Dotty Scott walks through how to speed up a mobile WordPress site. Remove unused themes and plugins, avoid duplicates, and check if your host offers backups and caching. Keeping plugin count low improves performance, security, and search rankings.
site. But what can you do about it, really? You as the DIY business owner, what can you really do about getting your website to load fast on mobile? And quite frankly, why do you care? I'm Dotty Scott with Premium Websites. I empower business owners to embrace technology in their business, and you care because slow-loading mobile websites don't rank nearly as high in the search engines as fast-loading websites. And you really want to be comparing yourself to your competition as far as how fast does it need to be, because you want to rank well with your competition. Doesn't matter about other people that are outside of your keyword range. Doesn't matter. But what can you do? So as a website designer, I see this often, and I kind of understand the thought process behind it, but I'll go into a WordPress website for a client or potential client, and I'll see 20 themes in there, and I'll see 30 plugins, and a lot of times the plugins aren't even being used. But they're there. And I ask, why do you have all this here? Oh, well, I might need it, or I used it at one time and now I'm not using it, and I might need it again. And, you know, as far as the themes go, I have no idea why they're all in there. I just know they're there. So here's the thing. All of that is overhead for your resources on your website. You need one theme, whatever theme you're using, and you need a default fallback theme. That's it. Anything else in there, delete, get rid of. Not only is it wasting resources for you, it's holding space. It is also an access point for hackers. So the more of this stuff you have in there, the more insecure and hacker-friendly your website is, which we don't really want. So get rid of any theme you're not using, leave one default. I personally, on my default, I just leave it to whatever year we are for WordPress. So right now it's 2023 because they put out a theme every year. That's the one I leave. Does it matter? Not really, but it's my choice. On the plugins, Here's the— they're the huge resource taker uppers. If you don't need it, don't use it. And if you don't need it and you've deactivated it and there's nothing going wonky on your website, delete it. Because not only is it still holding space, again, it's an access point for hackers and it will slow your site down. So get rid of it. It's not necessary. Obviously, if it's deactivated, it's not necessary. The other thing you want to do is you want to not duplicate plugins. I have seen customers come to me with 2 backup plugins or 2 optimization plugins or 3 form plugins. You only need one. You don't need duplicates. Choose the one you want, get rid of the rest. The other thing you might look at is, does your server, so your hosting provider, do they provide some of these things? So if you're in shared hosting, the answer is probably no. But if you're in like a managed WordPress environment, Find out, do they do nightly backups? If so, you don't need that backup plugin. Are they caching your website at the server level? If they are, you don't need that caching plugin. Are they optimizing your images at the server level? If they are, you don't need that image optimization plugin. So really go through and pare down the plugins that you're using on your website. I really suggest no more than 10, and 10 is really a high number. There are some websites that I build that go out of the office here with 3. I may take it back in a year and they might have 20 and they're having problems. So plugins, themes, Something simple that a business owner can do to speed up your website. That helps for desktop, it helps for mobile, and it can even help your search engine rankings by doing this. If you want more tips like this, go ahead and follow me, subscribe to my channel wherever you are watching this, and I will see you tomorrow.
