201 - How to make your WordPress website run smoothly (even after a year) with Alexandru Covtun

Interview with Alexandru Covtun and Nathan Wrigley

Today we talk about how to keep your WordPress website running smoothly, whether that's one month or one year after you launched it.

So we all know that having a website is more work than most people think. There's a ton of things that need to go on in the background to ensure that it's up and running, performing well and getting you leads.

As WordPress web professionals, we take much of this for granted. In fact I was thinking as I wrote this post of all the little tasks that it takes to create a website and then keep it running in a performant way, and I was honestly surprised at all the things that I could think of. There were dozens...!

Today we have Alexandru Covtun on the podcast to tackle this subject. He's with WP Dandy which is a WordPress maintenance and support company, so he knows what he's on about.

As I mentioned, there's more to this than meets the eye, and even a seasoned WordPress website builder might well have missed one or two of the tricks that he talks about:

• Carefully choose plugins/theme you use on your site
• Disable/delete unused plugins/themes that are installed by default
• Perform regular updates of your WordPress website’s core, plugins, and themes
• Keep your theme lightweight
• Minify, combine, compress, and cache the files on both the browser and the server
• Reduce the amount of render blocking resources (ASYNC/DEFER)
• Use HTTPS connection instead of HTTP one
• Maintain a minimal amount of HTTP/HTTPS requests
• Use optimized images (lossless compression, SVG format)
• Lazy Load your images
• Disable hotlinking (images, files)
• Optimize the fonts (self-host + preload, preconnect*)
• Optimize comments (lazy load)
• Use a good CDN (Cloudflare)
• Keep an eye on the PHP version your WordPress website runs under
• Clean up your database regularly
• Perform regular website performance checks
• Perform regular website security checks
• Implement security scenarios
• Block bad bots

I guess that it's fair to say that each project might need 'all' of these things implemented, but it's surely a good idea to have them in your arsenal of tools; a list of things that you can mention to clients when they ask about why they should pay you to get on your website care plans.

Like I say, an episode packed with useful insights for the pro and beginner alike.

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Mentioned in this episode...

WP Dandy