[Pos baru] WordPress Performance Tuning: Best Tips for 2021+

Pos : WordPress Performance Tuning: Best Tips for 2021+
URL : http://wordpress.com/2021/01/20/wordpress-performance-tuning-best-tips-for-2021/
Ditulis : Januari 20 2021 pukul 9:30 am
Penulis : The WordPress.com Team
Kategori : Tips

Running a website is a juggling act where you have to keep both functionality and performance going at the same time. And necessary website features should never be dropped just because site speed will suffer otherwise. However, with many self-hosted WordPress.org installations, because of the open-source nature of the platform and the thousands of available WordPress plugins, unnecessary functionality is being installed – and not used – and website performance inevitably takes a hit.

That's not the only way, though. Fortunately, there are WordPress-optimized and WordPress-only SaaS (software as a service) solutions – like WordPress.com – where these issues are easily handled. When you're able to have a fast-loading website, everyone will be happy, from your visitors to Google search engines (site speed is a big part of SEO).

This article is about that: how to figure out what prevents your WordPress site from being a top performer and what you can do about it. Read on to discover our best WordPress performance tuning tips.

WordPress Performance Tuning: Understanding the 6 Top Issues

You can't jump into WordPress performance tuning without first knowing what's likely going wrong on your website. The most common issues affecting WordPress performance with self-hosted installations include:

Browser caching: This is when there's a copy of website information stored on your computer to make loading those same pages faster the next time. Unfortunately, if older versions of a web page from the WordPress database are stored, it can actually decrease site speed, not increase it.
JavaScript: This programming language allows you to add complex features to your WordPress website, but it can also bloat your site and slow down the page rendering speed.
Minify CSS: With the minification of CSS files, you cut out portions of the code that aren't necessary, ultimately reducing the file size – and speeding things up.
Image optimization: A lot of data is used up by images, and if they're not optimized to be smaller (without losing quality), your pages may load at a snail's pace.
Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network): Basically, a CDN is a web server platform that reduces the distance between the user and the server side, which then allows much faster processing and loading times.

When it comes to WordPress caching, you can also use third-party tools, like WP Rocket, WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, to help. A powerful caching plugin like WP Rocket can be added to your website with the upgraded Business or eCommerce plan.

Apart from website speed, performance also suffers when there aren't regular security scans that protect your website against spam. When you think of spam, you may think of junk email – but in terms of your website, spam becomes much more insidious. Spam bots can take over your website's code, which can result in a slow-loading website – and do a lot more damage, too, all of which can negatively impact your Google ranking.

WordPress Performance Tuning: How WordPress.com Solves These Problems

If you have a self-hosted WordPress.org site, you may be facing one or more of these problems. But with WordPress.com, they're all taken care of you – or even prevented before they become a problem at all. In this case, WordPress performance tuning is pretty much handled for you, and you can sit back and reap the benefits.

WordPress.com's backend has multiple caching layers – and other types of performance optimizations – so that your site will load fast no matter where in the world the user is. You don't need a separate caching plugin, either – it comes out-of-the-box with WordPress.com.
Instead of simply removing certain JavaScript and CSS code, WordPress.com runs performance tests to see exactly what needs to be removed or updated – and what can stay as is so your site can have the functionality you want it to. If problematic code is found, you can then decide what to do with it. And thanks to WordPress.com's customer support team, you can get help with the next steps.
There's an in-depth, step-by-step guide on how to optimize your images for your website. Find it here ( https://wordpress.com/support/media/image-optimization/ ) .
When you host your website with WordPress.com, you automatically use their CDN data center – and you can also add WordPress plugins that include even more CDN features.
Several security features come standard with WordPress.com ( https://wordpress.com/support/security/ ) , including regularly monitoring for suspicious activity to sniff out spam before it can impact your site speed or safety. Access logs are also auto-enabled, so you can always keep an eye on who's in and out of your site. Plus, depending on your plan, you can add another security plugin like Cloudflare for even more protection.

One more thing: we have dozens of optimized WordPress themes for clients to pick from, and we limit the use of unverified themes from external sources. You can rest assured knowing that the WordPress theme you use is always safe.

WordPress Performance Tuning: How to Protect Your WordPress.org Site

While WordPress.com comes with a ton of site speed-related features built right in, you may be sticking with self-hosted WordPress.org for the foreseeable future. In that case, since you don't automatically have performance features pre-installed, you'll need to take steps on your own. Here's how to handle WordPress performance tuning for a self-hosted site.

Is Your Hosting Provider Optimized for WordPress?

When it comes to WordPress performance tuning, the first thing you want to do is see if your host is optimized for WordPress. (This is a huge benefit of opting for managed WordPress hosting – they only deal with WordPress.com sites, and so you know they're total experts in the field.) To find out if your host is optimized for WordPress (for example, the SiteGround web hosting platform is), seek out the answers to these questions:

Does the host have browser caching enabled?
Will you use a CDN by default?
Do they scan and protect against WordPress-specific hacks?

Additionally, your web host should probably recommend Jetpack – which is also made by Automattic (WordPress's parent company) – as a solution to the three issues listed above. If they don't recommend Jetpack, consider just how WordPress-optimized the host could possibly be. Also, it pays to remember that with WordPress.com, the answer to all of the above questions is "yes," and without you having to do any of it on your own.

Do You Need All of Your Plugins?

WordPress.org sites, and the WordPress.com Business plan or above, have the ability to add any number of plugins for all sorts of added functionality and features, such as Cloudflare for advanced security. But if you add too many plugins – or you add plugins that aren't managed and updated as they should be – you can end up slowing down your site instead of reaching your original goal of increasing its performance.

First, you should make sure that the plugins you have enabled are actually necessary and that they're being used. If they're not, get rid of them. Plugins are such a huge barrier to website speed optimization that if you don't need one, it's not worth the risk to keep it.

Second, check the plugins that you opted to keep and make sure they're still compatible with your latest version of WordPress and that they're updated semi-frequently. If they're not, there could be bugs that aren't being fixed, which can slow down your site and make it vulnerable to attacks. Plugins should be updated as frequently as updates are available; otherwise, this is an easy entrance point for hackers.

https://wpcom.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/screen-shot-2020-11-19-at-3.05.37-pm.png

All WordPress websites need plugins in order to function, fast-load pages and keep the site secure. However, with WordPress.com, the essential functionality plugins provide is pre-loaded automatically. You never have to worry if you're missing something you need, have extra plugins you don't require or have plugins that are becoming an outdated security and performance risk. You can also add more plugins to WordPress.com sites if you choose the Business Plan or above, but key functionality is already there for you from the get-go. WordPress.com does everything in its power to keep your site safe no matter what.

Does Your Site Have a Lot of Images and Videos?

If you have a lot of multimedia on your website, you should definitely work with a host that uses a CDN. Load time can differ based on where the user is geographically – and that's because users located around the globe will be at varying distances from the servers. The farther a user is from server resources, the slower the site may load. And while you may think a quick solution is simply to compress your images, that won't ensure quality along with faster loading time.

With a CDN, though, load time can be lightning-fast no matter where the user is in the world. That's because CDNs have servers located around the world, and those servers keep stores of static files from your website. A static file is something like an image – a file that won't change no matter how many times it's viewed.

With a CDN, whenever a user goes to your site, they're shown the static files (which are delivered via the closest server to them). That means the web page doesn't have to be loaded from scratch every time, and it also means that your web hosting server doesn't have to do the work – the CDN does it instead. This greatly improves the user experience.

Also, use PNG files whenever possible instead of JPG (they're higher quality and easier to compress), and consider using a compression tool like gzip to create a smaller file that retains its quality. Gzip is a software application that lets you compress and decompress files. This isn't the only thing you want to do to optimize your images, but combined with using a CDN from your host, it can improve page load speed even more.

Are There Redirect Leftovers From a Recent Website Rebuild?

If you've rebuilt your website or had it undergo a heavy content audit, you likely removed a lot of pages and/or posts. And, hopefully, you kept the best and most relevant parts of that content to be repurposed somewhere else – and we also hope your homepage URL hasn't changed at any point. But if you didn't properly set up redirects, you're going to lose out on a ton of traffic, and your stats will be skewed moving forward – at least until you fix those redirects and reclaim that traffic, which could take a long time.

When you rebuild or migrate your site, your web host should crawl the new site to ensure that the URLs are going to the right pages and that there aren't any broken links. There also shouldn't be extra redirects that create redirect chains – having those means that page loading speed can slow down.

WordPress Performance Tuning: WordPress.org Websites That Get Hacked Often

In order to keep hacks and other security breaches away, your hosting company has to be optimized for WordPress. Make sure to find the answers to these questions so that you cover every area of WordPress performance tuning:

Does the hosting provider run automatic updates on WordPress? And will you get a notification saying that an update has been run?
Do they regularly run website scans to find (and fix) security holes?
Do they include SSL certificates with all websites?
Are they able to fix issues automatically? The longer an issue goes unsolved, the more at risk your website is.

Furthermore, you want to find out how (or if) the web host backs up your site. Daily backups are a pretty good standard to look for, and sites that are updated more frequently – like news websites – should have even more frequent backups. If your site's been compromised in some way, having a backup is the only way to restore it to a safer version.

https://wpcom.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/restore-site_wordpresscom.png

WordPress Performance Tuning: Best Practices to Keep Your Website Performing Well

At WordPress.com, we host millions of WordPress sites, both big and small. Over the years, we've learned the best practices to always apply. Knowing what's important helps you with your goal of WordPress performance tuning even more.

Automatic scanning for security issues, which lets us find and solve a problem before it wreaks havoc.
Backup websites daily to protect each client's work. Additionally, we keep a 30-day backup archive, so you always have access to the last 30 days of backups.
Brute force attack prevention, which prevents hackers from accessing your account after trying to guess your password.
CDN for more accessible and faster loading websites, no matter where your users are in the world.
Downtime monitoring so your website can get up and running as soon as possible.
Lazy load images, which means that images are only loaded when they're needed instead of upfront. This improves page speed.
Plugin auto-updates so that you always have the latest and safest version installed.

Depending on your WordPress.com plan, you may want to use the Autoptimize plugin, which takes care of a lot of these fine-tuning practices for you. After doing all this work, consider using a third-party tool like Pingdom to monitor website performance and discover where improvements can be made. Also consider running regular website speed tests or check out Google PageSpeed Insights to ensure your site is always as fast as possible.

Final Thoughts About WordPress Performance Tuning

Running a website is a huge undertaking, and WordPress performance tuning is only part of the job – but it's an important part. If you have the time and skills (ranging from HTML and PHP to dealing with security breaches) to handle a self-hosted WordPress.org site, then you can reap the benefits that come along with that, like a fully-customized site that looks and functions exactly how you want. But with that come a host of risks, too, and the health of your site depends on how tech-savvy you are, plus the strength of your choice of web host. Plus, with the Business and eCommerce WordPress.com plans, you'll have access to different PHP modules.

If you don't have the time or know-how to manage a self-hosted site, and if you don't want to go through the trouble and expense of fixing a WordPress.org site should issues arise, consider WordPress.com. You get everything you need to build an attractive, functional, high-performing and safe website right out of the box. And the team behind your site will make sure that everything runs efficiently while maintaining a high level of security.

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