Keeping WordPress Running Smoothly

If your webpage takes more than 4 seconds to load, 25 percent of viewers will abandon it for a site that loads faster. While WordPress may at first seem like an easy to use, out-of-the-box website platform for small business owners, WordPress sites can have a very slow load time that will affect your bottom line. Learn to spot signs of trouble with WordPress sites and to fix slow-loading pages.

Causes of slow WordPress sites

Too many plugins are the top cause of a super slow WordPress site. Take a look at your index and see how many plugins you’ve loaded down your site with; if the number is really high, this is your problem. Ideally, you would use a smaller number of plugins that performed only the necessary functions. So-called SEO plugins sound like a great idea in theory, but do little to affect your site’s SEO and can cause slowdowns. Delete any plugins you are not using simply disabling them isn’t enough. This should increase site speed. Consider using the Plugin Performance Profiler or P3, a free WordPress utility that examines plugins and rates their performance. This can clue you in onto which plugins are affecting site performance, or demonstrate that your plugins are working fine and your problem lies elsewhere.

While you’re cleaning out your plugins, make sure you are using the latest WordPress release and that the plugins you do use are up to date. Note that rarely updated, out-of-date plugins can be a security risk. If some of your plugins have never been updated, you may want to consider finding a different, more current plugin that performs the same task.

Your WordPress theme could be causing the site slowdown, especially if it’s a free theme that you downloaded from a random site. While it’s okay to use free themes, limit your free theme use to those from the WordPress repository, since these are vetted for security threats like malware.

Finally, your problem may not lie with WordPress at all. If you host your WordPress site on a shared host that operates slowly, no amount of improvement to your WordPress site will speed up the page. Consult your web host for more information on website speed, bandwidth and site uptime. You may have to switch to a more reliable WordPress host to improve your page’s load time.

Improving a slow page

The suggestions above will help speed a slow site, but are certainly not comprehensive. If you aren’t already using a cache, implement a cache plugin. This stores frequently-loaded pages and calls them up faster than normally so your website users experience your site as faster.

Storing plugins in the functions file (functions.php) can also improve speed. By dropping all of the relevant plugin code in here, your back-end won’t have to work as hard looking for relevant code and can perform functions faster. From your own favicon to Google Analytics and AdSense, the code you paste here drives your site’s performance, function and utility.

The WordPress Support forums offer tips and tricks to diagnose performance issues and speed up a slow site. While this may seem like a lot of work, it is ultimately worth it to improve website speed, stop turning off potential customers and boost your return on investment.

 

Keeping WordPress Running Smoothly

Ten important features for maintaining your website

Creating alluring websites with great titles and brilliant visuals are one of the basic things that are needed to attract traffic to your site. But for many webmasters the main issue is maintaining their websites. With today’s technology and easy to use website building tools, webmasters are now running more than one website at a time. To ensure that they are able to work on different projects simultaneously without risking the performance and productivity of their websites going down, they tend to create certain features and characteristics that will help maintain their websites. This course of writing will help you realize the ten foremost features that a website needs to be maintained in the long run.

• A roadmap

Most websites fail because the webmaster is not sure about the future of their website. Even when creating one they tend to use ideas haphazardly and don’t have a clear direction. It is imperative that you have a roadmap for yourself that will help you easily create a website that is specific to the theme or the subject for which the website is being made (i.e. for a sporting company or an online clothing store).

• 
  Be specific about the content

Creating content is one of the crucial steps for building a coherent website. It is fairly common to create content that is either irrelevant or doesn’t make sense. For instance spending more time on creating an “about us” page whereas ignoring or creating weak content for the main subject of the website is one of the stupidest things a webmaster can do.

• Contact information

Always make sure that visitors can easily contact you. This is important for e-commerce websites since they have to deal with customers all the time. The key is to place contact information in such a place where it can be easily seen by visitors. Always make sure that the contact information is not an image or for that matter something that can’t be copied. This is incredibly irksome to the visitors.

• Coherent navigation

The website should be easy to explore. Creating website without any definite structure results in a web presence that is incredibly hard for visitors to explore. They will get frustrated and leave the website within minutes if it is not clear where they should go or what they should do on your website.

• Online security

Hacking is now easily done and everyday many websites go down if the webmasters don’t have good online security. If you are running a business online, it is imperative that you hire or create an effective online security that will allow you to protect your website.  A website that has been defaced by hackers leads to insecurity within visitors and also doesn’t help with the website reputation.

• Integrating social media

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are now used with websites to create effective presence on social media. They are now considered one of the most vital characteristics of websites. With almost every person using one of these social media websites, it is important to have presence on these platforms as well. Share your updates and offerings here whereas also promote your website free of cost on social media websites.

• Create a mobile version

Smart phones are now predominantly being used to surf online. If you want your website to easily get popular create a mobile version so that your potential customers or visitors can use their smart phones or devices to easily access your website.

• FAQ page

Customers and visitors to your website have numerous questions that you certainly can’t answer every time they are asked. It is important to know that if you want to ensure that your customers and visitors are satisfied, create a list of questions that are most often asked and create a FAQs page where they can read about them.

• Good strong hosting

Never underestimate the power of a good hosting service. Most websites fail because they rely on hosting services that are not efficient which sometimes leads to the website getting down from time to time and also prey to hacking. Therefore be meticulous in choosing the hosting service. Read reviews about popular hosting services and then choose. Hosting services like GoDaddy or Ipage reviews let you know whether to avoid them or go for them.

• Don’t  cheat

Sometimes websites have content directly copied from other websites that are similar to them. Don’t do this since this only leads to bad reputation. Visitors and customers will find or realize that you have taken content from another website since it is fairly easy to visit websites and it’s not exactly shopping or visiting brick and mortar places. Therefore create original websites with original content.

Bio:

Alice Kim is a webmaster who has been working for a private company offering SEO services. She writes about the ten most important features for maintaining your website in this article. Her work on hosting services is widely read. Her most popular work is titledMy Ipage review which can easily be found online.

Ten important features for maintaining your website