It is necessary to optimize your WordPress site if you want to achieve good rankings on the search engine results. Optimizing your site will make it more user friendly and increase the experience of the visitors. When your site is user friendly, the search engine will be more likely to recommend your site and list it on the first pages.
One way to optimize your WordPress site is to use a fast WordPress theme. A fast WordPress theme is a well coded theme without all the extra features that can slow down the performance of your blog. Heavy WordPress themes that are a few MB in size will take longer to load. The WordPress theme that you choose should be optimized to display on all kinds of devices such as desktop and mobile devices. You should first install the WordPress theme and test it yourself to see how fast it load prior to installing it.
Having too many plugins can cause your WordPress blog to stuck intermittently and load slow. Plugins with poor coding or constantly scan your blog or update on its own are likely to cause your blog to slow down. You should check how much CPU the plugin is using before installing it. If the plugin uses too much CPU, it is likely to reduce your blog speed performance. Any plugin that you seldom used should be deleted.
It is important to run maintenance on your plugins and make sure that they are up to date. Whenever a new version of the plugin is available, you should install it. Not updating your plugin can make your blog more vulnerable to hackers. Newer versions of plugins contain lesser bugs and are optimized to run faster. Get more details here.
Deleting the posts in your trash system can help to speed up your WordPress blog. The undeleted posts in your trash can take up spaces in the database. The trash is automatically deleted if you did not delete them in 30 days. You can reduce the number of days it take for the trash to be automatically deleted by making modifications to the wp-config.php file. Trash is not the only thing that can take up rooms in your database. Other things such as spam comments, revisions, drafts, and trackbacks will also take up rooms in your database. You can install plugin like WP Optimize and WP-DBManager to delete unnecessary items from your database.
If you include images on your blog post, it is important to compress it to a smaller size prior to uploading. The image should be just a few KB when you upload it to your WordPress blog. Doing so will help you to save a lot of spaces on your WordPress blog. Large image and high resolution image can increase the page load time. Plugins like Smush.IP and Lazy Load can be used to optimize the images.
If your blog gets a lot of spam comments, you should install plugin like Akismet to easily filter the comments that are spam and delete them. Automatically deleting all spams will discourage spammers from keep posting spam comments on your blog. You will need to have an Akismet API key to set up the Akismet. The Akismet key can be obtained by registering a new account at WordPress.com.
Another way to optimize your WordPress blog is to install a caching plugin. The caching plugin can cached your pages and reduce the need of having to constantly go to the database to retrieve the data. Caching plugin improves your blog performance by preventing the need to execute PHP and MySQL commands. The most popular WordPress caching plugins are WP Super Cache, and W3 Total Cache.