WordPress – Deployment Issues and Best Practices

WordPress is undoubtedly the most popular tool for creating blogs and sites. Its remarkable ease of use and the fact that it is free to use makes it the downloaded tool among non-techies.

Like all other software programmes, it has its issues, none of which can be fixed or avoided by a better understanding of WordPress and the best ways to deploy it. Here we list some of the most problematic issues faced by users viz consistency and scalability, site outages due to overloaded site infrastructure, page errors and reduced online conversions and how to avoid them.

A significant factor contributing to the popularity of WordPress is its design flexibility and ease of use. However, this in turn leads to a tendency to overload the site dragging down site performance and speed. Ease of designing, creating and uploading the site means that people often overlook the site performance factor leading to a heavy front-end weighing several megabytes. Also WordPress sites encourage embedding third party components and widgets from sites like Facebook and Google Ads as also video and live chat assets to enhance engagement which can also drag down site performance. Keep the number of widgets on the homepage to as low a number as possible, instead place the more important one on secondary pages which can be shared viz blog posts. Also resize/optimize large images before uploading. You can also use software like ImageOptim for optimizing images. Another alternative is to combine CSS files manually or through plug-ins. The best practice is to engage a CDN (Content delivery network) to help deliver the content files from the server closest to the content. This speeds up site performance allowing content to be delivered to the user much faster.

Plugins have become a fundamental part of the WordPress universe as they give designers and developers the freedom to build on existing websites quicker and (possibly) better. They save time, enhance the speed of your website and play an important role in improving SEO. With statistics showing more than 20,000 plugins and over 330,000,000 download there is no denying their use and importance. However, relying too much on plugins can expose your site to an increasingly wide variety of risks. Absence of any standards and norms means that there are a whole lot of poorly developed plugins available which can cause a lot of problems to the site. Some of the common ones faced by users due to a badly built plugins are

• Site becomes extremely slow
• Increase in vulnerability due to lack of lack of good data sanitization and validation
• Non-availability of Plugin updates

It is important to first determine the need for a plugin and then do a thorough research on the best available plug-ins, the credibility and track record of the author especially in terms of updates to the plug in and support available before installing it on your wordpress site.

• WordPress works fine upto a certain volume of traffic, typically for traffic volume below 1,00,000 visitors, but is unable to scale up if the traffic increases exponentially. Since the typical architecture is to use PhP + MySQL on a single server instance it has limitations in scaling up with traffic requests. Server load is impacted as requesting the same sources again and again over time increases the risk of server downtime and there is risk of the site shutting down totally. The Super Cache plug-in is a tool for helping you scale your WordPress site. Super Cache presents your website to visitors by generating a “static HTML file,” something that enables your site to load much faster. As per WordPress a typical blog won’t see much difference with Super Cache but if your site is generating heavy traffic or the servers are underpowered, the plug-in will speed things up. Also if you are looking at high traffic Wordfpress site, Apache and Linux platforms are the best platforms to use to build the site.
• WordPress sites are not by default optimized for mobiles, hence very often users face lag in sites loading onto their smartphones. With smartphones gaining increasing market share, the risk of lost conversions is high. However, this should not remain an issue for much longer as the developer community has come out with some very good plugins, some free and some available at a premium. The best part is that you will not need to make any changes to the current way that your site looks as once installed, the theme detects what kind of browser is being used by whoever visits, and loads the mobile theme when it detects a mobile web browser. Some of the more popular pluugins catering to this need include Any Mobile Them Switcher, WordPress Mobile Pack and WP Mobile Detector.

Lastly, a best practice recommended nowadays for managing your WordPress site is to create versions for your website, depending on how complex your website is. If you make future changes and accidentally impact something, you can reverse your changes just like with your source code projects.

As someone once said, “A good beginning is half the work done”, so make sure to employ the correct tools to ensure that you have a world class wordpress site.