Category Archives: Wordpress

Top 9 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Website in 2023

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As the digital world continues to evolve, having a fast-loading and efficient website is more important than ever. Slow websites can negatively impact user experience, search engine rankings, and conversion rates. If you own a WordPress website, you need to ensure that it loads quickly and efficiently to keep your visitors engaged. In this article, we will discuss the top 9 ways to speed up your WordPress website in 2023.

  1. Opt for a High-Quality Web Hosting Provider

Your web hosting provider plays a crucial role in the overall performance of your website. Opt for a reputable hosting provider that offers fast servers and solid-state drives (SSDs) to boost website speed. Invest in a managed WordPress hosting service, as these providers often optimize their servers specifically for WordPress.

  1. Use a Lightweight Theme

The theme you choose for your WordPress website can impact its loading speed. Lightweight themes have fewer features, scripts, and styles, which reduces the amount of data that needs to be loaded. To speed up your site, select a minimalistic theme or one specifically designed for performance. Avoid themes with excessive features or plugins that you don’t need.

  1. Optimize Images

Images are often the largest files on a website, and if not optimized properly, they can slow down your site significantly. To ensure your images don’t impact your site’s performance:

  • Compress your images using tools like TinyPNG or ShortPixel before uploading them to your site.
  • Use the right file format, such as WebP, for improved compression and quality.
  • Use lazy loading techniques to defer offscreen images until they are needed.
  1. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN is a network of servers spread across the globe that caches and delivers your website’s content to visitors from a server closest to their location. This reduces the latency and speeds up your site’s loading time. Popular CDNs include Cloudflare, Fastly, and KeyCDN.

  1. Minify and Combine CSS and JavaScript Files

Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters and whitespace from your code without affecting functionality. Combining multiple files into a single file reduces the number of HTTP requests your site needs to make, which helps improve loading speed. Use plugins like Autoptimize or WP Rocket to easily minify and combine your CSS and JavaScript files.

  1. Use Browser Caching

Browser caching enables your visitors’ web browsers to store static files, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript, locally. This reduces the number of requests to your server, resulting in faster loading times for returning visitors. Plugins like WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache can help you set up browser caching on your WordPress site.

  1. Optimize Your Database

Over time, your WordPress database can accumulate clutter, such as revisions, spam comments, and transient options, that can slow down your site. Regularly optimizing your database can help improve your site’s performance. You can use plugins like WP-Optimize or WP-Sweep to clean and optimize your database.

  1. Use a Caching Plugin

Caching is a technique that stores a static version of your website’s pages, reducing the need for your server to generate the content each time a visitor requests it. This significantly reduces server load and speeds up your site. Popular caching plugins include WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and WP Super Cache.

  1. Limit the Number of Plugins

While plugins can add functionality to your site, having too many can slow it down. Regularly audit your plugins and remove any that are unnecessary or outdated. Only use plugins from reputable sources, and make sure they are well-maintained and updated.

Speeding up your WordPress website is essential for providing a better user experience, improving search engine rankings, and increasing conversion rates. By following these nine tips, you can optimize your website for performance and ensure that your visitors enjoy a fast and efficient browsing experience. Remember, a well-optimized website not only keeps your visitors engaged but also reflects positively on your brand’s online presence. Stay updated with the latest optimization techniques and continuously monitor your site’s performance to maintain a competitive edge in the digital landscape.

Change Browse Listing Order in ElegantEstate Theme

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elegant-estate-header
One of the themes we were working with recently had great reviews from many esteemed businesses and web developers, giving us the option to heavily customize the front end without dealing with complicated MySQL database issues in order to keep costs down for the client. However, one inherent issue with the ElegantEstate theme evidenced by numerous posts in the ElegantThemes forums is the inability to customize the order of the ‘Browse Listings’ widget, which as one might imagine is a very large problem for realtors using the theme for their business since it does not look very professional if prices are not sorted numerically*

*The root cause of this issue is due to the way WordPress handles Categories, and stores the variable name as a STRING instead of an INTEGER or NUMERIC value, which works very well in most situations but in the case that categories are numbers the sorting is difficult to handle in an aesthetic manner

In any case, after a few minutes of playing around with a few ideas I had to fix the issue this solution was very simple and does NOT involve editing any of the core PHP files.

How to Change Browse Listing Order in ElegantEstate Theme

  1. Setup your Browse Listings categories as you would like them to be
  2. Rename the category you would like to list first with a value that will be listed first by WordPress ascending alphabetical logic (normally placing a few zero’s (“000”) in front of your variable will get it listed first)
  3. De-select everything in the Browse Listings widget for your particular Listings Options (1 2 3 or 4) under Appearance > Theme Options in the Browse Listings tab and click Save
  4. Re-select everything in the Browse Listings widget for your particular Listings Options, including the new category which will now be appended with the characters you placed in order to get it listed first
  5. Head over to the category page on the back end, and change your category back to the setting you would like it to be on the live site
  6. If done correctly, your live site should now be sorting your modified category properly!

 

My example is shown below with pictures, the ultimate goal being to have “2013 Spring” appear as the default selection in the third Listings option (by default, it is sorted Ascending Alphabetical so “2013 Spring” appears first).

After the initial setup, here is how things appear on the backend:

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Settings on the back end in Theme Options for Elegant Estate


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Settings for the 2013 Spring category, prior to the fix in Browse Listings for the Elegant Estate theme


Here is how this category appears on the front end, before the fix:

elegant-estate-front-end-category

In the end, our goal is to get the 2013 Spring category to appear first


We can use our knowledge that WordPress stores category data as a STRING to change the sort order of our options as desired. Below are the changes we will make on the back end to first get the “2013 Spring” data slot showing first:

elegant-estate-backend-change-one

We need to make a change so that the variable appears first (do not worry about what the final name will be right now). In this case I chose to rename 2013 Spring to 2010 Spring so that this category appears first in the list.


I am not sure if the slug needs to be changed as well, I more did it to help myself keep track of the changes and as a best practice with uniformity among categories.

After renaming the category in the order we want it to appear, it is then necessary to de-select the category from the back end in Appearance > Theme Options under the Browse Listings tab.

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In this case, I de-selected the 2013 Spring (renamed to 2010 Spring), 2012 Fall, and 2012 Spring categories, selected a random category, and clicked Save which made the change live in the database and the front end of the website temporarily.


After this change and clicking Save, we go back and change the categories back to what we would like them to be. In my case, I needed to select 2010 Spring (which will be renamed to 2013 Spring in the end), 2012 Fall and 2012 Spring.

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Finally, we can go back to the initial category we wanted to modify and change it to what we would like the final value to be (in this case, changing 2010 Spring to 2013 Spring).

elegant-estate-backend-second-image

Identical to the second image above, we change our settings back to what we would like them to be on the live site.


On the Live site, this is how the listing will now appear

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Elegant Themes are affordable and extremely customizable, which makes them a great choice for WordPress developers both novice and more experienced. The only issue is the documentation for these themes is not the best, but with a creative mind and a general knowledge of WordPress one can normally work out a solution to most problems with relative ease. If you would like to focus on what you do best and hire us to customize your theme, get in touch for a free quote and we will get back to you as soon as we can.