It’s never too late to declutter your website and fix the issues that effect speed and performance. A better user experience is linked to more revenues for your business so consider these 10 tips to optimize and manage your WordPress site.
Plugins and Themes
- Run updates for plugins and themes.
- Delete unused plugins, themes and widgets. Or deactivate the ones you use occasionally.
- Use security software/plugins to check for malware and logins.
Pages and Posts
- Delete drafts of pages and posts and empty the trash!
- Remove broken links.
- Delete unused tags and categories.
- Compress images.
- Remove unwanted shortcodes.
Design
- Look through your site for anything to remove that doesn’t align with a certain goal.
- Update content with new information, long tail keywords, author bios and structure with headings.
WordPress Plugins
Here is a short list of recommended plugins to help you achieve these goals. Note: Remember to deactivate plugins that are used occasionally.
- Security: WordFence, Sucuri, WP AntiVirus Site Protection
- Broken links: Link Checker
- Media clean up: Image Compressor – This tools allows you to compress both jpeg and png files. Each image can be up to 50 MB in size. Or try Smush Image Compression and Optimization
- Shortcode cleanup: Remove Orphan Shortcodes
- Clean up header: WP Asset Cleanup (Page Speed Optimizer)
- Database: WP-Optimize
Advanced tip for administrators:
- Change saved revisions limits and delete stored revisions. Here’s how: Add the following line to wp-config.php: define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3 );
- Use a speed test tool to analyze your speed performance such as WebPageTest or GTmetrix.
