15 WordPress Tips and Tricks to Supercharge Your Website’s Performance

If you ask who is the king of CMS then the crown should be served to WordPress because approximately 810 million websites are built around it. What’s more surprising is this statistic will keep rising in the coming days!

So if you are planning to build your website on WordPress, you have made a great decision. And if you are already a user but need some guidance then no worries!

You need to know about the ins and outs of WordPress to build, fix, and improve your website, ensuring a smoother and more enjoyable online experience.

In this article, we are going to share some effective WordPress tips and tricks to transform your complexity into simplicity and fine-tune your website for a stellar performance.

Let’s begin!

Is WordPress good for beginners?

WordPress is super user-friendly for people with little to no technical knowledge. With WordPress, you don’t need to crack the codes to build your website. The intuitive design and user-friendly interface make it an excellent choice for beginners.

Following are some of the facts that prove building websites with WordPress is beginner-friendly where your ideas become a well-functioning website:

• WordPress is easier to set up and doesn’t require extensive technical skill
• The platform will provide you superior flexibility with easy customization and modification
• It comes with various customizable themes and templates to design beautiful websites
• You’ll get tons of plugins with easy setup to extend your website’s operations
• You can easily create, upload, and manage content without any hassle
• You can incorporate different media types into your website
• Most importantly WordPress has a massive community both online and offline to help you overcome any difficulty or problems

15 WordPress tips and tricks to supercharge your website

If you’re a budding blogger, a small business owner, or a creative entrepreneur you need to know about the hacks that’ll maximize your WordPress website’s performance. 

You can be a newbie or an existing user who followed the wrong path but trust us it’s never too late to turn a scratchy or poor website into a remarkable one.

So let’s unleash some of the most effective tips & tricks for your website and turn it into an amazing site that will ensure smooth web management, streamline business operations, and deliver excellent performance.

Choose a fast and reliable hosting 

The first misconception to clear about WordPress is that it’s a content management system (CMS) and it doesn’t host websites itself. So you have to find a reliable and fast hosting service for your website to go live.

Remember it’s crucial to select the right hosting for your website to ensure optimum performance. So selecting the fastest WordPress hosting for your website will ensure you have a blissful website management experience with high performance.

However, if you are unaware of the properties of an excellent hosting no worries! Here’s the ideal characteristics of a perfect hosting:

• Sufficient space to manage data
• Reliability with high uptime
• Fast performance
• Strong security and
• High loading speed

Also, while selecting a hosting for your WordPress website make sure these requirements are met:

• PHP version 7.4 or newer
• MySQL 5.7 or higher, or  MariaDB version 10.4 or newer
• HTTPS support

If any hosting provider meets with the above properties and requirements then you can select it without any hesitation.

Still confused? Learn how to choose a hosting provider

Pick the perfect theme

WordPress offers tons of customizable themes that can be used to improve the appearance of your website. Moreover, you can explore many high-quality themes from ThemeForest.

However, most high-quality themes are premium and cost money. But the price is reasonable so there isn’t much to worry about.

So, are you rushing to install a theme instantly?

Hold on! You are making the mistake that most beginners do more often. They choose a theme based on its appearance or price.

So before picking a theme for your website ask yourself – “Why am I building this website?”

It can be a blogging website, a business website, or anything else for you.

Also, it’s important to consider factors like browser compatibility, mobile-friendliness, and responsiveness while choosing a theme.

Instead of merely considering the look or price, pick a theme that aligns with your goal and confronts other factors.

Plus, WordPress lets users preview a theme before making the final decision. So watch the live demo before activating.

Set up Google Analytics & Google Search Console

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are two awesome tools to monitor, analyze, and evaluate the performance and web traffic of your website to improve further.

• Google Analytics will allow you to dive deep into the visitors’ behavior and help you understand how visitors interact with your website. These valuable insights will help you make informed decisions about website optimization, content strategy, and overall digital marketing efforts.

• Google Search Console provides information on website traffic, performance, and online presence. You can monitor and optimize your website’s search performance and user experience by monitoring the data at your fingertips.

Therefore, setting up your Google Analytics and Google Search Console is a must to boost your website’s performance on search rankings for traffic generation & conversion.

Build your business stack

If you are a small business owner with a limited budget then you have to make your decisions wisely and spend your money cautiously. 

As a beginner building your business stack is a challenging mission when the market is abundant in alternatives. Your decisions will decide the degree of your progress so you can’t make mistakes here.

Therefore it’s important to identify the most suitable and reliable plugins for your business that’ll generate revenue.

Here are some of the plugins that should be included in your business stack to fuel your business operations:

• WooCommerce: Setting up your first digital store requires a reliable eCommerce plugin that’ll showcase your products and earn revenue. And WooCommerce is the perfect solution to build your eCommerce store in WordPress. Its features, integrations, and functionalities make it a must-have addition for running an online business.

• Fluent Forms: Form building plugin is a must for businesses to collect lead/customer information, feedback, important data, etc. Fluent Forms is a user-friendly form-building plugin that can help you create any form without technical skills.

• FluentCRM: Running an online business and ignoring email marketing isn’t a wise job since it helps to reach an audience more personally. Email automation will help you to engage, nurture, and convert your subscribers into customers. You can use FluentCRM for seamless email automation and CRM to manage your customers efficiently within WordPress. Plus, FluentSMTP will resolve your email deliverability issues.

• MonsterInsights: Keeping track of the important metrics of your website is crucial because it informs you whether your business is growing or declining. MonsterInsights keeps you updated about the most important and advanced stats of your business to ensure you always stay focused.

• Akismet: Spam content is dangerous because it can turn your healthy website into a malicious territory. So it’s important to block spam comments to ensure protection. Akismet is an anti-spam plugin to block spam comments and spam in contact forms to ensure spam protection on your business site.

• LiveChat: Remember real-time and responsive communication is necessary if you are serious about your business. Instant response to visitors connects businesses and customers in real-time. You can use LiveChat to connect with your visitors/customers in real-time and deliver 24/7 support.

• WP ROCKET: It’s important to ensure high and fast loading speed on your website to improve user experience and search ranking. WP Rocket will help you to improve site loading speed and performance to ensure your visitors pass a blissful time.

• Fluent Support: Fast and responsive support is important to deliver a speedy response to customers. This leaves a positive impression and proves your job isn’t done just by selling a product. Fluent Support is a customer support and helpdesk solution for WordPress users. Its addition will help you manage customer tickets efficiently and provide agile responses.

We have mentioned some of the must-have plugins for your business but if you need to add more functionalities then we recommend doing more research.

Create an organized site structure

A well-organized site architecture is important to improve SEO performance and user experience. When your website is well structured it’ll help search engine spiders crawl and index your pages & share link authority which eventually improves visibility and traffic.

So it’s important to design a well-structured site structure first before going live. Keep in mind that you should develop your homepage in such a way that your other pages can be linked to it and your pages link to your sub-pages.

Also, you can follow these tips too:

• Develop a simple top-level menu
• Generate an HTML and XML sitemap
• Keep URLs concise
• Develop topic clusters and pillar page
• Enable users to access most of your website within a few clicks

Publish high-quality content 

Google loves high-quality content that’ll meet the users’ expectations and add value to their lives. Therefore publishing quality content regularly will improve your site’s authority, credibility, and search ranking.

So you need to come up with a content marketing strategy that’ll help you to publish regular content that adds value to users, promotes your products/service, and generates conversion.

Follow the following tips to publish high-quality content on your site:

• Define your goals
• Conduct deep research on your target audience
• Thoroughly research your competitors
• Perform keyword research
• Plan and schedule your contents
• Maintain the SEO principles
• Regularly check and refine your existing contents

Add featured image

Adding a featured image to your post is important to make it visually appealing and catch the reader’s attention.

A well-designed featured image will help you convey the main point of your post and inspire them to continue reading.

Also, if your post is shared on social media channels then your featured image will appear as a thumbnail to persuade users to click.

Emphasize on link-building

Simply put link building is a strategy for achieving inbound links from other websites. It plays a major role in building authority in your niche and achieving a higher rank on Google. Also, it’ll help you to increase your Domain Authority (DA), Domain Rating (DR), Page Authority (PA), etc.

If you want to exploit the complete benefit of SEO, you should create a link building strategy and reach out to other websites to acquire hyperlinks.

Here are some best practices of link building that you can follow:

• Outreach: Reaching out to other websites for link collaboration
• Guest posting:  Writing articles for other websites that link to your site
• Reciprocal link building: Exchanging links between two websites
• Broken link building: Identifying broken links from other websites and suggesting your content
• Linkable asset: Creating linkable content like infographics, guides, case studies 

Create a custom 404 error page

A 404 error indicates a page is missing when a user clicks on a hyperlink. It occurs due to a broken link or the absence of a page. The worst part is this inconvenience can result in a high bounce rate and lack of trust.

You can create a custom 404 error page to redirect users to helpful content, suggest navigation options, and encourage them to explore other parts of your website.

Also, you should regularly check & update the broken links and use 301 redirects to divert the user from the old URL to a new one.

Follow this guideline to fix broken links on your website

Install SEO plugin

Search engine optimization is crucial for any website to improve online visibility and drive organic traffic. So an SEO plugin is a must addition to your existing setup to optimize website content.

A great SEO plugin will help you with on-page SEO, keyword optimization, XML sitemap generation, canonical URL management, implementing schema markup, etc. It simplifies the SEO process and improves search engine visibility.

You’ll discover hundreds of SEO plugins but we recommend using SEOPress. It’s a powerful and user-friendly SEO plugin for WordPress users to help you perform SEO operations smoothly.

Avoid using excessive plugins

Without plugins, WordPress is nothing but a basic framework, lacking the extensive functionality and customization options that empower it to meet the diverse needs of website owners and users alike.

However installing too many plugins can lead to security issues, site crashes, performance decline, slow loading, etc. So it’s important to determine which plugins you need most and which to wipe out. This will ensure your website isn’t bloated with excessive code that slows down it.

Also Read: 15+ Must-have WordPress Plugins for Every Website

Ensure top notch security

Since WordPress is a popular CMS platform, it’s also vulnerable to malware attacks, hacking, cyberattacks, etc. Websites like eCommerce, small businesses, financial services, online retailers, etc. are commonly targeted to spread malware, including spyware and ransomware.

Hence it’s important to safeguard your website from these common threats to ensure a secure online presence. Also, you should always follow the WordPress security checklist to keep security threats at bay.

Now here are some tips you should follow to protect your website:

• Get an SSL certificate: SSL certificate adds an extra layer of protection between a user and a website host to ensure a secure connection. The data transmitted between the user and the website remains encrypted for sensitive information such as login credentials, personal details, or financial data. So you need to get an SSL certificate for your website to ensure user safety and avoid Google flagging.

• Activate 2FA: Your online security deserves more than a strong password since your login credentials might get stolen. So you need to enable two-factor authentication on your site to protect it from unauthorized login attempts.

• Scan for malware regularly: Malware is a common weapon of hackers to sneak into a site to steal information and damage its reputation. So you should regularly scan your website for malware attacks and remove malware if found.

• Use reCAPTCHA or hCAPTCHA: It’s important to differentiate between humans and bots and save your website from automated bot attacks. Using reCAPTCHA or hCAPTCHA will help your website to distinguish between human users and automated bots, preventing malicious activities like spam, fraud, and unauthorized access.

Perform SEO audit

Regular SEO audit is crucial to inspect the status of your website in search ranking, improve visibility, identify technical issues and areas of improvement, etc. It’ll help you perform on-page optimization, examine backlink profiles, and implement technical resolution on your site.

If you want to drive more traffic and maximize the potential for sustainable website growth, then you should regularly follow the SEO audit checklist to optimize your website for search engines.

Compress images for faster loading

Again faster loading speed is important to provide the best user experience to your website visitors and improve SEO rankings. If you use uncompressed images then it’ll require more bandwidth and time to load.

So before uploading any image to your website, you need to reduce the file size. Smaller image files require less bandwidth hence optimizing page speed and improving user experience.

You’ll find many online image compressors but we recommend using TinyPNG. Just upload your image file in TinyPNG, compress it, and finally download the compressed version.

Also Read: How to Upload WebP Images in WordPress (with/without Plugin)

Avoid using clutter

If you use too many ads, CTAs, banners, or widgets on your website then it’ll hamper the navigation and user experience of the visitors.

Adding too many fancy elements to a website can go wrong since it may make the visitors confused and overwhelmed. However, an organized and concise layout will help you to deliver information effectively and with professionalism.

So instead of using clutter make your website clean and engaging for the audience. 

Build your dream website!

The opportunity with WordPress is boundless considering its rich plugins, ample resources, and amazing community. The features, versatility, and user-friendliness make it the most popular CMS platform on the web.

All you need is just a helping guide to explore the wonderful journey with WordPress and extract its full potential for your business.

We hope the above-mentioned tips and tricks will help you build an amazing website from scratch that provides outstanding performance and generates high revenue.