Keywords: WordPress, Performance
When it comes to fine-tuning your WordPress site, I’ve found this can be broken down into three areas: web and asset hosting, site caching, and theme asset optimization.
Choosing the right hosting provider can be challenging. Our preferred partner, WP Engine, specializes in WordPress hosting and offers a fully managed service, ensuring optimal performance and support.
For a more cost-effective option, we also recommend Cloudways. However, the 'managed' aspect of Cloudways is different from WP Engine. On the plus side, Cloudways allows you to host multiple sites under a single account, offering more flexibility.
Using Cloudflare CDN for your website's DNS and SSL provides undeniable benefits. With recent updates to their pricing plans, it's now possible to set up Cloudflare for free, securing your website behind their firewall and caching services at no cost.
The market for caching plugins offers plenty of options. Our top three recommendations are:
These plugins cover various caching needs, as not all caching solutions work with every hosting provider.
Note: You only need one caching plugin—installing more than one may cause conflicts and content issues. If you're using a dedicated WordPress hosting provider, tailored caching and CDN options may already be included, making additional plugins unnecessary.
It's crucial to optimize your theme assets during development by using tools such as PostCSS, image compression, and build tools like Vite and Webpack.
Efficiently parsing CSS and JavaScript assets is vital for reducing initial page load times before browser caching takes over.
Head of development
