Now that you have your WordPress site in excellent shape and filled with engaging content and compelling designs, you can start to evaluate if it is enough to retain new visitors and keep them coming back again and again.
With so many online options to choose from, it can be hugely difficult to compete for people’s already fleeting attention. To have a successful site these days, you have to do a lot more than just the bare minimum if you hope to increase the traffic on your page. While colourful designs, well-made content and excellent marketing may bring visitors to your WordPress site initially, it is the efficiency, speed and quality that will get them to stay.
Given how important speed is to a user that visits your site, one of the most important questions you need to ask is, how long does your website take to load a page? Studies show that more than half of the people who visit a site will leave if it takes over three seconds to load a page. Ideally you should aim to have your site load in around two seconds or less.
Abandonment of your site is not the only damage slow loading speeds can cause. Google confirmed that the speed of your website can even affect a percentage of search queries – and by extension, your SEO ranking. A very large part of your website’s success reflects on how fast it responds to visitor interaction.
With this knowledge, it is important that you do everything you can to make sure your WordPress site loads as quickly as possible. A great way to help achieve this is by installing the WP-Optimize WordPress plugin. In this blog, we will take a look at the many features and advantages of WP-Optimize, why it should be your WordPress optimization plugin of choice, and why you should upgrade to the premium version.
What can performance-boosting plugins do for your WordPress site?
No matter how well you may think your site is set-up, you should always have a dedicated tool that will help with your site’s performance. Performance-boosting plugins like
help optimize your WordPress site to perform at the best possible level. It can help to speed things up for visitors interacting with your pages for the first time, as well as improve the general efficiency of the website.
As an all-in-one performance-boosting plugin, WP-Optimize consists of everything you need to keep your website fast and thoroughly optimized. With thousands of 5-star reviews and more than one million active installations, WP-Optimize ranks at the very top of the list of the best performance-boosting plugins in the world.
Why should you use WP-Optimize?
As mentioned earlier, both the free and Premium versions of WP-Optimize expertly optimizes your WordPress site in the following ways:
- Cleans the database.
- Compress images.
- Caching.
1. Clean database
Your database stores all the data you require for your website to function properly. Some things you don’t need are also stored in the process. The clean database feature removes all the useless data and even reclaims the space lost due to data fragmentation. Database cleaning is the number one, most basic function of a performance-boosting plugin.
The database feature is easy to use and especially comes in handy for cleaning out the following:
- Drafts. Gets rid of auto-draft posts and creates space in your database for new and useful drafts.
- Comments. Removes Askimets and other such redundant metadata from comments.
- Trash. Deletes old post revisions and trash.
- Spam. Zero spam tolerance. Automatically removes all spam, unapproved and trashed comments.
- Trackbacks and pingbacks. Deletes automatic acknowledgments, references, and notifications ensuring a clutter-free website.
2. Compress images
In addition to cleaning databases, WP-Optimize features a tool for image optimization and compression. Large images that would have otherwise reduced your site’s load speed are compressed and saved to your image library, where they are uploaded instantly. WP-Optimize covers a wide range of image formats including PNG, GIF, JPG, BM, and TIF. This feature frees up space, saves server resources for more important tasks, and helps your website load faster.
3. Caching
Every website has a reserved storage space, which is referred to as the cache system.
The purpose of this cache system is to store temporary data like the static versions of your website. This way, your WordPress site won’t have to run heavy PHP scripts whenever someone loads your site. Instead, your cache will collect texts, images, and other required data from first-time visitors. This improves the load speed and general efficiency of the site during subsequent visits.
Every cache system requires adequate RAM and CPU performance. With time, growing page traffic will overwhelm your RAM and CPU causing your site to render slowly. But that won’t happen with performance-boosting plugins like WP-Optimize. With the WP-Optimize cache
Why you should upgrade to WP-Optimize Premium
As mentioned at the beginning of this blog, WP-Optimize has both a free and a premium version. The basic features of WP-Optimize are free and can be downloaded here. The Premium version comes with the following additional features:
Premium packages
The premium version is available in three packages at competitive prices:
| Package | Coverage | |
| 1. | Starter | 1 to 2 websites |
| 2. | Business | 5 websites |
| 3. | Unlimited | No limit |
Additional benefits of WP-Optimize Premium
Multisite support
While the free version can cater to ONLY one site at a time, the Premium version offers multisite functions. Optimize all your sites on your WordPress network.
More options
WP-Optimize Premium offers flexibility and a range of advanced options. For instance, you can optimize individual database tables should you wish to do so.
Remove unwanted images
This newly-added Premium optimization process helps to eliminate orphaned images from your WordPress sites. Images that exceed specific size limits are also removed to minimize server footprint – and by extension cost.
Lazy load
Not all components are needed to load your page. The lazy load feature helps to prioritize the necessary components while delaying the rest until they are required. This optimization process significantly improves website performance for large sites.
Scheduling
Optimization might be automatic, but with Premium you can schedule when it occurs. This Premium scheduling feature allows you to set up routine optimizations.
Logging
Every process can now be documented. Log messages are sent to three additional destinations – including Simple History, Syslog, and Slack.
Versatility
WP-Optimize Premium is available in multiple languages and subscriptions can also be paid for with multiple currencies.
Geolocation and WooCommerce compatible
Your international WooCommerce store requires an effective geolocation feature to offer country-specific content, determine appropriate VAT and pricing. WP-Optimize Premium can even help with this.
Run from WP-CLI
You can run optimization commands straight on the command line and receive detailed results on screen.
Power tweaks
This is an advanced option for experienced users. Power tweaks improve your site’s performance by aiming at certain weak points in your website or other plugins.
Purge pages
This lets you delete HTML copies of your page(s). With the Premium version, you can purge pages when needed – For example, when you update a media file or create a new post.
Prevent individual page caching
You can use Premium to prevent selected pages on your website from being cached. An example of such a page is the admin page. This feature can also help improve security.
Premium support
Upgrading to Premium automatically gives you Premium support. Your queries will be promptly addressed by WP-Optimize experts.
Conclusion
If you are serious about getting the best performance out of your site and giving your visitors the best user experience possible, then the short and simple answer is yes – upgrading to WP-Premium is totally worth it. With so many extra Premium features available, the added benefits will remove all doubts once you realize how important factors such as removing unwanted images, lazy loading, power tweaks and premium support are to the success and speed of your site.
Download WP-Optimize Premium today and see the difference for yourself.
The post Why You Need to Upgrade to WP-Optimize Premium appeared first on UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus – Backup, restore and migration plugin for WordPress.