WordPress Event Ticketing

Speed is without a doubt one of the most important factors of your WordPress powered website. Did you know that just a 1-second delay in page load time could lose an eCommerce business $2.5 million dollars a year? Even if you're not an eCommerce mogul, speed is still important. No one wants to wait 15 seconds while your page loads 20+ Javascript files, that fancy slider you thought was excellent and those images you exported in RAW from that new DSLR you just got.

Tip 1

Caching plugins - They can make a world of difference to your website speed even without configuring anything. WPRocket, one of the best caching solutions on the market, regularly chops seconds off the time on websites I use it for even before properly setting it up. But what if you don't want to spend $39 on a premium plugin (you really should). There are plenty of free plugins over on https://wordpress.org/plugins/ including WPSuper Cache and W3 Total Cache.

If you go with a plugin like W3 Total Cache never setup the database caching unless you have the server side setup to handle it. Many configure it for database caching without having the correct configuration. Doing this can break transients and other aspects of your install causing untold problems.

Good caching plugins usually allow you to exclude pages, posts and other aspects of your WordPress powered site from caching. Don't forget to do this!

All of the pages that contain any Tickera shortcodes must be excluded from the caching. Furthermore, you don't want your WooCommerce account cached for instance, it's not going to be great if someone logs in and sees another customers details is it?

Tip 2

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize! Your images that is. Un-optimized images are a pain to any WordPress site. You can easily save between 30%-60% per image depending on how aggressive you want to compress the image. The more you compress the image, the smaller it'll be but compress it too much, and you'll start losing the quality of the image.

What are the options for compressing your images?

1. Use a WordPress Plugin that can optimize images directly within your WordPress dashboard, some of the best on the market include:

• Smush - https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
• Tiny PNG - https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/tiny-compress-images/
• Imagify - https://imagify.io/

2. Alternatively you can use an image compression service before uploading them to WordPress, one of the best for this is undoubtedly TinyPNG which also happens to be free, and everyone loves free stuff.
3. Compress your images and optimize them for the web in Photoshop. This usually gives some of the best results but Photoshop is an expensive piece of software, and free services get you almost the same result with none of the cost.

If you have 10 images on your page at 150KB each that's 1.5MB on your page size. Optimizing those could half that, speeding up your website and helping visitors by using less of their data.

Tip 3

Use a CDN - A CDN or Content Delivery Network is a network of servers that serves the static files of your website from a server nearest to the visitor of your website. If you host your site in the UK and a visitor is in the USA and you don't use a CDN all your files would be served from the server in the UK.

Use a CDN however and the static files of your website (images, CSS files, etc.) will be served from a server in the USA, pretty nifty eh?

Most CDN providers have multiple locations around the world, and some of the largest networks are made up of hundreds of different servers across 23 countries!

Tip 4

Optimize your WordPress database. Most plugins and themes don't delete their data once you deactivate and un-install them, this can leave your poor database growing in size until it becomes a large un-managed mess. Everytime you install a new plugin it'll add it's data to the database.

Remember that time you tested 5 similar plugins to find the best one? Yep, you're correct; the other 4 plugins data is all still there. Slowing down your database and your site.

Luckily there are multiple plugins that can help you optimize your database, my favorite one is WP-Sweep, but there are plenty of other similar plugins available.

Database optimization plugins work by deleting orphaned data from deleted plugins, such as post meta along with being a useful tool for bulk deleting all spam comments freeing up valuable database space along with all those unwanted post revisions and auto-saved drafts.

If you find it annoying with how many post revisions WordPress keeps you can add a handy little snippet to your wp-config.php like this:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5); This tells WordPress to keep at most 5 post revisions of each post. Change that number to anything you want.

Tip 5

Minify - Minifying your files can make a world of difference in your page load time. When you minify your files you are combining all your CSS files into one CSS file and all your JS files into one JS file. Some websites depending on the exact number of plugins used load over 50 CSS and JS files per page load! Minifying those into 2 files will dramatically reduce the requests to your servers thus speeding up the load time of your WordPress powered site.

Minification can be a minefield for the less experienced site owner.

Good caching plugins like WPRocket offer minification out the box and professional support if there are any issues, or good free alternatives include Better WordPress Minify.

As with everything there's a chance you're going to break things by minifying. However, all plugins allow you to exclude resources from being minified, did your favorite plugin break? Don't fret, just exclude it from being minified and et voliá it works again! Simple as that.

Conclusion

Hopefully these 5 quick WordPress performance tips help you speed up your site and gain more visits. Have you worked wonders on your site speed? Maybe you know an awesome resource of performance information, let us know in the comments below.