In order to have a fast-response WordPress-based website you need to optimize it. By optimizing your resources, your website is not just fast but also effective at handling large traffic from your visitors. Previously I wrote a guide to improve your website performance, so if you feel adventurous and want to do it the technical way, please read and follow it.
We usually optimize the WordPress website for our clients after we deploy it to live. We decrease the load time significantly by just doing a few steps, and fortunately all are free plugins and free to use. This is why I love to use and develop with WordPress.
After we launch our WordPress website, we follow these steps to significantly increase performance:
1. WordPress Jetpack Plugin
This plugin helps you enrich your WordPress website with more features. One of them is image CDN using WordPress infrastructure, and this feature is absolutely free. Please refer to my previous post to read more about Jetpack.
2. W3 Total Cache Plugin
This is one of the best plugins to boost your WordPress performance. I only enable some of the features: page cache, database cache, minify cache, object cache, browser cache, and CDN.
3. Amazon CloudFront as CDN
I set up Amazon CloudFront to handle my CSS and JS files. Since I’m using W3 Total Cache to minify and configure the CDN setting, the static files are served using Amazon CloudFront. This increases the load time of the files and reduces my server load.
4. Use Memcache or XCache on the server
You need to tell your server administrator to do this. Ask them to configure Memcache or XCache on the server. From W3 Total Cache, you can configure all the caches to use Memcache or XCache, which will significantly increase load performance.
5. Cookies for Comments Plugin
Since there are many spammers using robots for comment spam, you can reduce them by using the Cookies for Comments plugin. By reducing comment spam, this will help you save resources for your loyal readers.
6. Resize and compress images
Always resize and compress your images. I like to use Jpegmini to compress all my image sizes. By compressing your image sizes, it will significantly reduce the download time for your readers.
For a live example, here is the result for this blog:
Not bad, is it? Please contact me if you would like my service to help you increase your blog performance.