WordPress is very popular tool for website building. And the best tool for freelancers. All in all, 40% of all websites are built with WordPress.
But because it's easy to master, many people use it but not all of them built good websites.
Most of WordPress websites have speed and performance issues. But if you do everything correctly, you can build fast and lightweight websites with WP.
Here are some steps you should follow to create modern, clean, and fast WP websites.
1. Choose A Good Hosting
First and the most important thing for performance is hosting. It is critical to choose the best hosting platform you can find.
There are many great affordable hosting platforms. And almost all of them have specific hosting plans for WordPress.
Personally I recommend Cloudways. Its fast, affordable, and very easy to use.
2. Choose A Great Theme
Next, you need to choose a theme that is perfectly built for WP. There are tons of free or premium themes, but not every one of them performs well.
If you use Gutenberg, there are many great templates you can use for free.
But if you want to build pages with Elementor, you can use the Hello theme.
3. Use Few Plugins
Plugins can cause not only bad performance, but also website hacking. So, you have to choose well-known plugins and as few as you can.
Use the plugin if you really need it. Must use plugins could be cache, SEO, security, and perhaps forms.
Do everything you can with your theme or page builder and try to avoid use of too many plugins.
4. Cache Is Mandatory
And one of the must use plugin is a caching plugin. Because WP is dynamic, you have to have cache installed to decrease page load speed.
There are great cache plugins like WP Rocket, but also you can try some free plugins like Hummingbird or WP Optimize.
Some hosting platforms suggest their own caching, but I don't like them.
Also, you can use some server side caching like Redis.
5. Optimize Images
And the last thing you can do for increasing the page load speed is to optimize images. Image optimization includes choosing the right dimensions and also compressing.
Because WordPress creates several image sizes when you upload them, you need to know which size you need to upload to make fewer image versions.
Also, compress them before uploading. You can use tools such as TinyPNG for image compression.
Also, since WordPress 5.8 supports WebP image format, you can convert JPEG to WebP and it will increase page speed a lot.
Wrap Up
So, if you want to build websites with WordPress, you should consider this steps. No matter what kind of website you build - big or small - you need to have a fast website. Its crucial for user experience and also for Google. A website won't rank because of a bad performance.
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