This lesson is a part of the How to Build & Maintain Elementor WordPress Website? course.
Hi, everyone!
In Lesson 8 we’ve checked the ins of Gutenberg editor now it’s time to have a look at the list of must-have plugins for your website.
Let's roll.
The Achilles heel of WordPress is the speed, in terms of site positions in search results website speed currently is one of the most important aspects. That’s why you need to make all the efforts you can, to make your website run extremely fast...in any case website speed provided by the hosting you’re using 🙂
But first of all, let’s see which plugins you may need to install right away. Some of them provide basic functionalities like contact form, and website optimization tricks while others will help you add features way beyond Elementor capabilities.
Here I have a list of 10 plugins that is more than enough for you to build a highly functional website.
Now let’s move on to speed optimization.
Top 5 things that limit the speed of your website.
Now let’s see what we can do to increase the speed of your site.
There’s a bunch of options how you can reduce the size of your images.
Serving cached pages to your visitors is a must-have. This works as follows When someone visits your website static content like images, CSS files, fonts and so on are saved in their browsers. So when they visit your page once again it’s loaded much faster since their browsers don’t have to download your static files once again.
Inmotion hosting runs on optimized servers that include caching setup. They use NGINX with a reverse proxy which decreases the amount of CPU, RAM, and other server resources utilized, thus improving the load time.
You can easily hook up some CDN (content delivery network) like Cloudflare. This free platform has premium functionalities, though free options they provide you with will be more than enough.
If you opt for Cloudflare you will have to change your DNS records, (with ones’ provided by Cloudflare platform) and it means that your website will be unavailable for some time. When you get to this step they will provide you will all the necessary tips on how to do it right.
Some users are afraid to update WordPress core, plugins or themes because they’re afraid to crash their website. To some extent this is true, updates can break a website, but only if they are installed incorrectly.
Feel free to check my WordPress website maintenance guide, there I’ve covered the procedure of how to install WordPress updates without killing your website.
Your website media gallery is perfect for storing images, but if you need to serve some video to your visitor you should upload it to a third-party service like Vimeo or YouTube.
When you add a video or audio file to some page it will load when someone visits this page (if it weight a lot it will slow down page loading), which is why embedding multimedia files is vital, and for sure won’t affect your page load speed (unless you have 100 embedded videos on one page) than you will have to enable lazy loading (plugin #7 from the list above).
All WordPress plugins and themes load tons of files, those can be scripts, stylesheets, images, or whatsoever.
In general it’s ok because loading files from external resources will reduce your server load, but still, there’s a downside. If you’re using tons of plugins they can significantly slow down your website.
You can reduce the number of HTTP requests by merging script and CSS files. You can do either manually or by means of a plugin like W3C Total Cache.
At the beginning of this lesson I’ve mentioned a plugin WP-Optimize, it will help you to complete this objective.
In case you’re feeling quite paranoid and you’re Updating your posts every minute you’re creating a ton of post revisions that are cramming your database, and this is quite bad.
You can manually reduce the number of post revisions by adding one line to your wp-config.php file:
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 );
To find which PHP version you’re using you need to check PHP Configuration application in your cPanel.
Your server should run the latest version PHP 7.2.
For more info on WordPress speed optimization, you can refer to the following blog posts. In case you don’t feel like doing it on your own, you can opt for the Maintenance Services provided by TemplateMonster webmasters.
WordPress Website Maintenance Guide
End of the lesson.