WordPress is a popular website-building platform, used by entrepreneurs from all around the world who want to create their own sites.  If you are planning on starting your own business, then WordPress is a great way to set up your first site.

However, you do need to take steps to optimize your website. WordPress can be a bit rough around the edges in places. If you don’t perfect your site, then it could end up not working the way that it’s supposed to.

This post will tell you how you can optimize your business’s WordPress site.

Headless WordPress

A headless WordPress site can be an effective way of improving your site. There are many advantages to using a Headless WordPress site, however, if you don’t actually know what that is, then here’s a brief explanation: a headless WordPress site uses WordPress for managing content, but another frontend stack to display that content to visitors. Headless sites are more flexible, perform better, and have easier multi-channel distribution. If managed and designed properly, then such sites can make your customer’s user experience a lot easier. These sites also tend to have significantly faster loading times and are easier to maintain.

Site Updates

If you want your site to perform well, then you need to make sure that it’s updated. WordPress regularly releases updates. If you don’t keep your site updated then it won’t benefit from the changes, amendments, and new features that come along with these updates. You should receive an email when a new update is available. If you do not, then you can manually check updates on WordPress’s website. If you think that your site is already performing well, however, then you don’t necessarily have to make updates if you don’t want to.

Hosting Plan

One of the most effective ways of optimizing your WordPress site is to choose a reliable, fast hosting plan. The faster your site is, the more likely users will be to use it. There are literally hundreds of thousands of businesses on the internet. You are unlikely to be the only business in your specific niche. Because of this, if your site isn’t fast, then people will just go and shop with your competition instead. Websites hosted by unreliable hosts are also more likely to experience frequent periods of downtime. Make sure you select your hosting plan carefully (and don’t try to save money by selecting an unreliable one).

Use Caching

Caching can significantly improve your site’s speed and performance. When you visit a website for the first time, the site’s cache is requested and then saved to your browser. Every subsequent time that you visit the website,  the same files will be loaded and displayed again. Caching means that your site won’t have to be requested and loaded from your server every single time your site gets visitors. You can use plugins to cache your site on WordPress. There are also lots of guides online that you can use to teach you how to implement them.

Image Optimisation

Image optimization is another effective way of optimizing your site and making it easier for visitors to use. Images are, on many sites, the reason that they perform so slowly. The process of optimizing an image involves compressing an image file’s size. However, despite compressing the file, the image’s quality isn’t affected. Most experts would agree that the easiest way for you to optimize images is to do it before you upload them onto your site. Trying to optimize images when they are already uploaded is possible but it is also unnecessary.

CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. You can use a CDN to speed up your WordPress site and improve its performance. CDNs are networks of proxy servers, hosted all over the world. These servers are then used to deliver a website’s content much more quickly. CDNs can also prevent your site from being hacked, and halt DoS attacks. Again, one of the easiest ways to implement a CDN is to install a plugin. Using a plugin will save you a lot of trouble, time, and effort. Trying to use CDNs without plugins can be very complicated. If you aren’t technically savvy, then there’s no way that you will be able to, at least without an expert’s help.

Deleting Plugins

While throughout this post, the use of plugins has been recommended at various points, you should delete any plugins that you aren’t using. A lot of website owners download plugins to their WordPress sites and then forget about them. However, forgetting about your plugins can then lead to your site becoming unnecessarily slow and significantly hindering its performance. As soon as you have finished using a plugin (or if a plugin has become redundant) make sure that you delete it. Also, make sure that you keep your plugins updated.

Media Library

Your plugins aren’t the only things that you need to delete and update. You also need to take care of your site’s media library. WordPress sites that have been open for a long time can build up a lot of unnecessary media. Unnecessary media buildup can slow your website down. If you have started to accumulate a lot of unnecessary media, then go through your media library and begin deleting things. You will be surprised at how fast cleaning one’s media library can make one’s site. The only downside to cleaning a media library is that it can take a lot of time to do.

Professional Help

Something else that’s worth considering if you have absolutely no idea how to look after your site (and you are too busy to learn) is to hire somebody to maintain and manage your site for you. That said, it’s a lot easier and cheaper to just pay somebody to create a website for you from scratch if you’re going to outsource site management. If you want to use WordPress, then you are just better off learning how to manage your site yourself.

WordPress is one of the web’s leading website builders. It is used by businesses in a variety of industries because it is highly effective. If you need to create a website, then you too should give it some consideration. Make sure that if you do use it, you take steps to optimize your site’s performance.

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