Things You Should Be Doing To Optimise Your WordPress Site

In an ideal world, we could just set up a WordPress site and it would magically take care of itself. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The reality, though, is that websites require maintenance. Here are some easy things you should be doing to optimise your WordPress website after the web design stage that will make a big difference in its performance and SEO rankings.

Update to the latest version of WordPress, plugins, and themes

You know those pesky little notices that pop up on your WordPress dashboard, asking you to update this or that? Stop ignoring them and start heeding their commands.

• First, make sure you’re up to date with the latest version of WordPress.
• Next, update any plugins that need updating. Update WordPress first before updating your plugins, in case of compatibility issues.
• Last, update your themes. If you don’t use and don’t plan to use any themes that you have installed, delete them. (WordPress comes with a few themes pre-installed that have frequent updates, so it’s best to just delete them so you won’t be bothered by them.)

Keep your WordPress plugins updated.

Clean up your plugins

You should only have plugins installed that are currently active (i.e. are in use on your site) or may be active in the near future. As for the rest: deactivate and delete them. Having too many plugins installed can slow down your WordPress site or potentially cause issues.

Upload images sized for web

Before you upload an image to your WordPress website, make sure you resize it so that it’s smaller than the original file. It’s not uncommon for images to be 10 to 20 megapixels straight out of your camera, which equates to large file sizes and images sized from 3000 pixels and up on the long edge. You’ll rarely need images this large for your website. Instead, try resizing them to about 1024 pixels on the long edge, or however wide the section on your website is that will contain these images.

Optimising images on your WordPress site

Optimise images for keywords

There are a couple things you can do to optimise images so that your website shows up on Google for your keyword phrases:

• Save the image file with a name containing your keyword phrase. If the phrase contains more than one word, put a hyphen between them (e.g. keyword “digital marketing agency” would be digital-marketing-agency.jpg in an image filename). Be sure to exclude stop words.
• Write descriptive alt text. WordPress gives you an option to fill in the Alt Text box upon inserting an image. Instead of leaving it blank or with the default filename saved in there, describe what the image shows, and include your keyword phrase where it fits naturally. (e.g. alt=”Digital marketing agency team planning a campaign”)

Contact us to learn more about the web design services and SEO services we offer at Rock Solid Marketing.