Getting The Most Out Of Your WordPress Site Through Optimization
Wordpress is a content management platform that has helped developers expedite the process of creating websites. The platform offers a wide range of dynamic features that developers can incorporate in their projects with minimal hassle. Despite the fact that Wordpress has simplified web development, you still need to be quite savvy to optimize your content. Image optimization is one of the critical components of a professional site.
In a website project, images are just as important as text. Images appeal more to the user than text making it crucial for a developer to incorporate them. While adding images to your website, you need to ensure that they are optimized. Large image files increase the load time of your pages making your site rank poorly on search engines.
Consider the following steps to optimizing your images
Despite the fact that internet speeds have significantly increased over the year, we still need to optimize images for smaller devices. Smaller devices have limited processing capabilities and smaller screen sizes.
The first step in achieving an optimal image file size is choosing the right file format. JPEG image formats are suitable for images which do not require transparency. GIF formats are excellent for displaying action and thumbnails. You can use PNGs when you want files as large as JPEGs but with a transparent background.
Compress your images
Whether you’ve chosen JPEG, PNG or GIF formats, you must shrink them to the optimal file size. The few steps below will help you trim the file sizes.
Crop your images to fit perfectly into the display container.
Compress your files to remove extra pixels using compression software.
This technique eliminates minute details that are not immediately visible from the image.
Image Optimization plugins for Wordpress
Manually going through every image to optimize it is time-consuming. A plugin such as Kraken.io is an example of plugins which can do the image optimization work for you.
How does web caching improve your customer experience?
Millions of websites on the Internet compete with each other to offer the best services and customer experiences. Web caching is a technique that is used to help sites load quickly.
Every time a client visits a Wordpress site, the core requests the right information from a database. The core interprets the data and executes PHP scripts that generate a web page for viewing. Once the page is delivered to the browser, WordPress caches the web pages and stores them in server’s disk drives. When another person requests the page, the cached version is delivered to their browser. This technique boosts the load time of sites.
What happens when information is added or deleted from the page?
Today’s web applications are very dynamic. When new designs are implemented, or readers post comments, several actions are triggered to remove the cache. The pages stored in memory are replaced by new ones. Purging of cache always happens when an original article is published, a comment is posted, or an old post is edited.
The benefits of caching
Search engines such as Google prefer fast loading websites. WordPress site which automatically caches their guests’ data is ranked higher on the search engines. Caching is a crucial indicator of the performance of a website.
We can categorize WordPress caching into two: front-end caching and back-end caching. In front-end caching, your website relies on cached data from your server without necessarily making new HTTP requests. This caching saves time and processing resources.
Back-end caching is a bit more technical. It involves more processes than client-side caching.
Setting up caching services on your WordPress website
To set up caching on your site, you can adopt the do-it-yourself technique, but you will require installing plugins. The plugins will handle the caching for you.
Another technique is to employ Team WP Sekure for a comprehensive website speed optimization service.
