Building Quality Into WordPress Projects: A Practical Example
If you find that your website does not get traction as you expected, there might be problems with the quality of the website. Today WordPress is probably the best content management system around. There are various codes and plugins that can enhance the quality of your WordPress website thus attracting more visitors. WordPress tutorials for beginners available on the internet that depicts the use of WordPress development tools like plugins, themes, widgets, etc. There are some simple hacks by which you can optimize the quality, look and performance of a WordPress website.
Let’s take a look at them one by one to build Quality Into WordPress Projects.
Velocity page
Velocity page is a premium service that allows you to edit the page in real-time in a simple drag and drop way. There is no need to worry if you don’t have any coding or technical skills. Velocity page comes with WordPress plugins which allow you to effortlessly create spectacular web pages. It comes with various modules that allow you to create multimedia-rich pages.
ThemeForest
WordPress comes with thousands of ready-made designs that can be installed on your website page. Themeforest allows you to buy themes and templates for customer management services (CMS) platforms like WordPress and Joomla. You can upgrade the quality of the website by choosing a simple yet effective WordPress theme and thus avoiding any complicated design with lots of unnecessary features. Themeforest provides premium paid themes as well as free themes. But if you are building a professional website for your business, then be ready to shell out some bucks. Quality comes at an expense.
Change compression of your WordPress image
WordPress comes with preloaded features that automatically compress the images for better performances. If you want to showcase high-resolution pictures in your website then you can disable image compression.
This can be done adding the below given code in the selected theme’s function.php file or installed plugin
add_filter(‘jpeg_quality’, function($arg){return 100;});
By inserting the above code, the quality of your image is set to highest. The difference in the quality of the image is visible.
Similarly, you can increase the compression of the image by adding the following code.
add_filter(‘jpeg_quality’, function($arg){return 75;});
Here {return75;}code reduces the size of the image from 100 to 75. This would reduce the image size thus loading your website more quickly.
Boosting the speed of the website by W3 Total Cache
Long loading time for your WordPress website could be a huge turnoff for a visitor. W3 Total Cache is a very useful plugin that boosts up the speed of your website by reducing the load on your web server. This plugin would clear the cache in static and dynamic content, thus loading your page faster. The decreased webpage load time would obviously improve the user experience.
BJ Lazy Load
This is another great plugin that would improve the quality of your website by loading the content as and when the user scrolls down the webpage. The speed of the webpage is boosted as the server doesn’t have to load all the content at once.
Avoid installing too many plugins
WordPress provides hundreds of plugins for each and every requirement you need. But some of the plugins are not scripted well and thus can cause hindrance in the performance. Before installing a plugin, you should Google search the review of that specific plugin to check if other users faced any problems with it. My best advice would be to uninstall the plugin if it does not offer any significant enhancement in the performance of your website.
Avoid the use of Java Scripted social share buttons
Everybody wants to insert a social share button on the webpage. But inserting too many buttons (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) would increase the loading time of the website.
Both Facebook and Twitter can share the website through a web link, thus avoiding the use of javascript buttons. Now, the links can be shared by twitter using the shortened URL of twitter. Below are the coding examples of the short social share URL.
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading:%20<?php echo urlencode(get_the_title()); ?>%20&<?php the_permalink();?>” target=”_blank”>Share on Twitter</a>
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?<?php the_permalink();?>&<?php echo urlencode(get_the_title()); ?>” target=”_blank”>Share on Facebok</a>
Yoast SEO
This option will make search engine optimization for your WordPress very easy. This is a boon, especially for WordPress Blogs. It will help your website get ranked higher on the internet. Improved ranking would lead to more subscribers to your page, and thus making your business grow faster.
