WordPress Slickified: How to Optimise Your WordPress Site
Digital Marketing • 11th Apr, 16
For the online up-and-comer, WordPress is a wonderful little boon. Whether you’re kicking off your new business’s online representation or creating a place to stash all the Bangkok honeymoon pictures the wife won’t let you keep on the hard drive, WordPress is a free, easy to use, and accessible. Sure, once you’ve grown a little – gotten folks to notice you and whatnot – you may want to upgrade to something more sophisticated; but as a starting point, WordPress can be a miracle.
Thing is, if you’re going to become more than that – a newbie with a WordPress account – you’ve got to make decent use of the tools that WordPress offers; more often than not, unless you, or someone on your payroll, have some decent degree of web dev experience (and neither of those things are cheap), you’ve got a fair chance of overlooking or misusing some of WordPress’s resources. And should you end up with your new business’s online presence fronted by a poorly-slapped-together piece of web work…well, it’s got a chance of being a major Lucy football gag to your business’s kickoff.
Lag, especially. Nothing’s going to wreck your image like a webpage that loads slowly. Lag has been the bane of PC users since the machine was invented, and it might be the most efficient stirrer of primal anger since road rage. You set up a laggy site, and your budding business is going to feel it.
So just to give you emerging entrepreneurs a bit more of a fighting chance in introducing your new business to the online world – because, let’s face it, whatever sort of business you’re going into, you’re faced with some severely looming competition – here are a few initial pointers on how to optomise a decent, non-PR-disaster-causing WordPress page.
- A Courteous Host
You should pick your site’s host with the same choosiness that you’d pick your investment plan or your kid’s day care. Choose the wrong one, and you could end up with a side with molasses-like loading times, or see all your work vanish into the ether because its host couldn’t be bothered to make backups.
And yes, we understand you’re a small business owner working on a budget; but still, try not to be stingy in this department. This is one of those investments that any up-and-coming business owner simply can’t afford not to make – there really is no reason for potential customers to see much promise in a business that can’t run a functional WordPress account.
- Pragmatic Decoration
Sure, sure, aesthetics are important for a business’s image; and when you’re a fledgling business, experimenting is one of the best ways to discover just what that image ought to be – more or less every renowned franchise has a history of the tweaks their logo underwent somewhere on their main site.
That said, though…don’t take this as an invitation to go too nuts when it comes to taking care of the artsy side of your WordPress account.
Obviously, it wouldn’t make sense not to take advantage of WordPress’s extensive and ever-growing menu of themes and plugins – hell, you pretty much have to; a generic, lazy-looking WordPress page is just going to conjure up the image of an unremarkable, lazily-managed business. But on the other hand, well, there’s a vast amount of WordPress themes and plugins, many of them community-made; and – there’s no polite way to say this – Sturgeon’s law tells us that a great deal of them are going to be slapdash.
And it’s primarily because of that that you’ve simply got to choose your themes and plugins carefully. Every one of them, you should ensure, fits in with the general aesthetic of the site, and assists in communicating the image of your brand – and, more importantly, that it doesn’t much up your CPU and make your site’s loading time drag. A plugin that shows the year’s Chinese zodiac animal dancing I the margin, or generates a random line from Paradise Lost in the site’s header every day, might have a tourist-trap-like appeal to it; but odds are it doesn’t at all tap into your brand’s genuine essence. No, all stuff like that is going to do is slow your site’s loading time to a highly off-putting crawl; and, thinking of it, anyone who comes back to your site just to see the plugins probably isn’t old enough to be doing business with you anyway.
Really, it all comes down to this: your brand shouldn’t need lag-creating plugins to communicate its selling points. Reducing it to such gimmicks is an insult to your business.
- Straightening the Crooked Frames
It really doesn’t matter what your business is, or who your demographic may be; you’re going to want to work in at least one or two pictures somewhere. Even the most serious of us, despite what we may pretend, like to have a few colours here and there to break up the stream of words – we’re only human.
But in a similar vein to the plugins and themes, you really need to ensure that you don’t end up sacrificing performance and user friendliness for the sake of being flashier.
Simply put, images, selected carefully and containing a minimal amount of memes, can do a great deal to make your site more appealing; but should they be of the several-thousand-by-several-thousand sort of dimensions, there’s a chance they could make your site drag a bit. High-quality images are fine and dandy, but they’ll hardly do much good if they’ve only loaded by one-tenth by the time the user’s gotten tired of waiting.
Because of this, it’s best to tweak your images just a little bit. Services like WordPress’s own smash.it can optimise and compress images, reducing their drag on load time without turning them into glorified thumbnails. The modern online attention span being what it is, the seconds that this shaves off your site’s loading times could be what makes the difference between a viewer getting bored and leaving or becoming one of your most loyal clients.
Now, of course, once your business has really taken off, and you’ve got it in the budget to entrust management of your online presence to a team of those web-dev types who’ll keep it looking as slick and professional as a Google executive’s office, all this will be irrelevant. Until then, though – well, got to keep the launch pad well-maintained until take-off day, right?