Have you chosen WordPress to power your website?
Since being launched in 2003, WordPress has quickly risen the ranks to become the most popular CMS around. From industry bloggers to ecommerce businesses, everyone is using WordPress to power their websites. And, for good reason. As an extremely flexible and user-friendly CMS platform, WordPress has made it easy for anyone to set up a functioning and reliable website.
However, whilst starting your own website with WordPress can be relatively straightforward, it can be difficult to know how to maximise the performance and operation of your site.
How to use WordPress to its full potential
Whether you’re completely new to the WordPress platform or you’ve just had a bespoke WordPress site built for your business, take a look below to find out how you can use WordPress to its full potential, to benefit both your business and your users.
Review your website’s performance
Before you can begin to optimise the functionality of your WordPress site, it’s important you know how it’s currently performing, in order to identify specific areas that require attention.
To monitor your WordPress site, we’d recommend using Google’s Page Speed Insights. A free, online tool, Page Speed Insights will provide you with a full breakdown of your website’s performance, detailing specific problem areas that are having an impact on the load time of your site and therefore the experience of your users. Once you get to know your WordPress site, you can begin to figure out what improvements need to be made for your site to operate as efficiently as possible.
Optimise your imagery
Images that haven’t been correctly formatted can hugely slow down the load speed of your WordPress site, putting the functionality of your website at risk.
By once again using Page Speed Insights, you can find out if imagery is jeopardising the performance of your WordPress site. And, if it is, there are a number of steps that you can take. Firstly, your images will need to be resized and scaled to ensure they correctly fit the space available. Secondly, you’ll need to review the file type of your images and reformat them to be WebP files, opposed to the standard JPEG and PNG. WebP images use a more optimised compression algorithm for faster downloads and improved overall site performance.
Minimise your code
As unused code can impact the operation of your website, it’s important you regularly review the code on your WordPress site and clean up any unnecessary characters. In doing so, you should be able to improve the speed and functionality of your website, enabling it to operate to its full potential.
If you need help reviewing the code in the backend of your website, feel free to get in touch. Our team can help to streamline your code and improve the performance of your WordPress site.
Limit your plugins
You may have thought adding plugins would enhance your WordPress website, however too many plugins can cause your site to drastically slow down. Plugins can also harbour vulnerabilities and bugs that are used by hackers to exploit your website and users. By limiting the plugins you install and only using plugins from trusted developers, you can prepare your website for optimum performance and operation.
Go bespoke!
What better way to get the most out of your WordPress site than having bespoke features tailored to your needs? Going bespoke will enable you to design and control each element of your WordPress site. And, by using a unique template and custom code, you will be able to bypass issues that would otherwise impact the performance of your website.
Whether you’re looking to have a brand new website built for your business or want to improve the operation of your current website, we can provide you with a bespoke and reliable WordPress site, enabling you to efficiently meet your business objectives. To find out more about our services, get in touch using the contact form below.