Why Best Practices Matter for Your Website

5 Effective Ways to Improve the Speed of Your WordPress Website

by Canada-Web-Services | Dec 31, 2023 | Best Practices

Having a fast-loading website is crucial for user experience and search engine optimization. Slow websites not only frustrate visitors, but they also tend to rank lower in search engine results. If you have a WordPress website and are looking to improve its speed, here are five effective ways to do so:

1. Optimize Images

Images are often the main culprits behind slow-loading websites. To optimize your images, start by resizing them to the appropriate dimensions for your website. You can use image editing software or online tools for this purpose. Additionally, compress your images without compromising quality. There are various plugins available for WordPress that can automatically optimize your images upon upload.

2. Use a Caching Plugin

Caching plugins are a great way to improve the speed of your WordPress website. These plugins create a static version of your website and serve it to visitors, reducing the load on your server. Popular caching plugins like WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache offer features like browser caching, minification of CSS and JavaScript files, and content delivery network (CDN) integration.

3. Minify CSS and JavaScript Files

Minifying CSS and JavaScript files involves removing unnecessary characters like spaces, line breaks, and comments from the code. This reduces the file size and improves loading times. There are plugins available, such as Autoptimize and Fast Velocity Minify, that can handle this task automatically. However, it’s important to test your website after minifying to ensure that everything is functioning correctly.

4. Optimize Your Database

WordPress websites rely on databases to store and retrieve content. Over time, these databases can become cluttered with unnecessary data, which can slow down your website. To optimize your database, you can use plugins like WP-Optimize or WP-Sweep. These plugins can clean up your database by removing spam comments, post revisions, and other unnecessary data, leading to improved website performance.

5. Choose a Fast and Reliable Hosting Provider

Your choice of hosting provider can have a significant impact on the speed of your WordPress website. Shared hosting plans, although affordable, can result in slower loading times due to the shared resources. Consider upgrading to a managed WordPress hosting provider or a virtual private server (VPS) for better performance. Look for providers that offer SSD storage, server-level caching, and a content delivery network (CDN) for optimal speed.

In conclusion, improving the speed of your WordPress website is essential for providing a better user experience and increasing your website’s visibility in search engine results. By optimizing images, using caching plugins, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, optimizing your database, and choosing a fast and reliable hosting provider, you can significantly enhance the speed and performance of your WordPress website.

Accessibility And Best Practices For Your Website

by Canada-Web-Services | May 1, 2022 | Best Practices

SEO, Best Practices and Accessibility Packages

Best practices for your website, errors, broken links and much more. Proper initial SEO for your website, meta tags, keywords and more.

Accessibility is the practice of making your websites usable by as many people as possible. We traditionally think of this as being about people with disabilities.

When websites and web tools are properly designed and coded, people with disabilities can use them. However, currently many sites and tools are developed with accessibility barriers that make them difficult or impossible for some people to use.

Making the web accessible benefits individuals, businesses, and society. International web standards define what is needed for accessibility. This just increases your chances at better sales, better search engines results and all around better service.

WHAT FACTORS COULD BE CONSIDERED BEST PRACTICES?

There are a number of factors that are taken into consideration from search engines that require you to use best practices on your websites. Below is a few of those:

Select a text that is easy to read.
Choose a color scheme that suits your brand.
Use white space to break up text and other elements.
Make your navigation simple and easy to use.
Make text simple and short and easy to understand.
Show using images instead of just telling.
Allow users to paste in passwords.

WHAT FACTORS COULD BE CONSIDERED FOR ACCESSIBILITY?

Accessibility is the practice of making your websites usable by as many people as possible. Below is a few of those that should be taken into consideration. these could be older people, Compatible with screen readers, people with low bandwidth connections or using older technologies, people with visual impairment:

Ability to enlarge your website content such as text while using a desktop down to a to a mobile device such as in pinch zoom up to 5x.
Images with alt tags for people with visual impairment.
Clear and precise text, not fancy or hard to read text. The most accessible fonts are Tahoma, Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, and Times New Roman.
Compatible with screen readers.
Images with high resolution.
No popups or anything that is moving on site that cannot be read or understood.
Colour scheme used on the website which may be difficult to see buttons and text.
Links and button names are simple and descriptive to understand.

An accessible created website is key to creating a great user experience for all your site’s visitors. Taking the extra time to make sure you are making your site accessible for everyone, will benefit everyone, including the website owner.