Part two of our guide on how to improve the performance of a self-hosted WordPress website.

Before you read the tips, please let me tell you about the best tip of all, and that is to hire Geonet Solutions to help you! Geonet Solutions not only can help you improve your website performance, but provide the design, development and thus the features that your website requires.

Hire our UK web design agency to help you move your website project forward.

CloudFlare CDN

CloudFlare provide a selection of worldwide cache related packages, including a free package that will cache your static files such as images, javascript and CSS at various locations around the world, and then use a server closest to the website visitor to load this data into their browser.The service works by handling the requests for your website content, then forwarding people to the correct cache location for their locartion in the world. This is not to be confused with a traditional cache on a WordPress website, which will mainly work to reduce the MySQL requests on the website server itself. Another benefit is that you can use CloudFlare at the same time as using a WordPress cache such as 'W3 Total Cache', which we mentioned on part one of this article.

What is involved in setting up CloudFlare for your WordPress website?

The whole process of setting up and configuring CloudFlare is usually a five minute task, but it is waiting for your name servers to be updated, to use CloudFlare's servers which takes time. So once you've setup your account and have configured your domain name servers, you will then have to wait up to 72 hours for the changes to take effect, but usually it is 24 hours or less, which is standard for name server updates.

Here are the steps involved:

  1. Sign-up to CloudFlare via www.cloudflare.com
  2. Follow the CloudFlare instructions for your domain.
  3. As instructed by CloudFlare change the name servers for your domain with your DNS provider, to the ones CloudFlare provides.
  4. If you are running a WP cache, then check for additional configuration options for that cache, to work more smoothly with CloudFlare.

WordPress Themes

Everyone wants to have a WordPress theme that compliments and properly presents the content to the website visitor, but some do hinder website performance, and can negatively impact areas such as search engine ranking, visitor bounce rate and server performance. So it is important that your WordPress theme is optimised to load quickly. It is true that cache solutions can help, but the original core files of a WordPress theme should already be optimised for improved performance.

Optimise the CSS code

Each WordPress theme has CSS code that covers areas such as content positioning, styling and colours. You can run CSS code through a CSS optimiser to help reduce the size of the CSS file, as well as remove redundant entries, by merging code. It is important before your modify the CSS code, you make a backup of the original CSS file, as the optimised code is often hard to work with and modify.

Optimise theme images

Often the images within WordPress themes can be optimised to load faster. Essentially you can take an image file and reduce the amount of colours used within the image or increase the compression used in the image file. However there is a fine line between reducing the quality of an image file, and creating an image that is not presentable. In many instances you won't be able to reduce the compression or colours in an image, but perhaps you can change its file type? For example bmp or png to jpg.

Don't forget!

Please don't forget if you require UK website design and development services, you should hire Geonet Solutions to help you.

Hire our UK website designers and developers, to work on your website.