Why WordPress Speed Matters?

Google does take website speed as one of the ranking factors. This means your SEO performance is affected by the loading time of your website. So, if your website loads slow then Google downranks your website. Fast loading websites are not only a good experience for users but also it will be easier for a search engine to crawl. This directly impacts the conversion rate but also reduces the bounce rate of the website.  So, it is super important to make the website as fast as possible in order to rank well on the search engines.

You can check the loading speed of your website in Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Related Article – First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Meaningful Paint (FMP) Explained

10 Free Techniques To Speed Up WordPress Website

1. Choose Good Hosting

Investing in a reliable hosting service is an important part of your business. If you do not have reliable hosting, your website will not be available to the users at the time of the query (or maybe load slow). If your website is not available, Google can not find you, and once Google notices it, your website will not be indexed.

So, investing in reliable hosting is a key decision you need to take. We have been using the Siteground for such a long time and their service is just great. In fact, it is the top three hosting companies recommended by WordPress itself.

It has tools that make managing WordPress sites easy: one-click install, managed updates, WP-Cli, WordPress staging, and git integration. They have a very fast support team with advanced WordPress expertise available 24/7.

2. Use CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and as the name suggests, it is the delivery of the content based on the geographical location. The core concept of CDN is serving content from the nearest possible physical location in order to increase the speed of the website. When you use CDN, copies of your site are stored at multiple, geographically diverse data centers so that users have faster and more reliable access to your site.

The CDN server closest to a user is known as the “edge server”. When a user requests content from a website served through a CDN, they’re connected to the closest edge server, ensuring the best online experience possible.

3. Optimize Image

Image optimization is another important task of Search Engine Optimization. For WordPress, there are many image optimizer plugins available, among all, Smush and ShortPixel Image Optimizer is widely used plugins. These plugins do a great job after you upload images, but you have to do lots of things before you even upload the images. This helps in even better image optimization. Such as –

• Image Size – You have to optimize your image size so as to make it light. This affects the loading speed of your website. But one thing you should be careful of is while reducing the size of your image, you should also take care of its resolution. You can use different tools to reduce the image size such as  tinypng.com, tinyjpg.com. These online FREE TOOLs help you to reduce the size of your image keeping its quality optimum.
• Proper Alt text –  Alt text (also called “alt description”, “alt-tag”) is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if that particular image fails to load on the screen. So, putting proper alt text is important for accessibility and Image SEO. Try to put the proper image alt tag that better describes the image.
• Description of the Image – Description of your text describes the image. This is different from “alt text” because alt text is an “alternative text to the image” that will be shown on the screen when the image fails to load. But image description is the description of that particular image that is shown below the image to further describe the image.
• Choosing the Proper format – There are mainly three image formats that are in use, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. I personally do not recommend GIF unless there is a “Must Use” situation. Although PNG produces better quality images, it comes in a larger size than JPEG format. So, you have to use the JPEG image in most of the cases in order to save size and quality. However, there might be some cases where PNG produces better results than JPEG. Just balance it.
• Use Unique and High-Quality Image – Unique and High-quality images are crucial for any website. But, one important fact to understand is a high-quality image is not necessarily be of large size. We can maintain high resolution with the optimum size as well. So, optimize images before uploading them to the website.

4. Use Cache Plugin

Installing a cache plugin is another important SEO setting for the WordPress website. A cache plugin generates static HTML pages of your website and saves it on your server. Each time a user tries to access your website, your caching plugin serves up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the heavy WordPress PHP scripts. This allows the caching plugin to tremendously improve your page loading time.

Tips

• Top 3 cache plugins are WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache
• Follow full documentation of the cache setup

Cache plugins like W3 Total Cache improve the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing load times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.

5. Lightweight Theme

WordPress theme quality is another important factor for the speed of the website. So, while choosing the WordPress themes, you should make sure that you pick up a lightweight theme. Some themes are so heavy that takes time to load the content.

There are thousands of WordPress themes available but the one with high speed, well-coded responsive theme is what we need to install. Fast loading and responsive theme are best for both search engines and users.

Tips

• Choose a theme that is not only appealing visually but also fast and responsive
• Keep checking Google Search Console if anything is wrong with the theme code and get the support from developers

A badly coded theme definitely going to harm your whole website.  Because the theme is the backbone of your website, you need to pick up the trusted theme from the trusted developer. There are lots of free themes available in the market, but the thing is they have designed and developed for different niches. Its speed, structure, responsiveness affect the SEO of your website. So, the theme is the first thing you should consider for better SEO. Acme Themes offers a wide range of Free and Premium Themes loved by thousands of users.

Explore the themes

What do you need to know about the theme?

• Chose the theme from the trusted developers
• The theme should be lightweight
• The theme should be SEO friendly
• Support from developer
• Use the premium theme as must as possible for better support and features

6. Remove Unnecessary Plugins

As well know, WordPress is a plugin rich platform. There are thousands of plugin developers who developed various plugins for different purposes.  But installing random and unnecessary plugins adds an extra burden to the website. Broken and unauthorized plugins degrade the speed of the website and ultimately it creates a negative impact on ranking. So, use only needed and trusted plugin on your WordPress website.

Tips

• Carefully look rating and last update date of the plugin
• Do not forget to check the compatibility
• Install only essential plugins and delete rest of the plugins

7. Use GZIP Compression

You can use GZIP compression that dramatically reduces the bandwidth usage and the time access time. GZIP compression compresses the files so, when a user makes a request, their browser will first have to unzip the website. A plugin like PageSpeed Ninja, helps you to enable GZIP compression. You can make your site load faster on desktop and mobile, fixing Google PageSpeed Insights issues with one click.

8. Don’t Upload Audio/Video Files Directly to WordPress

WordPress allows you to directly upload video or an audio file. These files take lots of bandwidth when users ask for the request. So, instead of directly upload the video to your website, you can use different audio and video hosting platforms. For audio, you can use SoundCloud.com and for the video, you can use Youtube.com and Vimeo.com.

WordPress comes with a great feature called auto-embeds that allows your website to automatically get the embed code from YouTube or Vimeo. You just need to copy the link of the video and paste it into the relevant place. This way you can save your bandwidth and speed up the loading time of your website.

9. Minify CSS &JS

When you check your website loading speed from tools like Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights, you get the report that says minify Javascript and CSS file. That means you need to reduce the JS and CSS calls to reduce the server response time.

By optimizing your code (including removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters), you can dramatically increase your page speed. Also remove code comments, formatting, and unused code. This will eventually help you to save bandwidth usage.

10. Cleanup WordPress Database

Cleaning up the WordPress database is the process of deleting unwanted data from your database will keep its size to a minimum and also helps in reducing the size of your backups. It is also necessary to delete spam comments, fake users, old drafts of your content and maybe even unwanted plugins as well as themes. All of this will reduce the size of your databases and web files, and thus speed up WordPress – your WordPress.

Other SEO Articles:

✅7 Techniques to Bulletproof Your WordPress Website

✅What is Duplicate Content? How to Avoid it?

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First off, if you do not know what a plugin is then here is a simple definition of the plugin. 

A plugin is a piece of software that adds extended functionality to a WordPress website. There are thousands of WordPress plugins available developed for different purposes. Plugins can be free or paid depends on the features. In Most cases, plugins are free to use. 

In our previous article, we have discussed the 10 WordPress Settings For Brand New Website, in this article we are going to list  10 plugins that you need to install right after the new WordPress setup.

10 Essential WordPress Plugins For New Website

1. Contact Form 

Contact Form 7 is a very simple plugin that lets you manage multiple contact forms on your website. You can easily customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports AJAX-Powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering.

So, we highly recommend downloading the Contact Form 7 plugin right as a very first plugin. Contact Form 7 is a free plugin that you can download and use straight away.

2. JetPack by WordPress.com

Another essential plugin for a brand new website is Jetpack by WordPress.com. Jetpack is a multipurpose solid plugin for security, performance and site management. Jetpack helps your site to have detailed security reports, guards you against brute-force attacks and unauthorized logins from hackers. 

Jetpack also allows you to fully customize your site with free themes, image tools, and rich content. Increase your traffic through automatic social sharing, related content, and faster load times. The best part of the Jetpack plugin is it comes with a bundle of features so that you do not need to install multiple plugins for different purposes.

Jetpack is free to use but free version provides just basic protection, while premium plans add expanded backup and automated fixes.

3. Yoast SEO 

Yoast SEO is no 1 plugin for WordPress plugin for maintaining the site’s SEO. Yoast SEO has been helping millions of content creators to rank higher in search engines.  It is very easy to use a plugin that comes in both free and premium versions. Even with the free versions, you can get basic content ideas to maintain SEO for your content. 

Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders. A dedicated team of developers, testers, architects and SEO experts works daily to improve the plugin with every release. Yoast SEO is used by small websites to large organizations in every corner of the world. So, we highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin.

4. Social Sharing

In today’s time, social sharing is an integral part of our internet experience. Furthermore, it’s constantly on the rise and becoming popular with older folk as well. Social media became the best way to share any information because many people engage in social media than any other platform. Social media also plays a significant role in helping you find your favorite websites. 

So, we highly recommend installing the best social media sharing plugin. We don’t say exactly which one you use because there are lots of best social media sharing plugins. But, what we can say is having a social media plugin is a must for any website.

5. TablePress 

In the list of 10 essential WordPress plugin, we have TablePress. It allows you to create and manage beautiful tables. You can easily embed the tables into posts, pages, or text widgets with a simple Shortcode. Table data can be edited in a spreadsheet-like interface, so no coding is necessary. Tables can contain any type of data, even formulas that will be evaluated. An additional JavaScript library adds features like sorting, pagination, filtering, and more for site visitors. Tables can be imported and exported from/to Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON files.

6. OneSignal Push Notification

OneSignale helps you to increase user engagement on your website by sending visitors targeted push notifications. This plugin makes sure that users just keep coming back. It is very easy to use plugin and takes few minutes to install. 

After setup, your visitors opt-in to receive push notifications when you publish a new post. Visitors receive these notifications even after they’ve left your website, thus driving re-engagement.

You can configure notification delivery at preset intervals, create user segments, and customize the opt-in process for visitors.OneSignal’s free plan allows targeting up to 30,000 subscribers with push notifications. 

7. Gutentor Page Building Block 

Gutentor is a WordPress Page Building Blocks with unlimited possibilities to design a webpage. Building professional elegant websites using new WordPress editor Gutenberg with very ease and with no absolute codes is what Gutentor is designed for. A page builder experience that brings advanced capabilities and graceful design never seen before on any Page Builder.

You can create a stunning website with Gutentor’s readymade templates Or by customizing the Guetentor blocks. You have plenty of options with unlimited design possibilities. 

8. Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (AKA blogroll) and other content and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take from a few minutes up to an hour or more. When parsing is complete, the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works. Again, how long this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are.  

In SEO perspective, having a broken link is very bad for users’ experience as well as ranking factors. So, we highly recommend installing a broken link checker plugin. It is free.

9. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore 

Your WordPress backups are worth the entire investment you’ve made in your website. The day may come when you get hacked when something goes wrong with an update, your server crashes or your hosting company goes bust – without good backups, you lose everything. So you need a good backup plugin for your website. This is when UpDraftPlus comes into action. 

UpdraftPlus is website backup and restoration plugin for WordPress. It is the world’s highest-ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over two million currently-active installs.  You can back up your files and database backups into the cloud and restore them with a single click.

Backup into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email. 

10. Cache Plugin

Website speed plays a vital role in SEO ranking and also user experience. When a website page is rendered, PHP and MySQL are used. Therefore, the system needs RAM and CPU. If many visitors come to a site, the system uses lots of RAM and CPU so the page is rendered so slowly. In this case, you need a cache system not to render the page again and again. The cache system generates a static HTML file and saves it. Other users reach to static HTML page.

In addition, the site speed is used in Google’s search ranking algorithm so cache plugins that can improve your page load time will also improve your SEO ranking. So, we recommend having the best Cache plugin installed on your site.

CookieYes GDPR Cookie Consent & Compliance Notice Plugin

This cookie consent plugin is your best companion for making your WordPress site’s compliance journey easier. With the plugin, you can manage both first and third-party cookies on your website as per the GDPR guidelines.

The plugin lets you create a fully customizable cookie banner that matches your website’s style. You can also allow your visitors granular control over the cookies on your site by categorizing cookies with the help of a cookie scanner provided by the plugin. 

Other than the above features you can block third-party cookies automatically, and generate a privacy policy from scratch. The premium version of the plugin supports advanced features such as cookie consent log and Geo-IP-based cookie consent.

                                                                                                          Explore  CookieYes GDPR Cookie Consent & Compliance Notice Plugin

Conclusion!

These are not ranking of the best plugins, instead, these are 10 must-have WordPress plugins for every WordPress website. Plugins are required as according to the website nature and what functionality a particular website needs. There are other plugins that you should install according to your needs. 

In our previous blogs about 10 Essential WordPress Settings For Brand New Website, we also discuss the two things to check before using any plugin. They are User Rating and Last Update Date. 

Rating helps you to guess that other people are using it and if they are satisfied with it. Also, you should check when was the last time the plugin has been updated. If the last plugin update is way long back then, the developer might be no longer working for that plugin. So, no point in using such plugins.

Last Tips 

Avoid using many plugins because unnecessary plugin makes your website heavy. Heavy website loads slower and as we talked above, it results in bad user experience and ultimately ruins your ranking in search engines. So choose the plugins wisely and build a great website!!!

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The post 10+ Essential WordPress Plugins For New Website appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.