optimizing databases, and editing wp-config.php files. However, think about the time you may need to spend figuring out why your WordPress backend is slow. When you have your hands full managing other aspects of your site or business, letting an expert fix issues quickly and accurately is a safe bet.

You’re probably already aware that there’s no dearth of freelancers and agencies offering website development and support services, including backend performance fixes. However, you want to work with a WordPress expert with extensive CMS knowledge and strong backend experience with PHP. You can be confident of a job well done and won’t have to deal with issues that end up costing you more to fix!

Freelance platforms contain hundreds of profiles. It will be time-consuming to check references, qualifications, and experience to ensure that the freelancer is the right person for the job. If you cannot wait to understand why your WordPress backend is slow and initiate a fix as soon as possible, you want to find a WordPress expert in a day or two. The good news is that you can engage a developer on the same day you request the service on Codeable – get matched to a developer with relevant skills within the day!

Codeable is the most reliable way to hire a WordPress expert to look into your backend speed issues:

• All Codeable experts are specialized in WordPress and have vast experience fixing site performance issues, so you know your site is in good hands.
  
• All the WordPress specialists are carefully vetted, removing the need to check hundreds of references and portfolios.

The process of hiring someone on Codeable is quick and straightforward. Here’s how to go about it when you want to know why your WordPress backend is slow:

• Share your project details. Codeable professionals can handle short-term projects and custom development work that may stretch longer.
  
• The Codeable team recommends 1-5 experts with skills matching your project’s requirements. Following a scoping of your project, the experts get in touch with you on the same day.
  
• Review the per hour pricing based on project complexity, urgency, and approximate hours. Then, select the WP expert and begin work on your project.

Codeable has an escrow system for fast, secure payments. A partial or full refund is available to customers that aren’t satisfied with the developer’s work.

Speed up your WordPress Admin

When your WordPress backend is slow, you need a reliable, risk-free fix. While there are many options to deal with a sluggish WP Admin, they all involve effort, time, and some measure of technical skill. If you aren’t a whiz at WordPress, carrying out fixes like plugin troubleshooting, database optimization, and increasing WP memory limit is unlikely to be smooth sailing. Any issues you encounter can add to your burden.

Hiring external help is a better route as it will save you time, effort, and the inevitable frustration when a fix doesn’t go as expected. Engaging a WordPress professional may be necessary when you’ve tried the common fixes but haven’t been successful in solving the problem or if you’re just not tech-savvy and don’t know where to begin.

You could use a freelance platform meant for technical projects but reviewing scores of profiles to find a WordPress developer qualified for the task will eat into your time. Instead, you can use Codeable, which exists exclusively for WordPress professionals and projects. As a hiring platform for WordPress experts, Codeable can enable you to optimize your WordPress backend’s performance quickly and reliably.

All Codeable experts are vetted for their WordPress skills and experience, which greatly reduces the chances of disruption to your website when looking at WordPress speed issues. The Codeable matching system ensures that you’re introduced only to professionals who are capable and available to work on your WordPress site or WooCommerce store.

A Codeable professional can get started on improving your WP backend performance right away. Submit your project and get matched to qualified professionals within the day.

The post How to Fix a Slow WordPress Admin Dashboard (Step-by-Step) appeared first on Codeable.

Do you want to make sure that your WordPress site is running smoothly?

A WordPress maintenance plan will allow you to break down the different maintenance tasks in manageable steps so that your site functions at peak performance all the time.  

In this article, we’ll run through five reasons to create a maintenance plan for your WordPress site, including why and how to hire a professional through Codeable to do the work for you. 

What is a WordPress Maintenance Plan?

A WordPress maintenance plan (sometimes called a WordPress care plan) is an actionable checklist of WordPress-specific tasks that monitors the health of your WordPress site. A plan like this keeps your site secure, optimized, and free of harmful malware.

Looking after your WordPress site is vital. WordPress recommends frequent site maintenance work by creating a calendar of maintenance procedures to optimize your site and increase search engine hits.

How do you go about it? You can build a WordPress maintenance plan yourself, or you could hire a freelancer to do it for you. If you decide on the latter, have a look at Codeable for WordPress experts who can implement a WordPress maintenance plan for you on an ongoing basis. 

5 Reasons to Create a WordPress Maintenance Plan + What a Good Plan Should Include

There are compelling reasons to devote time to WordPress website maintenance. A good WordPress maintenance plan includes best practices of performance optimization for your site and WooCommerce store (if you have one), as mentioned below.

1. Minimize the chances of error while staying on top of WordPress updates

WordPress rolls out updates to the core version at least every few months, and it’s important to run them as and when they’re released. These updates patch security vulnerabilities and extend the functionality of WordPress core. Having a proper WordPress maintenance plan in place with periodic checks for updates in WordPress will ensure that your site is prepared for any changes to the core WordPress framework.

Plugin and theme developers also roll out period updates to their products. These updates typically patch vulnerabilities, add new features and keep the plugin or theme up-to-date with the current version of WordPress. Sometimes, however, WordPress plugin and theme updates can cause conflicts with existing aspects of your site.

An important part of a WordPress maintenance plan is creating a hidden staging environment from where to test out plugins and theme updates. This way, you can make sure that nothing will break, that the plugin meets your requirements, and that it will be compatible with your WordPress site.  

A conflict with other plugins or an active website theme is easy to see, but the solution is hard to find. The plugin developer may not be of help as they aren’t aware of your website’s specifics and the other plugins you’re using. A WordPress troubleshooter can step in to solve the issue quickly, and build out a maintenance plan to avoid a similar situation from surfacing in the future.

2. Strengthen site security

WordPress, the most popular CMS on the web, is also the most hacked, accounting for 83% of compromised CMS platforms. Notably, 44% of the hacking is caused by outdated WordPress sites.

A good WordPress maintenance plan looks for any security vulnerabilities in your site and takes the necessary steps to mitigate them. You can secure your WordPress website in many ways, such as choosing a reliable hosting company, installing a firewall, and getting an SSL certificate. One of the easiest ways to protect it against hackers is to use a top-rated WordPress security plugin.

WordFence is one of the most popular WordPress security plugins. It scans your site for malware and filters out suspicious traffic. Regular security checks like these are of paramount importance, as a compromised WordPress site can be extremely damaging for your business – especially if you’re an eCommerce store holding customer, order and product details.

3. Avoid downtime as your business scales

Regular bouts of website downtime are undesirable. If your website is down or doesn’t function optimally and prevents end-users from completing a task, it can result in reduced website traffic, a loss of customers and other negative consequences.

A good WordPress maintenance plan will include a task for measuring the amount of traffic coming through your site, in comparison to the limitations of your hosting set-up. This is called uptime monitoring, and it ensures that your site loads without any issues even when you have a spike in traffic.

Uptime monitoring helps ensure that your website is up and running all of the time. This can be achieved with a monitoring solution that monitors the front-end and back-end issues that affect your website’s availability. Your WordPress maintenance plan can include actions to conduct the required checks and make your site more reliable.

4. Ensure a great user experience (UX)

Having a WordPress maintenance plan in place will allow you to spot any errors as and when they arise. By periodically scanning your site for broken links, images and redirects, you can fix problems and ensure a smooth user experience (UX) for your website visitors.

Core Web Vitals are another important aspect of a good user experience and a key ranking factor for SEO. As opposed to focusing on generic metrics like website loading speed, Core Web Vitals connect various aspects of your WordPress site’s performance to the user experience.

A WordPress maintenance plan will allow you to stay on top of your Core Web Vitals, which include metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (how fast the largest block of your page renders on-screen), First Input Delay (how long it takes after loading until your site becomes interactive), and Cumulative Layout Shift (a measure of the visual stability of your site).

Core Web Vitals metrics are measurable SEO performance indicators that show how your users experience your website. You can use this information to focus on those aspects of user experience that need improvement to attract return visitors and keep shopping abandonment rates low, among other advantages.

5. Regular backups can save your site

Backups of your WP site are a fundamental maintenance task. Carrying out regular site backups will keep all of your data in one place, allowing you to restore your site in the event of a security compromise or critical system failure.

You can go about it in two ways: use a plugin that automates website backups or engage a WordPress expert to take care of your site’s security.

Updraft Plus is a popular free plugin that lets you schedule automated backups, which can be restored from your admin dashboard at any time. You can set backup schedules every 2, 4, 8 or 12 hours, on a daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. If your day-to-day business involves storing customer information and orders, then it’s a good idea to backup as frequently as possible: daily backups are the recommended frequency.

Alternatively, an experienced WordPress security professional can look after your site security, which will give you greater protection than if you were to handle it yourself. The expert will harden your site’s security by implementing various measures, including daily backups that allow you to carry on your business even if a new malware wipes out your data.

Note: Codeable is not affiliated with any of the (plugins) recommendations mentioned in the post.

How to implement a WordPress maintenance plan

With the idea that the maintenance plan will cover backups, site security, malware removal, plugin updates and more, you can then determine how you’d like to implement it.

Do it yourself

You can implement a WordPress maintenance plan yourself by identifying the aspects of your site that require routine maintenance and creating a calendar for scheduling that maintenance. This would require you to: 

• Create a schedule for updating themes and plugins, and a staging environment to test them on. Delete old or unwanted plugins.  

• Use a backup plugin to automate periodic backups of your website (ideally daily).

• Set up regular malware scans using a WordPress security plugin like WordFence.

• Frequently check Core Web Vitals and site speed with tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and make the necessary speed optimization to your site to attain top scores (in a staging environment, if necessary).

• Monitor traffic levels through Google Analytics, and ensure your hosting plan is sufficient to handle traffic levels.

• Optimize your database using a tool like WP-Sweep.

• Use a crawling software such as Screaming Frog to check for broken links and 404 redirects.

• Manually test your site after updates by logging out of the admin dashboard and clicking through the site as if you were a user.

• Make the HTML, CSS and XHTML pages on your website standards-compliant to ensure that users don’t experience any problems using your site. Typically, this is done annually or when you make significant changes to your site.

• Delete spam comments (if there are one too many) in batches.

There’s a lot to do, and automation can take care of some of your WordPress maintenance tasks without requiring your intervention. But automating those tasks for free isn’t a good enough reason to manage site maintenance on your own. Also, every maintenance task cannot be automated for free. Think about the time you can actually afford to spend on maintaining your site, and how much you can run on autopilot with plugins.

Hire a WordPress professional

The alternative to a DIY implementation is having a WordPress expert do it for you. 

You may wonder if you really need to bring in a professional and pay for their services, but keep in mind that if you don’t have a WordPress maintenance plan you could get hacked, lose customers due to a poor UX, lose your data and miss out on SEO gains. All of this matters a great deal if you’re a solopreneur or business owner making money via your WordPress-based website.

Someone with a personal blog or site that has a non-commercial purpose can do with minimal maintenance and depending on how often they use their website – not need it at all. For anyone that runs an income-earning business on WordPress, due attention to site maintenance will help boost conversions, retain customers, and improve search engine rankings.

There are a variety of companies online that offer maintenance plans for your site. However:

• Not all are specialized in WordPress
• Some maintenance packages can be very pricey and some companies may even apply a price depending on your website’s number of visitors
• Many do not include support after maintenance has been completed
• Many do not cover essential services like security monitoring or uptime monitoring
• Some offer weekly service reports and other services that are not necessarily useful for small businesses.

Engaging a WordPress professional through Codeable

Codeable is a WordPress freelance platform that matches your project with WordPress experts. It introduces and connects you with a selected number of professionals who have the right skills and experience, and you take it from there. In this sense, Codeable isn’t a traditional hiring platform.

Generic marketplaces that accommodate all types of talent require you to review the many professionals on the platform and may ask you to pay extra to access vetted talent.

Codeable offers some of the features of a hiring platform, but has added benefits. While all WordPress developers on Codeable are vetted, they will provide an estimate only if they’re absolutely clear on the scope of the work, and if they can deliver on-time and on-budget.

Choosing Codeable for your WordPress maintenance services means saving time and gaining peace of mind. Devote your time to strategic and profit-generating tasks, while your WordPress support and maintenance duties are in capable hands.

The process to hire a WordPress professional on Codeable is easy:

• 1. Fill out a brief
• 2. Codeable recommends 1 – 5 experts who are suitable for the job 
• 3. Get a price estimate for the work
• 4. Start working with your expert on the maintenance and support plan of your site

It’s fast! You can get matched with one or more WordPress experts within a day.

Create and implement a WordPress maintenance plan painlessly

A good website maintenance plan will keep your website functioning properly and up to date, which is essential for business success. Creating and implementing a WordPress maintenance plan involves many tasks and hours of your time. It may not be feasible if you’re a busy business or have little or no technical knowledge.

Engaging a WordPress expert will cost you, but the returns will far outweigh what you pay those professionals for their specialized services. Before you bring a WordPress professional on board, you want to make sure that they are vetted and can actually get the job done to your satisfaction. And if you don’t relish the prospect of participating in a bidding war, where price tends to sometimes overshadow competence, you’ll have to look past generic freelance marketplaces.

With Codeable, you can have your cake and eat it too! 

Codeable experts will only engage with projects they know they can work on and the pricing model is fair, so you’re never at a cost disadvantage compared to bidding-based generic marketplaces.

Don’t wait to access WordPress professionals who will maintain your website in top shape!

Start now – submit your project to get a free, no-obligation estimate. 

The post 5 Reasons to Create a Maintenance Plan for Your WordPress Site appeared first on Codeable.

The benefits of regular WordPress maintenance are numerous. For one, you’ll boost your site’s security and load times. But there are also less apparent advantages, like improving your site’s ranking and lowering your bounce rate. After all, speed optimization is a huge part of core web vitals. It directly impacts the user experience, and search engines prioritize that over all else.

Companies with in-house technical teams can easily schedule, run and keep track of WordPress maintenance tasks. But smaller organizations and solopreneurs may have a more challenging time figuring out what to do and find the time to actually do it. 

When you handle WordPress maintenance on your own, you run a few risks for your business and website. For instance, you might not be aware (or have the know-how) to conduct all the necessary checks, and as such, put your site’s security in jeopardy. On the other hand, while taking more time and effort, a DIY approach can save you money (providing you know what you’re doing).

Fortunately, there’s another option for small businesses looking for reliable WordPress maintenance: hire a WordPress expert to manage your website maintenance tasks for you.

That said, is maintenance really vital for your website? This article explores what best WordPress maintenance entails and how to find a WordPress expert to manage your website maintenance (should you need one).

What It Takes to Maintain a WordPress Website

Some WordPress tasks are more basic than others. So, providing you have a foundational understanding of WordPress and some rudimentary knowledge of CSS, PHP (WordPress core), and HTML, that should be enough to handle simple updates. 

That said, developer-level skills are necessary for a thorough maintenance process that benefits your site in the long run. Below are just some of the required skills for carrying out expert WordPress maintenance:

• Knowledge of version control systems
• An understanding of command-line interfaces
• A familiarity with object-oriented programming

…To name a few.

Besides custom development skills, you’ll also need a clear plan in place to help organize your WordPress maintenance tasks. This serves as a reminder of what needs checking, when, and how often. 

A WordPress Maintenance Plan

While many tasks can be performed without putting your website into maintenance mode, you’ll need to conduct heavy WordPress maintenance every now and again, which, of course, requires this mode. 

When you put your website into ‘maintenance mode,’ visitors can’t view your site. As such, any in-depth WordPress maintenance needs planning ahead of time to ensure you lose as little traffic as possible.

Maintenance Mode

Although switching your site to maintenance mode has its disadvantages – most notably, a disruption in eCommerce sales and a loss of traffic, there are some perks:

• You can hide broken pages from visitors while you’re fixing them.
• It gives you space to tweak your website settings, template, or plugins without your visitors seeing what’s going on.
• It’s also good for SEO – by signaling to search engines that your website’s periodically down for maintenance, they won’t index any changes that look incomplete. As a result, your rankings remain intact.

You can put your website into maintenance mode with or without a plugin. WordPress automatically enables maintenance mode when you start an update. To turn it on manually, you’ll have to edit WordPress’ .htaccess file on your server. Here, you can write a few lines of code to redirect all traffic to maintenance.html. To customize the maintenance page, you’ll have to construct code to style the HTML and CSS.

Alternatively, with a plugin like WP Maintenance Mode, you can easily customize the maintenance notice your visitors see, to read something like ‘coming soon’ or whatever else you think is appropriate.

Things to Note Before Starting Your Website Maintenance

The last thing you want is for your maintenance operations to drag on so that you endure prolonged downtime. As such, it’s good practice to audit problem areas on your site before officially scheduled maintenance commences. That way, you know precisely what to address while your site’s in maintenance mode. Run a performance test and audit your content and SEO (Google Analytics is a great starting point). This is also an excellent time to check your website’s speed to determine whether significant optimizations are necessary. 

Maintenance Tasks

Next, let’s look at which maintenance tasks are the most vital and, as such, should always be included in your WordPress maintenance plan:

WordPress Backups

A site backup acts like WordPress website insurance. It ascertains that in the rare case something goes wrong, you don’t lose everything. Site backups protect you against any type of attack. So, no matter what happens, you can restore a previous version of your website. 

Don’t wait to learn this lesson the hard way. Many WordPress experts believe daily backups are necessary. While that sounds like lots of manual work, you have options:

Manual Backups

You can manually backup your WordPress site if you have access to the server it’s hosted on. You can run a built-in backup using your managed WordPress hosting provider’s cPanel. Or, you could conduct your own backup, independent of server software or WordPress plugins. 

If you opt for the latter, this involves logging into your server. Then, downloading and compressing all your folders and loose files to store in a location of your choosing. As you’ve probably gathered, you need to be comfortable navigating your WordPress site’s database to do this.

Automatic Backups

Alternatively, you can go for the much easier option, running automatic backups. Most hosting providers offer an automated backup service, so you don’t need to do anything. They’ll schedule the backup and store files securely. Then, should you ever need to, you simply request your service provider rolls back the site to a specific version.

Paid backup services are also available. However, the downside of these is that their pricing is usually expensive – especially when you’re starting out. Plus, you don’t have your website’s files at your disposal, which means you don’t have as much control. 

If control and ownership over your website backups are essential to you, manual backups are the way to go. That said, there are plugins available that automate this task while providing more control and ownership over your files. With this option, you enjoy the best of both worlds!

A few examples of such plugins include VaultPress and UpdraftPlus.

Pro Tip: When choosing a plugin, double-check it’s regularly updated and highly rated by WordPress users. Backups aren’t something you can gamble with!

Website Updates

Site updates are necessary when your WordPress theme or plugins are updated with security patches or extra functionality or when WordPress launches a new version of its software. Outdated software is more vulnerable to attack, so it’s worth keeping up with this. 

WordPress automatically updates itself if it can. It likely already does this for minor updates. However, you can also enable WordPress to update itself automatically for more significant versions too. The same goes for your chosen theme and downloaded plugins. You can turn on automatic updates for these too.
While automatic updates present less work on your part, there are more risks involved. In some cases, you don’t want to update a tool or software unless you’re sure the latest version will work seamlessly with your website. Many site owners have run into issues with plugin updates. Typically, it’s best to wait a couple of weeks to allow the theme/plugin developers to identify any glitches and fix them. Then, you can pull the trigger and install these updates manually. 

Website Security Monitoring

Website security comes with its own maintenance regime, ranging from backups to regularly changing your website’s password. But, to adequately protect yourself against attacks and security breaches, you should also periodically review your site’s access and error logs. 

Sometimes, unusual activity isn’t detected until it is too late. Your site might already be under attack before you start noticing that it slows down or your rankings drop. You can work with a security audit plugin like the iThemes security scanner to perform these checks regularly. 

As mentioned in the previous section, security updates are also vital. However, these can sometimes cause compatibility issues that can break your website. That’s why security isn’t something you should handle yourself unless you’re confident you know what you’re doing. 

For the same reason, any updates should be performed on a WordPress staging site and in maintenance mode first. That way, you can rest easy knowing the update won’t jeopardize your site’s operation or aesthetic.

Performance Updates

Performance updates ensure your site’s loading speeds remain high so that visitors don’t have to wait long before your website becomes fully interactive and visible. This is worth keeping on top of, especially when you consider that as many as 46% of users won’t revisit poorly performing websites.

There are several tasks involved in performance optimization and maintenance. Many of them you can do by yourself, including:

• Clearing your cache using a caching plugin
• The optimization of your database
• Optimizing content and images for the web
• Clearing spam comments from blog posts
• Testing WordPress forms
• Finding and fixing broken links
• Identifying 404 errors and correcting them

You should also remove any plugins you no longer use and clear any commands in your code that don’t do anything. 

Final Checks

After completing all the WordPress maintenance tasks listed on your plan, perform a few final checks. This is paramount for ensuring everything runs smoothly when your website’s back in operational mode. For instance, you should re-validate your site after making any customizations to the code or style sheets. It’s imperative your site conforms to expected standards and is interpreted the way you want it by various browsers and search engines.

You should also check every aspect of your website thoroughly to ensure everything works before eventually logging out of maintenance mode!

Are You Ready to Better Maintain Your WordPress Website?

Your WordPress maintenance process isn’t something to be taken lightly. Adequate WordPress maintenance ensures your site performs at its best and doesn’t fall prey to ever-evolving attacks. 

We hope your takeaway from this article is that maintenance is vital to your site’s safety and health. Only through regular cloud backups and a consistent security maintenance schedule can you ensure you won’t lose your hard work. As maintenance is so vital, you should never perform these crucial tasks yourself unless you have the skills, time, and resources. This is especially true of more significant security updates and website edits. These should always be handled professionally. In doing so, you avoid compromising the health of your site.

You can hire a fully-fledged WordPress agency or professional freelance support services to handle your maintenance plan. Codeable experts can be hired for regular WordPress maintenance and they’re all vetted. You can submit your project today to get a free estimation with no obligation; it’s 100% risk-free!

The post Is WordPress Maintenance Really Vital for Your Website? appeared first on Codeable.

*(You can read up on Google’s upcoming changes here). 

This means websites that perform poorly will rank lower on search engines. So, we’re shedding some light on core web vitals metrics, DIY solutions, and when it’s time to seek a professional.

Why is This Important Now?

If currently, your website scores poorly where web vitals are concerned, you have lots of work to do before May. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t doable. By finding out what you need to do and putting it into action, you’re on the right track to SEO success. 

Failure to do so, and you may end up penalized. We observed this last time Google made a significant change to its algorithm. When the search engine wanted to promote responsive websites as an influential ranking factor, there was a substantial shift against sites that weren’t optimized for mobile-friendliness.

With all that said, let’s take a closer look at what core web vitals actually are.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Web vitals aim to simplify the often confusing and complicated landscape of UX performance metrics to help site owners focus on what matters most. They’re a subset of web vitals that apply to all web pages that site owners can measure via numerous Google tools. Here, these web vitals are measured by performance in the 75th percentile.

Some of the more well-known solutions for evaluating your core web vitals include:

• Lighthouse
• PageSpeed Insights
• Chrome DevTools
• Google Search Console
• web.dev’s measure tool
• The Web Vitals Chrome extension 
• Chrome UX Report API

There’s a lot of overlap between the tools. Some enable you to plugin the URL and then the tool will analyze your web vitals, others allow you to run a report directly in the browser, and others enable you to monitor your web vitals on an ongoing basis. Google has provided a multitude of tools with different users in mind – from less technical to more tech-savvy ones. 

In any case, Page Speed Insights is a great starting point. I ran a random website through PageSpeed Insights and found they calculate field data via the Chrome User Experience Report using real-world speed data. With regards to core web vitals metrics, this is how they display the data:

Core web vitals are complementary to Google’s Page experience metrics, which include: multi-device responsiveness, HTTPS, pop-ups, etc., and as such, core web vitals aren’t a replacement for these metrics. 

It’s also worth noting, what’s considered a core web vital may change over time as technologies evolve and priorities shift. However, at the time of writing, the current core web vitals include:

• The largest contentful paint (LCP): This measures loading performance (a loading performance under 2.5s is considered good).
• First input delay (FID): This metric measures load responsiveness to the first moment a user interaction can occur with the website. Ideally, this should be below 100ms.
• Cumulative layout shift (CLS): This measures visual stability. For a good user experience, pages should score less than 0.1 on this metric.

How Can You Optimize Your Website for Core Web Vitals?

Before you can start optimizing your site, you must determine how the website’s already performing across each metric. Therefore, the first step is to check your core web vitals score. 

• Generate a report on your page speed and core web vitals using Google Page Speed Insights.
• Track particular issues with your core web vitals in Google’s Search Console, and see how your solutions are working

You can also use the Web Vitals Chrome extension. This is another fabulous tool for measuring your site’s metrics. Finally, web vitals can also be measured in Javascript using Standard Web APIs.

Making Enhancements to Your Core Web Vitals

Now that you’ve run the checks above, you should have a better idea of how your site performs for core web vitals. If you passed them all with flying colors, you don’t have to worry about May’s upcoming changes. However, if there were one or more metrics you could improve upon, pay attention. Below we’ve listed some of the changes you may need to make and how to execute them (in order of importance):

Optimizing LCP

As we’ve already said, the LCP measures the time it takes from clicking through to your website to seeing the main of your on-screen content. As such, this metric concerns your page load speed (usually the home page), which is influenced by the render time of the largest image, video, or volume of text on your website. 

Remember, under 2.5 seconds is considered a good website load time. Anything above needs improvement, and if your site loads slower than four seconds, Google will consider it inferior.

Any of the following could be the cause(s) of slow loading times:

• Slow server response times (this could result from poor-quality web hosting, a lack of caching, increased web traffic, etc.)
• Render-blocking Javascript and CSS (These are files that prevent websites from displaying content before they’re fully loaded).
• Client-side rendering (These kinds of websites create dynamic routes directly in the browser).

How you might fix it:

• Remove any unnecessary third-party scripts (plugins). These might not be optimized and could slow your site down.
• Upgrade your web hosting. Cheap hosting might shackle your site to slower web servers, and hence, loading times.
• Set up lazy loading or use a content delivery system. This enables your site to cache more easily and sends content to users via data centers near them. All of this goes a long way to reducing load times.
• Remove large web page elements. 
• Service HTML pages cache-first.
• Establish third-party connections early.
• Minify CSS.
• Optimize/compress website imagery.
• Ensure your web pages are AMP optimized.

Optimizing FID

First Input Delay (FID) measures how fast the page becomes interactive. In other words: when the user first clicks on something, how long does it take before something happens?

This metric may be less relevant for blogs or news sites where the central interactivity relates to opening articles to read. But for websites involving logins and/or signup pages, FID is crucial. Sites with an FID of more than 300ms are considered inferior. Ideally, you should score under 100ms on this metric.

Fixing your FID is difficult without in-depth knowledge of how websites load JavaScript.

However, you might be able to improve this metric by:

• Breaking up long tasks and minimizing Javascript bloat
• Removing unnecessary third-party scripts
• Using a web worker

Optimize CLS

Cumulative layout shift (CLS) concerns whether your web page elements stay where they should as the site loads. It measures the sum total of unexpected layout shifts (a layout shift occurs every time a visible element changes its position between rendered frames).

Have you ever tried to click on something on a mobile site, but the element moved as you were trying to select it? The chances are that the site had an undesirably high CLS. Anything below 0.1 is good. If you score higher than 0.25, your site badly needs to improve its visual stability.

Here are a few fixes to apply:

• Define media size attributes in HTML, so internet browsers know how much space they’ll take up.
• Reserve space for any ads.
• Add any new UI below the fold so they don’t push expected content down.
• Work with responsive images.
• Some fonts can cause a flash of unstyled text or invisible text while a font is rendered – so test for this and make any necessary changes. 
• Use transform animations rather than animations of properties. The latter has a higher chance of triggering layout changes.

Optimizations Suggested by Google

Finally, Google’s PageSpeed insights tool comes with its own recommendations on how to improve your site’s performance. These are good practices across the board and, when implemented, could enhance your website’s load time. 

That said, these optimizations won’t necessarily affect your core web vitals. However, they should help provide a better user experience, which is excellent for SEO and visitor retention. Most notably, you should start:

• Saving images in next-gen formats
• Eliminating render-blocking resources
• Enabling text compression
• Removing unused CSS
• Removing unused JavaScript

How To Implement These Optimizations

Lots of these fixes require knowledge and familiarity with development practices, so much so, that you need to be a developer. For instance, some of the changes demand an FE specialist, while others may require a Backend or a server-level specialist. For example, breaking up long tasks, minimizing Javascript bloat, and removing third-party scripts. You can’t remove all third-party scripts, some like Google Analytics are crucial. As such, you need an understanding of these third-party scripts, which ones you can actually delete, and how you go about doing that (which involves some coding know-how). 

The keyword to remember is optimization. You’re not trying to rebuild your site into one Google wants. Instead, you’re trying to optimize your website with your user’s best experience in mind. Of course, at the same time, you’re also working to avoid Google’s penalization. This is where the challenge lies.

Suppose you don’t possess much technical knowledge yourself. In that case, your site might benefit from hiring a professional developer – especially if you don’t want to compromise your website’s design. A pro will be able to preserve your site’s “look and feel” while making the necessary optimizations. 

Using a professional developer’s services is undoubtedly the easiest way to save you and your team lots of time. Plus, you can await May 2021, confident in the knowledge that your website makes the grade. 

How Do You Hire Professional Support, and Where’s The Best Place to Find it?

When it comes to optimizing your core web vitals, the biggest mistake you can make is attempting to fix everything at once. Instead, prioritize and resolve core issues first. Website optimization is not a task you do once and can forget about. Rather, it’s an ongoing process that requires your continuous attention. 

As we hinted at earlier, you should always start with an audit to get an idea of where your website stands. It’s then a good idea to work with an expert webmaster to prioritize and roll out an optimization plan. 

Codeable experts can do that for you. Codeable matches customers with carefully screened WordPress experts and developers. To determine the best qualified candidates, every specialist goes through a vetting process which includes a technical exam and live coding tests.

Codeable’s pros can perform anything from small tasks and fixes to full custom development work and they can tackle your website’s optimization to ensure you’re ready to face May 2021 with confidence. Best of all, you can connect with a reliable expert within as little as three to five hours.

Are You Ready to Optimize Your Website for Web Page Experience Signals?

By now, you’ll know that Google is rolling out significant changes in May 2021 as to how its SEO algorithms treat core web vitals. Sites that aren’t ready and optimized by then risk losing their rankings and their visitors. It’s essential to start creating and executing a web page optimization plan to adjust to these changes ASAP.

Marketers can run quick and simple checks on your site today to determine how it performs across the three core web vitals. From there, you might be able to implement some of the DIY fixes outlined above. However, for significant optimizations, getting expert advice is a great idea. This will allow you to work promptly to prioritize the most important changes. 

The post Core Web Vitals: Why and How to Optimize Your Website for Page Experience appeared first on Codeable.

In addition, only a 1-second delay can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. A 2-second delay in load time during a transaction resulted in abandonment rates of up to 87%:

Humans have limited patience when it comes to online browsing and slow websites contribute substantially to throwing visitors off because of the time that it takes for them to load and display the relevant information. Optimizing the speed of a WooCommerce website will significantly improve your core web vitals score, but it is a tricky business and the processes involved requires different considerations.

Want to know how to optmize your WooCommerce store for maximum speed?

Grat, here’s how!

Start by analyzing the current speed of your WooCommerce store (no servers involved yet)

For any performance optimization work, you need to know what’s your current state. Gathering data as your first step provides you with a key benchmark. It helps you ascertain the extent of optimization that is needed, and in what areas. It is important to note that the first step is to asses your site speed only, leaving servers untouched for the moment.

To perform this type of assessment, you’ll usually use online tools you might have already heard of, namely GTmetrix, Pingdom, Google Site Speed tool are the most well-known and recognized for this task.

When hiring a developer, this early part of the work doesn’t need your login credentials to be shared.

After the frontend speed of your WooCommerce store, it’s time to analyze where your store “lives”: your hosting provider.

Examine your hosting provider, CPU, and PHP version

Once you’ve determined the speed of your store on the frontend, the next step in line is to check the hosting provider your store is hosted on. This means looking at your hosting servers stack and configuration at first, but not only. As WordPress developer and Codeable expert Milan Latinović there are more elements to check:

After having looked at your hosting configurations and speed, we also need to investigate other crucial elements affecting the speed of your WooCommerce store. Specifically, we’ll look at the CPU usage, RAM usage, and PHP version your store currently uses.

Analyze caching mechanisms

Once you collect data both from frontend and servers, it’s time to dig deeper into your caching setup. If you have no idea of how caching works, I suggest you read this short anecdote from Peter Chester. In short, cache works similarly to snapshots of a given page (or query) which are then stored in an efficient way so that, when requested again, your store doesn’t have to go through the same process from scratch and can serve data faster to your users. Highlights Milan:

When we talk about caching system for a WooCommerce store, our goal is to find the most effective way to deliver the smallest amount of information that’s not compromising the user experience.

Caching can be configured client-side, via your users’ browser, and/or server-side, via the servers provided by your hosting providers.

Check whether WordPress core files, WooCommerce, and themes are all up-to-date

This is a problem often overlooked by store managers: since the store gained some popularity, the importance of updating it gets undermined. This is a common yet counter-productive approach to running a store (and, more broadly, any site) because it won’t only lower the security of such WooCommerce store but, as the goal of this article, it won’t allow it to reach better performances. As Milan recalls:

In my experience, 90% of WooCommerce stores run some outdated versions of their software and that’s what leads to them to having slower pages. The most updated
stores are those that are not selling actively because they’re new ones.

Image optimization strategy

Image optimization is another important element to take care of, especially with large WooCommerce stores featuring numerous products that are accompanied by relevant images. The strategy for image optimization is three-pronged:

1. Automatic image optimization

When you hear someone talking about “Image optimization”, most of the people think it’s a matter of using a script or plugin to do that for you like Kraken, TinyJPG, or any other image optimization tools. Even though this a great and easy win, when it comes to making your images weight less, it’s just one of the things required in a full image optimization process.

2. Optimize template images

There’s a special type of images that can’t be optimized automatically by a script or plugin. These images are embedded into the template used to design layout of your store and aren’t accessible to external tools or plugins. As a result, these images have to be manually tweaked and then re-uploaded to start having some beneficial results.

3. Normalizing images

The third part of the image optimization process is to normalize images against your template’s image size requirements. Let’s say you’re using a 1000 x 1000 px photo when it should be a 200 x 200 photo. Sure, the code on the page will try to render it properly but your store is still loading it at its original size and now tries to shrink it to show it as your settings require.

What’s happening here is that not only your store needs more time to go through all these activities (uploading image › shrink it › show it) but it also needs more resources, namely more CPU and RAM. The result: slower pages and higher server resources required to go through a process which could have been streamlined in the first place.

Using images with the wrong size means two things: a) your store is loading more than it should and b) your store is executing additional scripts to fix the issue which you initially created using that wrong-sized image.

Optimizing images on your store can provide you with great results but it’ll require a reasonable amount of time to be invested in.

Script selection and optimization

If we’re talking about time-consuming tasks occurring during a WooComerce store optimization process, script selection and optimization is surely at the top of the ladder. Scripts are actually the most complicated part of the entire speed optimization process.

Let me try to quickly explain why.

In short, there are different iterations of scripts running on the backend and the frontend of your store. Those running in your backend are not meant to run on the “front”, for your customers; the ones pertaining to your frontend, as you might have already anticipated, can’t be run on your backend. This means that scripts for both have to be optimized individually in order to enhance the speed of your store.

On top of that, everything has to be tested to see if all is working like a charm. However, the process is not as easy as it might sound and, sometimes, clients hardly understand the intricacies of why script optimization require so much time. Milan points out:

When doing script optimization, we have to spend several hours, sometimes even 10 hours, just to reassemble already-existing scripts. All without having created a single line of code.

Multi-language optimization

Stores are usually universal or they cater to people from different countries which means that they have to support different languages. This is where multi-language optimization comes into play and this is extremely important because, if not handled properly, it can spell disaster for the entire project. Milan explains:

usally, store managers either use a premium solution like WPML or some kind of automatic translation mechanism. If we don’t have a properly-optimized WooCommerce website implementing multi-language support, we’ll increase issues exponentially.

A multi-language optimization process can happen in two ways: you either optimize everything for WooCommerce and then add a plugin like WPML. Or, the opposite: you optimize a website which is already using a localization plugin and then you add WooCommerce to it.

Wrapping up

Speeding up and optimizing a WooCommerce site is important to keep your sales conversion rate as high as possible. The optimization process has a number of steps that require extensive efforts whether by your in-house developer or by an outsourced WooCommerce specialist.

If you’d like to grow your store business, that’s surely one of the most effective and powerful enhancement you’ll be required to perform. Unless you’re ok having a couple of seconds jeopardize your revenue stream.

This blog post features Milan Latinović, a software developer and team lead with 8+ years of experience and strong technical background in PHP, GIT, infrastructure (virtualization, provisioning, integration) and security. Experienced both in technical and the domain of management (project scoping, planning and implementation), Milan specializes in WordPress optimization, WooCommerce, Security and LSPs – large scale project deliveries. He is also an official WPML contractor and Phd researcher in the field of semantic databases and SQL optimization.

The post 7 Key Areas For Speeding Up Your WooCommerce Store appeared first on Codeable.

In a world where there’s no room for slow pages, speed optimization is a key aspect of many online businesses that touches different areas of a website. And one of the most important steps in a speed and performance optimization process is setting up the right type of caching solution to gain even better performances.

Caching it’s a technical matter just a little segment of WordPress users can take care of on their own, leaving room for a category of plugins that’s always one of the most researched: caching plugins.

In fact, there are plenty of WordPress caching plugins you can find in the WordPress repository like W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, just to name a few of the most well-known. It’s worth mentioning WP Rocket too, a premium plugin that in the last years has gained a lot of attention because of its good results.

So, how do these caching plugins work? What’s the core problems they help you address? In this blog post, I’ll share more insights on the nooks and crannies of what these caching plugins do and answer those questions you always wanted to ask a developer… but were afraid to ask!

Are you ready to get your answers? It’s about time, let’s dive in!

Question #1: What’s caching in plain English?

It all starts with this question, which to a non-technical person or business owner might sound like impossible to understand and get an answer to. Have faith, dear friend!

Instead of trying to give you a short definition lacking technical (and scary) terms, there’s nothing better than Peter Chester‘s example. Here it is:

What’s caching?

During a WordPress talk, Peter asked the audience: ‘What’s 3,485,250 divided by 23,235?’
Everyone fell silent. Some people pulled out calculators to do the math, and finally, someone yelled out the answer after a few seconds.

Then the speaker asked the exact same question again. This time everyone was able to immediately call out the answer.

This is a great demo of the concept. The initial time-consuming process was done once, then after that, when the same question was asked, the answer was readily available, and delivered much faster.

The first visitor to a particular page on your site is ‘asking the question’ and your server provides the answer. The next time a visitor goes to the same page (or the first one comes back), and ‘asks the same question’, your server can provide the answer – the web page – much faster.

Roughly speaking, caching is similar to taking snapshots of a given page (or query) and storing them smartly so that, when requested again, your website doesn’t have to do that exact process and can serve it faster. That “smart” storage can happen client-side, via your browser, and/or server-side, via your servers provided by your hosting providers.

Question #2: How do caching plugins work?

Caching plugins make a business owner’s life easy by simplifying the entire caching process to an enormous extent. Given the complexity of it and the abundance of plugins for this purpose, we can summarize it by saying which aspects of a website could be interested by a caching plugin.

Here following you can find the top areas that are commonly touched by caching plugins:

• HTML and CSS
• Database
• Images
• Third-party scripts
• Server-side elements

Pay attention here: a caching plugin won’t cover all elements that a thorough WordPress optimization process will affect. WordPress developer and Codeable expert Josh Morley further elaborates:

If your hosting provider does not offer an inbuilt caching system, as many don’t, we would install a caching plugin like WP Rocket, which is my preferred plugin to use. But before we do anything, we’d take a backup of the site. After the caching plugin is installed, configured and tested, we would move on to other issues that slow down a site such as render blocking JS & CSS or the process of minification and concatenation.

Through a plugin, you’ll never reach the same level of results a speed and performance specialist could guarantee as there are several technical advanced aspects involved in such projects. Yet, thanks to a properly configured plugin, you can improve your speed in a more convenient way, i.e. through the preferred plugin’s settings.

Question #3: Do I need a plugin if my hosting provider has a caching service already?

Depending on which type of hosting your website is on, you could already have some sort of caching in place or the option to have it enabled by the service provider.

The one thing you should be aware of, though, is to stay away from piling a caching plugin onto a caching system your hosting has currently enabled on your website. Josh seconds this view:

If you have some sort of caching system as part of your hosting package already in place, and you’re considering adding an additional caching plugin on top of it, it can cause conflicts between the two. I personally wouldn’t go down that road. Either disable the one from your hosting provider and add a plugin but don’t use two.

The more, the merrier doesn’t apply here. Actually, it should be: use one only that does the job at its best.

Question #4: Is it preferable to use the caching option provided by the hosting service or a caching plugin?

The caching service depends on the quality of the hosting service. A few notable ones – like SiteGround, DigitalOcean, Cloudways, WP Engine – provide extremely efficient and powerful caching features, which can be used without having to opt for any alternatives. Josh elaborates this point with respect to certain services:

Not all caching systems are created equal. I would always recommend that if your hosting provider has a system, use that first. And then, if it’s not doing what it should do, look at changing your host to one where you can actually add your own caching system, or find a way to disable the inbuilt caching system. Personally, out of all the inbuilt caching systems I have used, WP Engine has always worked well. Their caching system is amazing and if you have the budget, go for it.

Wrapping up

Caching is vital for your website’s performance because of the optimization that they bring along. Relying on caching plugins, even though seen as a common tactic, it’s a pretty technical matter more than the average WordPress user realizes and wrong setups can provide you with (almost) no benefits.

Still, you could reach good improvements by combining good plugins and having them properly set up either by your in-house developers or a speed and performance optimization specialist. No matter what your preferences are, it’s time to think about your website’s speed because your customers have already been doing so for the past years!

This blog post features Josh Morley who is the founder of MarketingTheChange, a small digital agency that use its profits to support charities, non-profits and unfunded startups. He’s been designing & marketing websites for the past 4 years, with a focus on WordPress webdesign, online marketing and SEO, PPC, keyword research, link-building and lead acquisition for local business.

The post 4 Questions About Caching Plugins You Always Wanted To Ask A WordPress Developer appeared first on Codeable.

But before any speed and optimization improvements, you need to dig deeper into what’s causing your website to lag. Here’s a look at four of the main factors that influence your WordPress site’s performance, along with some optimization suggestions.

Reason 1: clogged up database

Using plugins can gradually lead to a bloated database. And because the database isn’t optimized for storing lots of data, it might take longer to query the database. As WordPress developer and Codeable expert Justin Frydman explains:

Depending on the plugins you’re using, some could be storing a great deal of data or leave behind empty rows. This makes the database bigger and as a result, queries begin to take longer to perform. The more records in the database, the longer it takes to get that data out, especially with unoptimized queries.

Generally speaking, a lot of plugins will pollute the database. This is in addition to the data that most plugins leave behind when deleted. Luckily, there are some useful tools that can help you clean up that mess. A good example is Plugins Garbage Collector, which basically helps you identify and remove the leftover data from deleted plugins.

When using tools like the one mentioned above or any that make changes to your database, ALWAYS make sure you have taken a database backup, and have the know-how to properly restore it without issues if needed. You can’t be too safe with taking backups before performing any database cleaning.

Since it may be difficult to know which plugins overload and slow down your database, Justin also suggests performing routine checkups:

It’s difficult for a nontechnical person to know which plugins are slow or bloated. It requires investigation via a number of tools and digging directly in the database. Once you identify a problematic plugin, you can look around for lighter weight alternatives, or try to clean up the mess it makes.

Reason 2: server capabilities

As you do your checkups, you may discover the problem has little or nothing to with your plugins. For example, if you’re getting more traffic than usual, it could simply be that your server is unable to handle the load gracefully. The only solution, in this case, is to upgrade to a better server, which ultimately means changing your hosting provider. Justin asks:

What if your site has grown in traffic and the solution that’s in place right now is just not able to handle it?

The issue of insufficient server resources happens to be quite common and is, in fact, the main reason why many websites are so slow to load. Finding out if your hosting solution is no longer a good fit for your site and your business is a non-optional thing you want to mark off your important things to do list.

Reason 3: images

Having the right numbers of pictures, photos featuring your products, and any other visual assets are key elements to your business. The right product image can directly boost your sales numbers, while a pixelated one can scare way your prospects. Same thing can be said on a broader view: even if you’re not selling anything directly from your website, relying on small, less-than-appealing visual elements, will make you look unprofessional and your branding efforts diluted.

As with other assets pertaining to your website, imagery and visual elements are ultimately a business asset. Therefore, you need to question them:

Says Justin:

The thing we see clients doing a lot at Codeable is they put a slider on their homepage. That’s fine, but then they put 15 images in there. Why? First of all, no one’s going to look through all those images. Secondly, those elements are loading in the background and are adding to how long your site takes to load for no clear business case.

Having too many images on your pages will obviously slow things down. Specifically, you have to decide whether that slider or photo gallery should feature all images at your disposal or just have the best ones being featured. Ask yourself: is this image/visual element helping my business in any way?

Reason 4: third-party scripts

In life, once a service or technology or app is heavily adopted, we usually tend to think we need to use it as well or we’d be missing out on something (we have no idea of). Same thing happens with websites: think of Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Google AdWords code, SumoMe, and so on. We add them to our websites (or hire someone to do it for us) before knowing how they will affect our website’s performances.

As Justin suggests:

It’s about questioning each and every element that is included in your website. When it comes to checking on third-party scripts the question is: ‘Is it bringing any value to your business? Does your business really need it?’

Having many of these third-party scripts can heavily affect your website’s performances. If they’re providing you with value, like tracking your visitors, for example, it’s worth having a developer focus their time finding a solution with that. On the other hand, if these scripts aren’t beneficial in any possible way, you’d want to get rid of them as soon as possible.

A developer can help you more easily determine which external scripts are critical and which ones are the slow resource hogs holding up the loading of a website.

Wrapping up

Having a website that loads fast is essential to the success of your business, you know that. Always remember what the goal is: providing your users with the best possible experience and a smooth buying process. And all starts with pages loading blazingly fast.

So, if your site takes forever to load, how will they ever buy from you when they’re already gone?

This blog post features Justin Frydman who is a top-rated WordPress expert constantly delivering quality projects of all different types for clients on Codeable. A specialist with WordPress site speed optimization, Justin understands the value of what a faster website can do for a business and truly enjoys the work of testing and optimizing to produce the best end result possible.

The post Why Is My Website Slow? appeared first on Codeable.