50 of the Best WordPress Tips and Tricks for Beginners – Part 1
Improving your WordPress website is essential for optimising performance, enhancing user experience, and boosting search engine rankings.
Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, there are always steps you can take to enhance your site’s speed, security, and functionality.
This list of 100 tips provides practical, actionable advice to help you improve various aspects of your WordPress site, from choosing the right plugins and optimising images to implementing security measures and improving SEO.
By following these tips, you can ensure your website runs smoothly, loads quickly, and delivers an excellent experience for your visitors.
Choose a reliable hosting provider
Choosing a reliable hosting provider is one of the most important decisions when building a WordPress website. Your hosting provider impacts your site’s speed, security, and uptime. A good host ensures fast load times, which enhances user experience and SEO rankings.
Reliable hosting also includes features like automatic backups, SSL certificates, and solid customer support, reducing the risk of data loss or security breaches. Shared, VPS, and managed WordPress hosting options are available depending on your needs. Opt for a provider known for excellent performance, strong security measures, and scalability to handle increased traffic as your website grows.
Here are the top 5 hosting providers for WordPress, including SiteGround, along with reasons why they stand out:
1. SiteGround
Performance and Speed: Known for its fast performance, SiteGround uses SSD storage, free CDN, and caching tools like SuperCacher to ensure excellent site speed.
Free SSL and Daily Backups: SiteGround offers free SSL certificates and daily backups, providing security and peace of mind.
Expert WordPress Support: Their 24/7 support is highly regarded, with specialists trained to handle WordPress-specific issues.
Easy Staging and Managed Updates: SiteGround offers one-click staging for website testing and automatic WordPress updates for hassle-free management.
2. Kinsta
Premium Performance with Google Cloud: Kinsta is powered by Google Cloud Platform, offering top-tier speed, scalability, and security.
Automatic Scaling: Kinsta automatically scales your resources during traffic spikes, ensuring your site remains fast and stable.
Built-In Security Features: They provide free SSL, daily backups, and a firewall, with proactive monitoring for threats.
Developer-Friendly Tools: Kinsta includes features like one-click staging, SSH access, and Git support, making it ideal for developers.
3. WP Engine
Enterprise-Level Security: WP Engine offers advanced security features such as a firewall, daily malware scans, and automatic security updates.
Fast Load Times: Their EverCache technology ensures rapid page loading, and their platform is built for high performance.
Excellent Developer Tools: WP Engine offers staging environments, SSH access, and Git integration, making it a favorite among developers.
Global CDN: With a built-in CDN, WP Engine delivers fast loading times across the globe, further optimising user experience.
4. Bluehost
WordPress.org Recommended: Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress.org, making it a reliable option for WordPress hosting.
Affordable Pricing: Bluehost offers budget-friendly plans with features like free SSL, a free domain for the first year, and unmetered bandwidth.
User-Friendly Interface: It has a beginner-friendly control panel with one-click WordPress installation and easy site management.
24/7 Customer Support: Bluehost provides 24/7 customer support through phone, chat, and email.
5. Flywheel
Managed WordPress Hosting: Flywheel provides fully managed WordPress hosting, including automatic updates, caching, and daily backups.
Easy Collaboration: Flywheel offers tools for agencies and designers, including client billing transfers and easy collaboration features.
Fast Performance: Flywheel uses Google Cloud Platform and includes built-in caching for fast loading speeds.
Staging Environments: Flywheel allows for easy creation of staging environments to test changes without affecting your live site.
These hosting providers offer top-tier performance, security, and customer support, making them ideal choices for WordPress websites at different levels of need and expertise.
Use a lightweight WordPress theme
Using a lightweight WordPress theme is crucial for improving your website’s speed, performance, and overall user experience. Lightweight themes are optimised to load quickly, using minimal resources, which reduces the time it takes for your pages to display.
This helps lower bounce rates and improves search engine rankings. These themes also typically have clean code, fewer built-in features, and simpler designs, allowing you to add only the essential plugins or customisations as needed.
By choosing a lightweight theme, you enhance your site’s responsiveness and mobile compatibility, making it faster and more efficient for all users.
Here are five lightweight WordPress themes:
Hello Elementor Designed by the creators of Elementor, this theme is extremely lightweight and minimal, offering a blank canvas perfect for building custom designs using the Elementor page builder. It loads incredibly fast, as it contains no extra features or styling that could slow down your site.
Astra Astra is known for its speed and flexibility. It offers numerous customisation options, is fully responsive, and integrates seamlessly with popular page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder. It’s lightweight yet feature-rich for performance optimisation.
GeneratePress GeneratePress is a fast, lightweight, and modular theme that allows you to enable only the features you need. It has clean code, is optimised for speed, and is fully compatible with all popular page builders, making it a great choice for performance-focused websites.
Neve Neve is designed to be lightweight and fast-loading, perfect for mobile-first designs. It’s flexible, easy to customise, and integrates well with page builders like Elementor and Gutenberg. Neve also offers extensive header and footer customisation.
OceanWP OceanWP is a highly customisable and lightweight theme. It’s built for performance with fast load times and offers deep integration with popular page builders. OceanWP is suitable for any type of website and comes with many extensions for added functionality.
Optimise images before uploading
Optimising images before uploading is essential for improving your WordPress website’s performance. Large image files can significantly slow down page load times, negatively affecting user experience and SEO rankings. By compressing images and reducing their file size without sacrificing quality, you can ensure faster loading speeds. Tools like Photoshop, TinyPNG, or online services can help optimise images before uploading them to your WordPress site. Additionally, saving images in the correct format (JPEG for photos, PNG for graphics with transparency) and adjusting dimensions to the appropriate display size can further enhance your site’s efficiency, leading to a better overall performance.
Did you know? – The SiteGround Optimizer plugin includes a powerful image optimisation feature that compresses images without losing quality, helping to reduce file sizes and improve site speed. It also offers lazy loading, which delays image loading until they’re visible, further enhancing performance and boosting your WordPress website’s efficiency and user experience.
Here are five popular plugins for WordPress image optimisation:
Smush
Key Features: Smush automatically compresses and optimises images without reducing quality. It offers bulk image compression, lazy loading, and resizing options.
Why It’s Popular: Easy to use with great performance, Smush is beginner-friendly and integrates seamlessly with WordPress.
Imagify
Key Features: Imagify provides multiple levels of compression (Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra), allowing you to optimise images based on your needs. It also supports WebP format.
Why It’s Popular: Known for its excellent compression quality, Imagify optimises images without visible loss in quality, ideal for performance-focused websites.
ShortPixel
Key Features: ShortPixel optimises images, PDFs, and WebP formats, offering both lossy and lossless compression options. It also provides automatic resizing and WebP conversion.
Why It’s Popular: A highly efficient plugin that handles bulk image optimisation with a strong focus on speed and quality.
EWWW Image Optimizer
Key Features: EWWW Image Optimizer provides automatic image compression, bulk optimisation, and the ability to convert images to WebP. It also includes lazy loading features.
Why It’s Popular: It offers unlimited file size optimisation and works well on shared hosting environments, making it a favourite among many WordPress users.
Optimole
Key Features: Optimole offers real-time image optimisation with automatic resizing based on device and browser. It also integrates with a CDN for faster image delivery.
Why It’s Popular: Optimole delivers optimised images through its CDN, reducing server load and improving site speed, ideal for mobile-first designs.
These plugins provide various levels of image optimisation, helping you improve your website’s speed, performance, and user experience by reducing image file sizes without sacrificing quality.
Read More: https://dcpweb.co.uk/blog/50-of-the-best-wordpress-tips-and-tricks-for-beginners-part-1
