15 things to remember before WordPress development

Wordpress is an open source content management system based basically on PHP. There is hundreds of working on it around the world. Before using WordPress, there are various things one has to keep in mind. These objectives can help you develop the WordPress efficiently.

1. Speed matters

According to a report by the Bing search team, A two-second delay in the page response can reduce 3.8% user interaction.
When a user approaches your website, you only have seconds to grab his attention. The attention can cost you benefits if you successfully convince the user.

On the other side if the website takes its time to load, the visitor may not even hang around for a while. Therefore, even Google has started considering site speed in its ranking process. This can affect your SEO.

Basically, it means, a slower site can avoid visitors and lessen the intensity of the WordPress development Singapore.

• Choose an appropriate host

For developing WordPress perfectly a good host is mandatory. If you prefer a shared host, it has specific disadvantages that include
Slow site speed and frequently going down the time during traffic periods.

If you believe you have a big feature, why go for a shared host? You can prefer quality WordPress systems that provide good hosting such as ‘Trust touch’.

Taking the choice of hosting from someone qualified can help you with the speed.

2. An effective caching Plug-in

One of the major benefits in case of plugins is that they are free in WordPress.
They improve page loads time and are easy to use. One of the best is W3 total cache as it has the entire required feature and is easy to install.

After its installation your page will load much faster.

3. Optimization of the home page

Visitors land on your homepage, therefore it is important to ensure that it loads quickly. You need to consider few things for the homepage to load faster.

• Reduce the number of posts on the page
• Keep minimum widgets
• Posting an excerpt rather than a full detail.
• Remove widgets that are unnecessary
• Removing unnecessary plugins

Hence an accurate and well-placed homepage can help in loading better and faster.

4. Content Delivery Network

If you belong to online marketing business through WordPress then it’s always good to use CDN (content delivery network). Many big blogs prefer CDN.

Now, considering the function of a Content Delivery Network, it basically takes all the static files and serves them to the server. This will help the visitor to download it as fast as possible.

5. A Solid Theme

Framework or the theme is important. It needs to be lightweight and speedy.
Various sites have bloated themes with unnecessary features that are used less. Framework of that kind can slow down the site. Therefore, keep it simple and useful.

Using framework from ‘Thesis theme framework’ can be helpful as it gives fast loading premium framework.
It will not slow down even with excess plugins or custom edits.

6. Automatically Optimizing Images

Trying to decrease the file size of an image without reducing its quality is a challenge.
Using an image optimizer can help you reduce the image file size without reducing its quality. One of the examples is Smush by Yahoo!

Therefore the plugin WP-SmushIt can automatically adjust your images while uploading. This can make your task much easier.

7. Optimizing WordPress database

Optimizing the database including spam, post revisions, tables, drafts etc. is extremely boring at the same time tedious.
To make it comfortable, you can use WP-optimize plugin which can also schedule dates for your database optimization.

8. An expires header to static resources

An Expires header is a way to specify the time far enough in the future. It allows the visitor to re-fetch any static content which is far enough in the future.

For that you need to add a code in the root.htaccess.file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

You can make changes in the above numbers as per your requirement.

9. Stop your content from leeching and hotlinking

When some sites provide direct link to the images on your site making your server load high, Hotlinking occurs.
Basically it’s a bandwidth “theft”.

This gets added up as more and more people scrape your posts or sites to become more popular in case you create custom images.

10. Adjusting Gravatar images

Various sites have their Gravatar images as nothing. Well, that doesn’t count as your aesthetic. They add nothing because having nothing can generate more page loads than any unnecessary gravatar.

Under the settings tab in wordpress dashboard, you can change the default image to a blank space. It can improve your site speed.

11.Controlling the post revisions

It’s necessary to keep post revisions because in case there is a mistake you can continue taking it from the drafts.
But cluttering it can be unnecessary. You need to clear the drafts stored once it is published. Or, it is better to keep your post revisions to a minimum of 2-3 times. You can use revision control Plugin to make sure of it.

12. Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Trackbacks help you notify the legacy blog systems that you have linked with them. They can notify you automatically using pingbacks if you link it to Wordpress.

By default itself Wordpress links with blogs that are equipped with Trackbacks and pingbacks.
Turning these off will help in destroying the setting that generates a lot of work for your site.

13. Using CloudFare

Using CloudFare along with W3Total cache plugin is a potent combination as they integrate with each other.
It can improve your speed as well as the security of your site.

15. Replacing PHP with Html

The themes that we choose are generally loaded with PHP bloat. You can replace these PHP codes with static html for saving CPU processing time and database queries.
This can enable better functioning and a great difference.
You can replace it by few steps.

• When you examine your theme’s header.php file in your Presentation> Theme editor tab in the control of the panel, you may find some lines.

• Look at the bolded parts, i.e. php is mixed in with html. Replace these php with html which is about 20 times faster.

• To do this, load your blog in a normal browser media, where you need to select “View source”.  The process is completed.

15. Adding lazy-Load to the images

In lazyload, the images come above the fold load. When the visitor scrolls down, the other images begin to load before coming to view.
It saves your bandwidth by loading less data for the users who don’t scroll down. You can choose jQuery Image Lazy load plugin

CONCLUSION:

Wordpress helps in generating outstanding design, powerful statistics, best support and mobile ready. But using its development process appropriately is necessary.

To get involved with WordPress is to attend or volunteer in a word camp. It is free of cost and has low-cost events that enable the users around the world organized.