Building a great website for your business might sound like a huge task when it’s eventually done. In the real world, that is still just the beginning of your journey. A great website without any traffic on it is like great clothes put on a mannequin. 

Also notice that a great WordPress website developed now could become completely obsolete the very next year. Technologies are evolving at a crisp pace. With just one update from either the search engine or the platform on which your website is built, your whole website could become an abandoned castle.

What is The Ideal Solution?

The best way to get maximum traffic on your website is to keep posting regularly about relevant topics on your website. These postings can be in the form of blogs, articles, product descriptions, discussion topics on forums, comment replies or even image or video uploads. All of the above mentioned pieces are known as content in today’s time. Creating regular and original content related to your business on your website can prove to be the single best idea to rank higher. 

WordPress has its own set of tools to optimize anything and everything you post on your website. Right from keyword density to image description text, WordPress SEO tools help you post the most relevant content that gets maximum attention. But doing that alone may not be enough for your WordPress website. 

Ways to Optimize Your WordPress Website

As iterated earlier, posting regular content and using tools to optimize that content is probably the ideal way to get maximum traffic on your WordPress website. But despite having done that, if your website’s performance is not up to the mark, you will end up losing all that vital traffic and engagement.

All that build up will be of no significance if your WordPress website is not fast, strong and smooth. There are some techniques for both your front end and the backend to make sure that your website runs smoothly and remains optimized. Your custom WordPress development service providers would more often than not take care of these practices. But for reference, let us have a look at five basic steps that ensure the optimization of your WordPress website.

• Update PHP/WordPress Versions

Both WordPress and its de facto programming language PHP keep updating their versions for performance improvements and security enhancements. These updates may involve syntax or functionality changes which may not be compatible for some of your plugins or third party extensions like SDKs and APIs.

Updating the versions for PHP and WordPress may solve many common issues that many websites might be facing. However, these core updates will also mean that you will have to update all your plugins and themes to ensure compatibility. WordPress has an auto-update feature that can be turned off though. For your reference, WordPress notifies you if your current PHP version is not compatible.

• Use Cache Plugins

Caching is an age old yet very popular concept. Caching basically means provision of an additional layer of data on your website. This layer processes data in a high-speed manner. This is done to facilitate faster response to frequent requests of the same set of data without having to go all the way to the data’s primary storage location. 

Caching plugins on WordPress perform exactly the same theory. They are also the most popular type of plugins on WordPress. In some instances, caching plugins create almost a parallel static version of your website which is faster and nearer for the end user device and browser to access than going to the host to fetch the actual version.

• Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is one of the fastest growing concepts in the world of WordPress development. Lazy loading will only load a portion of the website that is visible according to the viewport height of the user’s browser. It will continue to load the website further only when the user scrolls down to view the remaining page.

This has a significant impact on the speed of the website. The “eager” attribute tells the browser to immediately download the image once the user decides to scroll down further than the initial viewport height. Starting from WordPress 5.4, all images are by default enabled with lazy loading. This means that only the images in the default viewport height of the screen will be downloaded and other images will feature as per further request. 

• Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content Delivery Network (CDN) works very much similar to cache plugins. The aim is to fetch vital website data without having to make refreshed user requests to the host server. CDN works on a network of proxy servers that are distributed around the world to create a static version of your website’s essential data like images, CSS, JavaScript and video streams. These servers respond to the user requests and deliver this data to the user without the browser actually having to request the host server. 

Apart from the speed, using CDN also ensures that your website never appears crashed to the user. The entirety of your website is spread across multiple proxy servers which makes it light for all those servers to respond to. It also ensures safety at the highest level as it becomes almost impossible to hack so many servers that contain data from your website.

• WordPress Hosting

Hosting a website is like renting or leasing a place where you can put your furniture and belongings. This place is a physical storage at a remote server somewhere. There are many hosts for websites on the internet. The ones that offer WordPress specific services for hosting your WordPress website are called WordPress hosts. 

With a WordPress hosting service provider, you will get a lot of tools and functionalities that are specific and dedicated to a website built on WordPress. 

Conclusion

Performing these steps can pretty much improve your WordPress website’s performance to a significant level. By only remaining updated with all the frameworks and platforms, you can keep your website agile. If you want to optimize the speed though, the aforementioned are some steps you can perform. Adding regular content still remains the top way to attain traffic and engagement for a WordPress website. In addition to that, you would surely want to keep your website tidy, smooth and agile when you finally get all the desired traffic.