WordPress Design Tips
We love WordPress, but when we are looking to optimise this blogging platform for speed and user experience – what are the best WordPress Design Tips we should consider?
Here is our list of WordPress Design Tips that can help optimise your Blog and page loading.
1. Don’t make changes to your core WordPress files.
WordPress release updates a couple times a year, at least. If you make changes to your core WordPress files then everytime there is an update you changes could be overridden.
Look at the various plugins available if you are looking to add additional functionality.
2. Check your CSS file
If your have lots of different styles in your CSS file, try condensing them or removing some that are not absolutely necessary. Too many styles in your CSS file can significantly increase page loading time.
3. Check your functions.php file
Similar your CSS file, if you have too many PHP scripts in your functions file this can increase page loading times.
4. Remove inactive and unused plugins
Not all WordPress plugins are perfect – therefore when you have a WordPress blog try to run as few plugins as you can. Not to try and sound like a skimp, but the more plugins the more PHP scripts, which again cause delays loading your site.
Also from a security perspective, some poorly coded plugins can have security flaws and therefore it’s best not to have them.
5. Cross Browser Checks
When you make changes to your blog, any of the files, layout or themes may sure you check your site is different web browsers.
As a minimum I would do checks in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari, Chrome and possible Opera web browsers.
6. WC3 Validation
VC3 Validation is good to make sure search engines can crawl your site easily. You can validate your site at: http://validator.w3.org/
8. Incorporate your most valuable features into your site, not around your site
You need to decide what features are most important to your website.
This may be Social Media, Photos, Video Integration, Displaying Photos.
If social media is going to be of significance to your blog, if you expect to attract as much traffic from social networking sites as possible – incorporate social media into your blog design. Don’t just slap your blog together then think ‘oo I need to add social media’.
Same for photos and videos. If you site is going to be largly photo/ video based content – make sure you pick a blog design and theme that incorporates this sort of content.
There are many WordPress themes available for Photo and Video Blogging. Start on the right foundation and this will serve you long into the future. Making changes to your blog when you have 500+ posts is not easy and often will break some sort of functionality.
We hope these WordPress Design Tips help optmise your blog and make it more efficient for your users.
