WordPress is by far the most popular content management system in the world. This means WordPress is powering the majority of the websites online. With these 7 easy tips, you can improve your WordPress website’s performance drastically or protect your website against possible threats.
Compress images
Lowering the size of the images you are uploading to your website can increase your website’s performance drastically, which also allows you to get better SEO scores. Images can be easily compressed with Photoshop or GIMP, or you can also use online tools, such as TinyPNG, JPEGMini, and Optimole. With specific formats, you can also remove EXIF data from the images.
External links
Instead of editing all the external links in the posts you publish, you can handle all of them with a single plugin, WP External Links. The plugin allows you to open all external links in a new window, or add a noreferrer and noopener attribute to all external links.
SSL certificate
Adding an SSL certificate to your website will let your visitors and search engines know that their data is protected. After installing the SSL certificate, don’t forget to update your website’s URL to use the HTTPS protocol. You will also need to update the .htaccess file, wp-config.php file, and database to reflect the change.
Two-factor authentication
Two-factor authentication is one of the most popular methods to protect your accounts online. With an easy-to-use plugin like Two Factor, you can easily add this feature to your WordPress website’s login page. The plugin allows you to use email, time-based one-time password, FIDO Universal 2nd Factor, and backup verification codes to log in along with your password.
Alt text for images
When it comes to SEO, most people only focus on text-based content, however, images are also an important part of your posts. To improve your SEO results, you can add alt text to let search engines know what the image is about and index the image also, which will improve your SEO results.
Erase spams
WordPress comes with a built-in spam cleaner, allowing users to remove spam comments with a single click. It can be found under the Comments menu, titled Spam. By clicking the Empty Spam button, you can delete all spam comments.
PHP memory
Just like other websites, WordPress also requires resources to compute to be able to handle incoming requests. If you think that these resources can’t meet the demand, you can try increasing the PHP memory by editing the wp-config.php file. You can add the line “define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’ );” after the “define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, false );” line. 256M parameter means your PHP memory is 256 megabytes, which can be increased anytime.