WordPress optimised

Like a croupier at the blackjack table, Kent Elchuk deals out a multitude of tips to ensure Wordpress websites load effectively all across the planet.

Kent Elchuk uncovers a multitude of tips to ensure that your Wordpress website load effectively all across this flat planet.

We’re going to look into how you can modify a Wordpress site to ensure that it’s been built for speed. However, before we get into the details of how to achieve this goal, we’ll first take a closer look at understanding why it’s a crucial concept by looking at Wordpress’s history and its ways of doing things.

Although it seems like an eternity in web development years, Wordpress was really just beginning to show its face around 2003, when it was dormant code that was taken over as an open source project. Since then it’s experienced such momentum that it’s risen to the top of the content management systems popularity chart.

In the early 2000s, content management systems became a buzzword for web developers. Until then, most websites were built with simple HTML coding as static files. Although Wordpress started out as a blog, it didn’t take long before it crossed over into the content management systems category for web builders.

Now the fun began. Before long, there were three platforms battling out in the popularity stakes: Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. Although the competition was fierce, Wordpress’s ease of use and the confidence of its users ensured it blasted ahead of the pack.

With that popularity came a lot of baggage. Developers and coders were able to create both free and commercial themes and plugins. Thus, it was the contributing community that made available the greatest amount of style and functionality options. One example of this functionality includes ecommerce plugins from Woocommerce. On top of that, there are many developers that create plugins that integrate with Woocommerce, too.

The need for atomisation

So, now that we have a grasp of Wordpress’s history, it’s clear why optimisation is critical. There are so many resources to build our masterpiece, and yet we don’t need and won’t ever use all of these resources.

For example, we may have a slide-show plugin that has 10 style sheets and plenty of javascript features for the various types of slideshows, but we really only need to use about 10 per cent of that code. There are likely to be several other instances when unused code loads, wasting the time of visitors to the website.

In essence, as features grow the site’s performance typically drops. But don’t worry − by the end of this article we’ll have the tools to take our clunky Wordpress SUV and turn it into a two-seater sports car.

So, let’s start with a Wordpress installation. This tutorial will explain everything from scratch and instructions will make references to the Apache server. However, if you already have a Wordpress site, we can skip the odd step and move on to the new procedure.

Performance checkers

Wordpress sites that have a web address can easily be checked for performance with free online tools such as Pingdom and Google Page Speed. Offline, you can click the Performance tab from the Chrome Inspector and hit the Reload button to see the details. For example, the Hestia home page for our site at

localhost/Wordpress-optimisation could take between 600 and 800ms to load. That’s less than a second − not bad at all. However, there are some loading elements that we can quickly remove, which will speed up the loading time even more.

Unused files

Now that we have our basic site up with a simple template, let’s take a look how optimised it is out of the