5 Tips for WordPress Weight Loss
Wordpress is widely used by webmasters and web developers. It's more than used for blog purpose nowadays, one day you found you are operating a big site and sometimes hard to load a page. Now you should consider to lose some weight for your wordpress system. This article picks up the main points you should consider when trying to lose weight for wordpress.
Wordpress Hosting Choice
Web hosting is definitely your primary consideration before trying to optimize anything on your wordpress site. The hosting server performance and network connectivity will determine how much you can optimize on website direcly. You can not make much improvement with a bad server. We highly suggest webhostinghub(www.webhostinghub.com) for small to medium size wordpress site based their state of the art server and data center structures. Their group provide data center service on both east and west coasts with max speed zone enabled. The spotlight is they provide real no overselling service which is confirmed by most users. Their single hosting solution is deeply optimized for wordpress script so the best performance and security is guanranteed.
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Wordpress Weight Loss on Theme
A nice looking theme will add score to your wordpress site quality. But make sure you get the theme from a reputable vendor. A good wordpress theme is not only on layouts but also professional in code design. Below are few tips on how to lose weight for your wordpress theme
Header and footer. By default wordpress header file comes with lots of lines for various purpose such as bog version detection, pingback engines etc. However, we actually don't need most of these because they have no use for our blog site so we recommend to delete it. To simplify the process, we collected the following codes that we can add to functions.php file under theme folder.
<?php
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');
remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'index_rel_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'parent_post_rel_link', 10, 0);
remove_action('wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link', 10, 0);
remove_action('wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link_wp_head', 10, 0);
remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');
remove_action('wp_head', 'feed_links', 2);
remove_action('wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3);
?>
Another practice on header/footer file is various php codes for static contents creation. For example home title, meta keywords, copyright words etc. We can put the actual description there directly instead using php codes to quote from admin panel settings. Fewer queries will be executed on our website and better loading speed is expected.
Get rid of code comments. There're lots of code comments in place for most themes. It's good for designers to trouble shoot issues since they know how codes being organized. However it's useless to end users. We can save lots of space by deleting those comments. But please keep in mind, do this carefully and test it from different explorers after you made the change, sometimes it may cause problem. For example the first code comments on top in header.php can not be deleted.
Compress js/css. Your wordpress theme might include multiple css/js files with big size. It's absolutely bad for faster loading requirements. We recommend to install WP minify plugin for prefessional compression over css and js files with no real effect on page layout.
Wordpress Weight Loss on Plugin
We always have to install various wordpress plugins to achieve different purpose. The numbers of plugins may go up quickly as time goes by. Before we consider a plugin, think twice to see if we really need it or not and if there's alternative solution. One more plugin to our wordpress site means extra weight added. We highly suggest working with source files as more as possible. In this way you can get rid of lots of plugins.
Wordpress Weight Loss on Picture
Picture always takes lots of space and most of the time it's the main size on our wordpress site. Especially when you operate a photograph gallery site with hundreds or thousands of pictures, you have to deeply optimize your pictures or else users will find it hard to load up your site. Till present there're two solutions to reduce your picture size
If you use photoshop for picture design, make sure to select the "save as web use" option, it can be quickly done by press "Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S" keys. The web use picture size is at least half of regularly saved version.
Use picture compression plugin. There's a famous wordpress plugin called "WPSmush.it" which is prefessional in picture resizing. The process is done when you upload a picture to your site. The best of the best is there's no color loss in using this software.
Wordpress Weight Loss on Database
When we write blog posts or revise an exisitng article, wordpress will auto save a duplicated version in database. Generally speaking, each post will receive at least one revision entry in database. Sometimes you might be surprised about your database size because you haven't really added that many contents. Those duplicated contents will cause low database efficiency and bring problems for daily maintenance. We use WP-optimize plugin to clear out such duplicated contents every few periods. This plugin will not only clear out all post revisions as well as spam comments and do database optimize. It's only working from admin panel so it won't cause frontend load problem at all.
Every blog receives spam attacks. Take our blog for instance, we receive 20+ daily spam comments and we always have to clean up every day. Finally, we installed facebook comment plugin to override the default one. Surprisely, spam comments almost reduced to zero. Highly suggested service for everyone who like to reduce spam comments.
