Speed is very important online. First of all because the user’s get impatient after 3-4 seconds. Speed is also one of the factors that will improve your SEO ranking.
How do you speed up WordPress. First of all: use Lighthouse in the Chrome browser and follow the suggetions. On my website the images needed optimization. And for some reason the meta tag “description” was missing. Therefore the score was low.
Images
Some of my images were just too large. In the Media section you can crop and resize images. This will speed up things immediately.
Lighthouse suggested to install a lazy load plugin. Again the performance skyrocketed.
Missing Meta Description
The missing meta description ought to be a simple job for a plugin. I tried a few with no good result. Then I decided to add the missing SEO tags to the header.php.
I used the Open Graph tool in order to create the Social Media Specific tags. And an online meta tag creator. Again the result was amazing. The SEO score went from 87 to 91.
Below you see the meta tags I used:
<!-- Meta tags -->
<meta name="description" content="A large collection of free tutorials about: WordPress, REST API, JavaScript. Also you can get insight into the art of databases, PHP and much more.">
<meta name="keywords" content="WordPress, Linux, REST API, JavaSScript, PHP, free tutorial">
<meta name="copyright" content="Per Skolander Thykjaer Jensen">
<meta name="language" content="EN">
<!-- /meta tags -->
<!-- Open Graph Begin -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Multimusen - tips, tricks and tutorials about WordPress and UX">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Multimusen.dk">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://multimusen.dk">
<meta property="og:description" content="Hundreds of tutorials about WordPress development, REST API, JavaScript. Tutorials about WordPress backend, the database and PHP. By Per Skolander Thykjaer Jensen, MA IT.">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://multimusen.dk/wp-content/uploads/cropped-cropped-cropped-multimusen-150-150-1.png">
<!-- Open Graph End -->Now the SEO stuff shoul go in my theme’s <head> section. In a child theme this is easy:
- Copy the file header.php from the parent theme folder to the child theme folder.
- Copy-paste the meta tags somewhere convenient in the <head> section.
- Save the file and upload header.php .
Cache
One of the things that will speed up WordPress is a good cache. The cache will create static pages. These pages will load faster.
But when you edit your code remember to clear the cache. If you don’t see the result right away try to clear the cache – both on WordPress and in your browser. Suddenly things will work out fine.
Experiment with the cache – this will make your site really fast.
Leave a Reply