The importance of an excellent WordPress host
WordPress hosting services play a very important role in website performance. A good shared hosting provider, such as BlueHost, will take some extra steps to optimize the performance of the site.
However, on a shared host, you share the resources of this server with many other clients. In other words, when the traffic to the website on the same server is relatively large, it will affect the performance of the entire server, and your website will be affected.
On the other hand, WordPress dedicated hosts can provide the optimal configuration needed to run WordPress. Hosting providers also offer automatic backups, automatic WordPress upgrades, and more advanced security features to protect your website.
Besides a good host. Let’s go through some easy setups (no code required) for beginners.
Install the WordPress Cache Plugin
WordPress pages are dynamic. Which means that every time someone visits an article or page, WordPress regenerates the page he or she visits. In order to generate the page, WordPress must run the process to fetch the data it needs, then integrate the data together and finally render it on the user’s screen.
This process involves a lot of steps, and when there are many people visiting your site at the same time, it will obviously slow down the site. So we recommend that every WordPress site should use a caching plugin. Caching can increase the speed of your WordPress site to 2 to 5 times.
Here’s how the cache works: The cache plugin generates a copy of the page after it has been accessed for the first time, and then when someone visits the page, it will send the cached copy to the user first, thus avoiding each The process of regenerating the page is required.
As you can see from the above figure, when the user visits your website, the server will get the information from the MySQL database and the PHP file. Then process the information into an HTML page and present it to the user. This is a long process, but if you use the cache you can skip some of these steps.
There are many easy-to-use WordPress cache plugins, but we recommend WP-Rocket (Advanced) or WP Super Cache (Free). The installation of the plugin is not difficult, but your users will obviously feel the difference.
Note: If you are using a WordPress dedicated host, you don’t need to install the cache plugin anymore, because the hosting provider has already cached it for you.
Special note: You can combine the caching plugin with the web application firewall, such as CloudFlare or Sucuri, to maximize performance.
Optimize image to accelerate website loading
Images can bring vitality to your content and increase user engagement. Studies have shown that using color visual effects increases the likelihood of people reading your content by 80%.
But if your image is not optimized, it may have more negative effects than the benefits. In fact, in most WP website, the lack of image optimization is one of the most common reasons for the slowdown of the website.
Before uploading images directly from your phone or camera to your website, we recommend that you do some optimization with photo editing software. The source file size of the photo is generally very large, but in the editing software, the image can be compressed up to 5 times according to the image file format and compression ratio you choose.
In WP, we generally suggest using two image formats: JPEG and PNG.
You may have questions: What is the difference between the two?
The PNG image format is not compressed. When you compress the image, the image will lose some details. So the uncompressed image is of higher quality and more detailed. The disadvantage is that the file size is large and the loading time is long.
JPEG is a compressed file format that slightly degrades the quality of the image, but is significantly reduced in size.
So how do we choose which image format to use?
If the photo or image has many different colors, we use JPEG. If it’s a simple picture or if we need a transparent picture, then choose PNG. Most of our pictures should be JPEG.
That covers our first set of suggestions that are easy to apply without a lot of knowledge in WordPress. We are going to talk about more suggestions that are more related to the technical part in the following blogs.