How To Make Your WordPress Website Faster
WordPress is a versatile and highly capable platform to build your site. Nevertheless, WordPress hosting challenges are a popular topic in the IT industry today. Here are the ways to address the most common WordPress hosting challenges.
Switching hosts is not always the viable solution
If your WordPress site has any code issues and compatibility problems, switching the host is not going to solve the problems. To solve any such issues, work with a talented WordPress developer who can figure out the real problem.
Do not use live sites for development projects
These days, WordPress hosts have staging or developing environments in order to avoid the downtime forced by the users breaking things while attempting testing on their sites. This scenario can cause what is called the white screen of death. While not wanting to use a staging environment, you can move to test or developing locally with the help of LAMP or LEMP stack.
If you are not a developer, never edit your code
Those that are not familiar with WordPress and those that do not know the basics of how codes work must never attempt editing files. If someone edits a PHP file directly from the appearance editor on the dashboard, the WordPress site can go down. A smart administrative measure recommended to avoid this is to place the code <define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true);> after removing edit_themes, edit_plugins, and edit_files capabilities for all the users. This can prevent the users from breaking the site.
Never settle with cheap themes and plugins
Choosing the right themes and plugins is very important to get the best out of your site. It is good to stick with reputable developers by doing some research with the ratings and reviews. Contract a developer who can give the best product support. Outdated and bad themes can get easily infected with malware. They can also inject bad links on your site.
Do not over-optimize
Though optimizing your site is a crucially important thing recommended by most experts, over-optimizing your site can lead to an undesirable scenario. Some of the activities you must avoid include attempting to cache the cache, trying to combine CloudFlare, and KeyCDN or MaxCDN, and stuffing the site with more SEO plugins, which can only hamper the performance of your site.
Changing the WordPress core is harmful
Never attempt to modify the WordPress core file in order to make your code work. This is a bad idea, especially in a live production environment. This can lead to making the site vulnerable to security issues. Instead, the good idea will be to make the good use of WordPress tools and features like nicely developed third-party plugins, child themes, hooks and custom post types.
Optimize your database when your site gets larger
One of the major reasons why a large WordPress site slows down is if the database is not optimized. A simple task like cleaning up the WordPress revisions or unused tables can help in preventing this issue. The InnoDB is a highly reliable storage engine than MyISAM as it can allow the queries much faster.