The Significance of WordPress Performance Optimization in 2023.

In recent years, website performance has become more critical than ever, with both users and search engines demanding faster loading times and better overall experiences.

As WordPress powers over 40% of the entire internet, this influential platform must pay heed to performance improvements. Recently, Google’s search algorithm updates have caused quite a stir in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), with ‘Core Web Vitals’ becoming a pivotal ranking factor for websites. Let’s explore how WordPress performance optimization can be your secret weapon in today’s competitive digital landscape.

1. Why WordPress Performance Optimization Matters:

The introduction of Google’s Core Web Vitals emphasizes user experience, taking into account speed, responsiveness, and visual stability as key assessment parameters. In line with these updates, WordPress websites must be optimized not only for content quality but for performance as well. When your website loads quickly, it provides users with a better experience, leading to longer stays, lower bounce rates, and increased conversions.

2. The Role of Themes and Plugins in Performance Optimization:

Themes and plugins contribute greatly to your website’s functioning. However, they can also harm performance if not selected and configured properly. Choose themes optimized for speed, and ensure you strictly pick plugins that contribute directly to your site’s functionality. Regularly evaluate your site’s active plugins and remove any unnecessary or outdated ones to improve performance.

3. Image Optimization: A Quick Win:

As images contribute to most websites’ size and load time, optimizing your media assets is essential. Use modern image formats like WebP for improved compression while retaining quality. Employ tools and plugins to compress and optimize images automatically, and consider implementing lazy-loading to further speed up page loading.

4. Leverage Browser Caching and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs):

Browser caching speeds up the loading time of your website for return visitors by saving a copy of static assets locally. Implementing caching mechanisms on your WordPress site is a quick performance boost. Additionally, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps distribute your site’s content over multiple servers spread globally, thus reducing latency and improving loading times for a wider audience.

5. Implement Critical CSS and Minification:

Optimizing CSS and JavaScript in your WordPress site can dramatically improve loading times. By inlining ‘critical CSS’ – styles essential to render above-the-fold content – you can ensure a faster initial render. Minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files removes unnecessary code, whitespace, and comments, making the files lighter and faster to load.

In conclusion, optimizing your WordPress website for performance in 2023 requires a strategic approach and leveraging the best tools at your disposal.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Very good points indeed. It is easy to mess up your WordPress fast if you make the wrong choices. I like to add also:

• Never ever use pirated plugins that you can buy off some a bit shady websites for much cheaper price than the original authors website. Not only are they often not the latest version and might not ever be updated but they may also be altered code-wise so you run the risk of a double whammy in terms of security issues. Don´t try to save a few bucks which might costly you dearly later.
• Do not have more than 20+ plugins installed if necessary. A rule of thumb here is “less is more“
• A common very beginners mistake is that they overload he system with tons of different plugins which then not only slows down the whole website, but also introduces potential security risk and definitely code crashes between the plugins and WP itself which causes incompatibility issues that might even might bring your WordPress website to its knee.
• Use code instead of plugins if you can. Code is always faster and uses less of the server’s resources such as CPU and memory.

and hmm yep! That is fit or me. 🙂

How to chose the right plugin for your WordPress site

I wouldn’t have thought of doing an article on the subject, because it seems simple and almost obvious.

But in many cases people the problems often derive from a bad choice of plugin and could have been avoided. This can be easily avoided by choosing the right plugin directly.

I will try to give you some advice in this direction, what are you doing to chose the best plugins for your sites and your customers ?

1. Have a strategy

I say it very often, if you want to have a site that is well done and works well in the long term you have to have a strategy. That is, deciding in advance what you want to do and how you are going to do it.

Once you know why you have your website, what you want to offer and how you will deliver it, it will be much easier to choose the plugin you need. You should even have a list of the features you are looking for before looking for the plugin.
When you have found several plugins that meet your criteria, you can compare them to choose the best one.

2. Check the reliability of the developer
In the catalog of WordPress plugins you can directly see who the developer is and go to his page to find out a little more.

Then I advise you to look at the following which will let you know if the developer is reliable:

• Since when the developer is registered on WordPress
• The number of plugins he offers, and the ratings received for his plugins
• The description of plugins: a developer who describes correctly, puts visuals will probably be more used to providing detailed and detailed explanations in the documentation and the support
• Go to the “support” tab of the plugin to see if the developer answers the questions
• When buying premium themes and plugins from a third part such as Envato e.g https://codecanyon.net always be observant and check the plugin s last update and also how many are using it. Some items on Envato can be really old and installing old code can lead to both severe security issues and compatibility issues with both WordPress itself, themes and of course other plugins. It can easily be avoided.
• Also try avoid over bloated plugins with loads of unnecessary functions with will both use excess server resources as memory etc. which will slow down your website and have higher risk of causing incompatibility issues.

3. Check the reliability of the extension
There are several ways to easily ensure the reliability of a plugin. These criteria usually give you a good idea of ​​what to expect:

• The number of installations: There are +60 million sites running on WordPress. If an extension doesn’t have several thousand active installs, it’s probably for some reason …
• Look at the date of the last extension update. This is very important because it tells you whether the extension is maintained by the developer or not.
  For an extension to be reliable over the long term, the developer must regularly fix problems, add security patches and new features. If the extension has not been updated for more than 6 months, go away.
• Look at customer reviews. There must be a lot and globally positive. If they are not positive try to understand why.
  Also remember to see if the developer responds to negative reviews, this is a good indicator of the importance of customer satisfaction for him / them

4. Don’t make small savings

This is the mistake I see almost all the time and understandable, you want to save money. This is normal, but always keep in mind that choosing the cheapest or even free extension does not mean saving money, far from it!

Indeed, developing and maintaining a plugin is very time consuming and therefore expensive, which is why plugins are billed by monthly or annual subscription. Developers who have the money thanks to the number of users and the price will be able to continue working on the plugin by patching security, resolving bugs and conflicts with other plugins. In addition to providing quality support.

Extensions for which this is not done may not only make your site vulnerable but more importantly cause many problems, especially conflicts with other plugins.
This will not only make you lose visitors / customers because of the bugs but force you to regularly debug the site, which will cost you much more in the end.

My advice, if you want to have a site that performs well in the long run, to avoid stress and hassles, choose the best plugins, no matter the price.
You will save time to devote yourself to your core business and will be able to develop serenely.

Does the theme developer offer good support options?  That is a vital factor I look for before I invest in a new WordPress Theme. I use Envato ThemeForest a lot which I like. but you need to be careful there because some items they sell haven’t been updated for years.

This is a really useful information. I didn’t know that WordPress cron didn’t do this by itself on WordPress Multisite..

Setting up a WordPress site is easy and there are plenty of premium WordPress themes online. There are free themes that you can use too but they are pre-designed and often do not fit perfectly with your site. The perfect theme, however, can be achieved by customizing it according to your liking. This can be done by opting to invest on a premium WordPress theme rather than having free ones.

The theme is what a user will notice first therefore impressing them at first sight is vital. Not all themes look the same and not all can be made to your specifications. It will help if you are aware that there are specific features that can bring the best out of every theme.

So, if you want to boost your site and user experience, look for the WordPress theme with the following features.

1.Easy to Customise
Anyone nowadays can own a site. But not everyone can have an impressive one that exudes personality, uniqueness, and attitude. Yes, a website can have an attitude too and it can be done by customizing the look from the colour palette used down to the fonts.

2.Mobile Responsive
Not all users access the internet using their computers. There are those who prefer to use their gadgets like mobile phones and tablets. The capability to automatically change to fit the page into a mobile screen is an advantage especially when you are targeting people on the go who access the internet using their smartphones.

3.Minimalist Design
When it comes to web design, almost every time, less is more. Too frilly pages can be quite too much to take especially when the design has too many details on each page. The clutter translates as a mess to the eyes of the user. The reader’s focus should be on the content rather than the unnecessary pieces on the page.

4.Special Plugins and Theme Options
Extras are always valuable when it comes to designing themes. Check the plugins included and functionalities. There are important plugins and options you should look for in the best theme like – seo plugin, page layout flexibility, easy drag and drop page builder, one-click install option, easy theme updates, colour picker, background and image control options and more. It would be easier to create one-of-a-kind websites if you are armed with extra tools.

5.Browser Compatibility
It would be a bummer if your theme will not show up as you picture it out because it’s incompatible with a browser. There will be users who will prefer to use browsers that are readily available on their devices. Making sure that a theme is compatible with all browsers should be on top of theme features you should look for. This can be achieved by having a theme that has passed browser compatibility tests.

6.SEO Ready
SEO friendly and SEO ready themes ensure higher rankings and will give an edge when monetizing your site. This feature is important as search engines rely on SEO in ranking sites. You can’t afford to have a low ranked website just because your theme is not SEO ready. The best theme is one that makes your site look great and makes sure that the users get to see them too when they search for it.

7.Security
Finally, on top of the premium features that a theme should have, top security should not be left out. A bank- grade security is recommended because you will never know when bad coding or even hackers will strike. A great back-up for your content is a fail-proof method of not losing them once a theme is compromised.

8.Speed
There are WordPress themes that are very impressive but take too long to load. A slow website can be frustrating to the user. Even Google does not like slow websites. This is one of the main reasons why a fast loading site tends to rank higher.

9.Updates
It is important to review any theme and its update log and see how often it gets updated so it could fit at least WP core changes and PHP requirements. Always look on this before you purchase a new WordPress theme.

Well there could be many reasons why cron jobs needs to run on the sub-sites in a WordPress Multisite network. The most common and simple reason is this:

In WPMU installations you will have many different flavors of plugins installed and not every plugin will by default run on the primary site or be network enabled. Thus there will be plugin on individual sub-sites  that will run plugins that needs to be scheduled to do certain task such as they need to send out emails at a certain time due to various events or lets say a front-end meeting booking for example where the calendar needs to be refreshed and the attendances need to be notified when a meeting is about to start as an example.

The same applies for example to other types of plugins like lets say a security plugin where a malware scanner needs to be scheduled to run at a certain time and date. The same applies. The cron jobs needs to be running.

Now if you the cron jobs does not run on the sub-sites too then the functions of these plugins will simply not work as the crons are never fired up . So that is why it is not sufficient with just having the cron run on only the primary site.

Also you should think about that WordPress itself has a lot of natively scheduled background task and those need to run on the sub sites too in order for WordPress to function properly and if they to do not run there also then the WordPress background tasks will fail to complete their job on the whole network, (except for the main primary website).

I hope this explains it better for you?

Kind regards

Cheers from Canada!