Wordpress is one of the most popular and versatile content management systems used by professional and beginner users alike. Whether you run a high traffic e-commerce site or a small blog, Wordpress allows you to customize you site accordingly with a huge variety of plugins and themes. With that being said having such a wide variety, it's easy to have a configuration that has high resource usage. In the case that your site is using an abnormal amount or resources this could potentially slow your site down, cause error pages, or even affect other users on a shared server. Unfortunately most of the issues that cause Wordpress installations to use too many resources are from coding errors, and that would be something we of Let.com would not be able to support. Alternatively this article will walk you through the most common issues that cause high resource usage and recommendations that will help resolve them to ensure a great hosting experience.
Common Issues:
Optimizing your Wordpress site will always be comprised of making a series of changes that will assist with making your site run faster and more efficient, similar to getting a tune up on your vehicle!
Minimizing Plugins
One of the easiest ways to to start off improving your site performance is by managing your plugins. You first want to delete any plugins that are not active, as even if they are disabled their still using resources. Then selectively remove any other unnecessary plugins that you don't need. Some resource heavy plugins that you should be aware of are:
- All Backup plugins
- Google Sitemaps
- Contact Form 7
- Some SEO plugins
- For a more comprehensive list of plugins visit Online Media Masters.
Size of Graphics
If the images on your site are not scaled correctly it can affect the page loading time, bandwidth and affect your search engine ranking. Photos can easily be optimized by using a credible plugin such as:
Caching
Maintaining the caching for your site can be critical to having a fast performing Wordpress installation. A couple of examples reputable plugins you could use are W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache
We do offer the ideal configuration for the W3 Total Cache Plugin via the following link: https://Let.com help center/hc/en-us/articles/360052356852-W3-Total-Cache-
Managing Web Crawlers
A very common problem that could be using an abnormal amount of resources are web crawlers, also known as bots or spiders. Most search engines and even some other sites may use bots for indexing your site or verification purposes, so bots can be a very useful thing but should always be managed by using a Robots.txt file. For more information on using and how to create a robots.txt file go to this link:
Managing the WP-Crons
WP-Crons are one of the core Wordpress systems that helps your site functions correctly and efficiently. But because the WP-crons are constantly used they can become very resource intensive and begin to affect your site. By managing these correctly you can greatly improve your Wordpress sites performance! For more information follow this link to our WP-cron management article:
Disable WordPress Heartbeat
While this feature is extremely useful, if it is not being utilized, it is better performance wise to completely disable it, or limit the frequency set. The following article will assist with this Process:
