A CDN refers to a group of servers that are located in different geographic locations, in order to serve web content to visitors in that region.
The majority of website traffic today is served through a CDN, including well known websites such as Facebook, Google and Amazon.
What benefits does a CDN provide?
- Improved load times – by serving cached content from a location closer to the website visitor, the performance time is improved because data has to travel a shorter distance.
- Increased website availability and reliability – Heavy traffic can put significant load on a server and negatively impact performance & hardware failures can cause complete downtime in many cases. When using a CDN, your origin server experiences less traffic which means less load – and because the servers are in various locations, they are not at risk due to hardware failures.
- Improved Security – While this is an indirect benefit, a CDN can mitigate DDoS attacks, improve certificate management and various other tweaks. An infected or vulnerable website can have potentially catastrophic impacts to performance – along with costing you money to restore your website!
remove unused plugins and code
If you manage a WordPress website, then you have probably had to make decisions about which plugin to use to fill a specific need. It is important to know your plugins and how to use them, as many of them have overlapping features. It is also important to know where plugins are truly needed, some plugins load on pages where they aren’t used and can be removed from those pages to decrease load time.
How to start slimming down your website?
- Remove plugins you no longer need.
Sometimes you install a plugin for a project that is no longer needed, such as a CSV import plugin that was only used during setup. Any plugins that are completely unused are only adding overhead to your site and presenting unnecessary security risks – remove them. - Know your plugins and avoid redundant features.
There is often more than one plugin that can be used in a given scenario – but in many cases, you already have a plugin that can accomplish a task.
One example is the popular “redirection” plugin, used to setup HTTP redirects. This is a great plugin, however, if you already use RankMath SEO to manage your metadata and Webmaster Tools connections, then you can manage redirects inside RankMath and remove the unnecessary Redirection plugin.
This is only one example, but these scenarios are very common – so be sure to check your plugins for features you may not have seen at first glance. - Stop plugins from loading unnecessarily.
Some plugins are necessary for specific features or pages, but aren’t used on all pages of your site.
Unfortunately, not all plugins are efficiently coded, so they may load some scripts on all pages anyway – and these start to add up to a slow loading site.
One example, is the “Anywhere Elementor” plugin – a great solution for creating custom blocks and widgets for the Elementor page builder, but even if you only create a single block for your homepage, the plugin will load some scripts on every page.
To resolve this, you need to remove the scripts from your page.
Wordpress enables many features that most sites don’t need, including storing many revisions, enabling gravatars and custom emojis. You should take a look at which features you absolutely do not need and enable them to speed up your website.
Which WordPress functions can be optimized?
- Schedule spam comment cleanup.
If you have comments enabled on your site, there’s a good chance you’ll accumulate some spam comments.
You should enable removal of these comments to minimize clutter. - Emojis, Google Maps and Gravatars – a vast number of sites will never actually use these, so keeping them enabled can have a significant negative impact on speed.
- Pingbacks and trackbacks – you almost certainly don’t need them. These are similar to virtual comments when you link to another blog, notifying them of use of content.
- Set a limit on number of post revisions. Usually 5 revisions is plenty, unless you’re updating content on an hourly basis and regularly need to rollback content.
If you manage a WordPress website, then you have probably had to make decisions about which plugin to use to fill a specific need. It is important to know your plugins and how to use them, as many of them have overlapping features. It is also important to know where plugins are truly needed, some plugins load on pages where they aren’t used and can be removed from those pages to decrease load time.
How to start slimming down your website?
- Remove plugins you no longer need.
Sometimes you install a plugin for a project that is no longer needed, such as a CSV import plugin that was only used during setup. Any plugins that are completely unused are only adding overhead to your site and presenting unnecessary security risks – remove them. - Know your plugins and avoid redundant features.
There is often more than one plugin that can be used in a given scenario – but in many cases, you already have a plugin that can accomplish a task.
One example is the popular “redirection” plugin, used to setup HTTP redirects. This is a great plugin, however, if you already use RankMath SEO to manage your metadata and Webmaster Tools connections, then you can manage redirects inside RankMath and remove the unnecessary Redirection plugin.
This is only one example, but these scenarios are very common – so be sure to check your plugins for features you may not have seen at first glance. - Stop plugins from loading unnecessarily.
Some plugins are necessary for specific features or pages, but aren’t used on all pages of your site.
Unfortunately, not all plugins are efficiently coded, so they may load some scripts on all pages anyway – and these start to add up to a slow loading site.
One example, is the “Anywhere Elementor” plugin – a great solution for creating custom blocks and widgets for the Elementor page builder, but even if you only create a single block for your homepage, the plugin will load some scripts on every page.
To resolve this, you need to remove the scripts from your page.