How to Burn the Fat of a New Born WordPress Site with a Few Simple Steps

Though WordPress has many complaints, specifically about security and speed, it is the most popular CMS in the world! We love its quick setup procedures, easy interface, and huge availability of resources like themes and plug-ins. But we don’t even spend a few minutes thinking about its performance or security. We got everything almost free, just do some quick clicks to set up the theme, install tons of plug-ins, upload some heavy content, then just leave everything with the very initial and generic username and password before going to sleep. Then one day we wake up in the morning and see some issues with the website or see actually something weird because it is hacked. But we didn’t take any security measures, we never thought to optimize our site and never ever thought to take any backup. So we start cursing the WordPress.

But is it really so tough to do simple things by yourself? I think it’s not. But maybe you are a busy individual and don’t have much time to do all the staff by yourself. Okay, that’s good for us, the WordPress Developers or Support Engineers. We are here to do those kinds of stuff for you.

Just kidding. Here I am going to reveal some simple techniques which will give you an amazing speed and performance boost to your WordPress sites. It will help me, too, like a to-do list for each and every WordPress (WP) site we work on.

Install a fresh WP site with an unusual username and stronger password

This is a very simple thing to do. Just don’t use ‘admin’ as your username and set a strong password. Try to generate the password using a password generator. Are you afraid of forgetting the password? Install and use a password manager solution like LastPass, you don’t have to remember a password anymore when creating an online account. But just don’t forget the master password of LastPass. Write it down and keep it in a safe and secured place. If you start using applications like LastPass, some memories of your brain will be freed up from remembering passwords and you will feel happy.

Delete unnecessary posts and pages

Delete default posts and pages after fresh WP installation, also from the trash. However, you can leave the privacy policy page. This is useful sometimes. Having a privacy policy on the website enhances the quality of the site and also acts as an important SEO factor.

Delete unnecessary comments

Although there should be no comments after the fresh installation, you can enter the comments section once as a routine checkup, if any comments need to be deleted.

Permalinks

From the settings, go to Permalinks Settings, select the Post Name option and save. While this is not a fat-burning issue but a very important task to do after a fresh WP installation. It helps the site URLs presented well which is very important for SEO until or unless you want to keep the date format in your post URLs.

Deleting unnecessary themes

1. Go to Appearance> Themes from Dashboard.
2. The theme you want to delete must be an Inactive theme. You have to go to the Details option of the theme.
3. The theme can be deleted by clicking the Delete button at the bottom right.

Note: If you work with your own theme, you can activate your theme and delete the rest.

Remove unnecessary plugins

1. From the Dashboard go to Plugins > Installed Plugins.
2. There are two default Inactive plugins called Akismet Anti-Spam and Hello Dolly. These can be deleted.
3. You have to delete them by pressing the delete button under the name of the plugins.

Refrain from creating copies of all four sizes of images

Uploading an image to WP produces three different sized copies, including the original uploaded image. Most of the time we use a single image (unless it is a heavy photography-related website).

To prevent WordPress from creating three sizes of an image, all you have to do is go to Settings > Media and set the Max Width and Max Height fields to zero (0).

But how do I size the image then? For this purpose, you can use any image editor (such as Photoshop or any other lightweight tool) to resize the image to the required size before uploading the image. Moreover, different image sizes can be set by custom CSS.

Note: Plugins can be used to resize the uploaded images, too. But why make your WP site heavy by installing a separate plugin for this simple task!?!

Conclusion

So above are some tasks which we can perform on a newborn WordPress website. But what about an old site with heavy loading time and unknown security issues? Yeah, alright, more articles will come on these topics where I will show step-by-step tips and tricks to optimize and secure any WordPress site.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read the article so far. I will try to update it more adding more tips from time to time. I hope this one will be a help to every WordPress lover and site owner. Feel free to comment or drop me a line if you have any words about this article.

Cheers!