Welcome to WordPress!

WordPress displays a helpful welcome message when you first login after installing a new WordPress site, but it’s a little too brief to be helpful to new users. We’re constantly teaching our friends about WordPress so we’ve put together a quickstart guide for new users with this article below!

Logging into WordPress

Let’s start right from the beginning — how do you login to WordPress? You can get to the Admin for any WordPress site by going to

sitename.com/wp-admin/

However, If WordPress isn’t installed in the root directory, you’ll need to adjust the path, e.g.

sitename.com/blog/wp-admin/

Tip: Bookmark the URL to save you from typing it every time you want to login to WordPress.

Hide inessential Dashboard widgets

One of the biggest complaints we hear from new users is that the WordPress Admin is too cluttered. That’s really easy to remedy.

Hide Dashboard modules with Screen Options

Click the Screen Options in the top right of the screen to reveal a list of modules that are available for the Dashboard. Deselect the ones you don’t need and their associated modules you don’t need will be hidden from the Dashboard. You can even choose to display the page modules in 1–4 columns.

Tip: The Screen Options tab appears on every page, allowing you to customize your entire WordPress experience.

Customize site settings

Next stop is to customize your site settings by going to Admin → Settings → General. Here is what the settings do:

Site Title & Tagline — These describe your site and are displayed in the header and page title of your website or blog for many themes. It’s important to use a descriptive Site Title and Tagline because it’s what visitors will find you with.

WordPress and Site Address — Don’t change this or you may get locked out of your site!

Email Address — This is the address that WordPress uses to send notifications from. For example, new comment notifications are sent from this address. Set it to something generic like wordpress@yoursite.com.

Membership and New User Default Role — You can allow visitors to sign up for your website as Subscribers or any other role from the dropdown. This does pose a security risk so it’s best to leave it off unless you need it.

Date and Time — Choose a city in the same timezone as you. This is important for determining the correct time when you publish content on your website, and for scheduling posts to be published in the future.

Setup your permalinks

Permalinks are the URLs for each individual page on your site. By default, WordPress gives each post a permalink that looks like:

clickwp.com?p=591

Symbols and numbers in the URL aren’t very intuitive so we’ve customized our permalink structure to look like this:

clickwp.com/wordpress-first-steps

You can setup your permalink structure in the WordPress Admin → Settings → Permalinks.

Customize your site design

Out of the box, your site uses the Twenty Eleven theme. This theme comes with theme options, widgets, navigation menus, custom backgrounds and custom headers. Explore the settings pages under Admin → Appearance for your theme to personalize your site. FYI not all themes have the same features, so that’s why you may not see Backgrounds or Headers in the Appearance Menu for some themes.

You can also install and activate new themes directly from the Admin. Go to Admin → Appearance and click on the Install Themes tab to search and browse for themes from the WordPress Free Themes Directory.

Fill out your profile

Now click on your username in the top right of the site. This will bring you to your profile page where you can change preferences, personalize your user profile and change your password.

Tip: Take the time to fill out the Biographical Info box. Some themes will display your bio underneath your posts. Scroll down to see an example.

Get a Gravatar

We’ll now leave your site and continue our first steps at Gravatar.com. What’s a Gravatar? The site explains:

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

Gravatars are a great way to display a consistent identity or brand image throughout your website and other sites that you may comment and participate on. It’s also completely free! Just follow the instructions on the site to set it up.

Gravatars are linked to your email address, so be sure to use the same email address as in your profile from above. Once you’ve set up your Gravatar, it will appear with your author bio and comments. Yes, it even works when you comment on other sites.

Best thing about Gravatar? Update it at Gravatar.com, and all your gravatar images are updated on your site and all other sites that use the service too. Cool huh?

Sign up for Akismet

The next thing we like to recommend WordPress users to sign up for is Akismet, a spam filtering service for your website. Unfortunately spam is an unavoidable part of modern life. As a website owner you’ll get spam on any forms that you have on your website including contact and comment forms.

After signing up for Akismet, you’ll need to activate the Akismet plugin for your site. This allows Akismet to scan each comment your site receives and determine if it’s spam or ham. Taking this single step will greatly reduce or eliminate spam comments on your WordPress site completely, so we highly recommend doing so.

Please note that although Akismet is a paid service, they do offer a free, personal option for bloggers. And because Akismet is made by the same guys who oversee the WordPress project, the Akismet plugin is included in every WordPress installation. Learn more about how it works.

Understand the risks

We know you’re excited to tell the world about your new site but hold on! We want to have a serious talk with you about something that doesn’t get covered enough.

It’s a great feeling to have a website where you can install plugins and themes, display advertising and write about anything you want. You can do anything, it’s your site!

You can do anything — you can also totally mess up your site.

This is especially true for those of you who have migrated over from Blogger, Tumblr or WordPress.com — there is no more system in place to prevent you from accidentally making a terrible mistake. Make sure to read the instructions of plugins and themes carefully before you install them.

The internet is also a dangerous place with hackers and criminals on the prowl. They would love to hijack your pride-and-joy to distribute malware or use it in phishing scams. You can protect yourself by making sure that WordPress and all plugins and themes are kept up to date.

Be sure to also consider implementing a WordPress backup solution so that if the worst does happen, you’re not left out in the cold. There are lots of plugins that can help you with this so please take the time to research your options, or contact us for help.

Now you’re off to the races!

Congratulations! If you followed the steps above after installing WordPress you’ll be ahead of most new users and you’ll be heading down the road to success. Enjoy your new site and have fun!

We’re thinking of publishing a Part 2 to this article. Was there anything that we left out? Please tell us in the comments. Did you enjoy the article? Please share it with your friends!

Thanks for reading

The Business Circle by the Economic Transformation Programme

The Official ETP Blog is one of the media hubs of the Economic Transformation Programme. The blog is constantly evolving and adapting to the needs of the ETP communications team. Because of this, the ETP chose ClickWP as a partner whom they could turn to for advice on all aspects of running and maintaining a WordPress website.

Recently the ETP rebranded their blog to ‘The Business Circle’ and launched a makeover too. The design was created by Ximnet, a Malaysian digital agency who built and manages their main website. ClickWP took the design and converted it into a Genesis child theme. We chose to build the site on the Genesis theme framework for two main reasons:

1. We could rapidly develop the child theme by taking advantage of the built-in features of Genesis like breadcrumbs, threaded comments, and functions to create the grid posts and new theme options. These may be small features but they add up to development time.

2. Being a high profile site, we wanted to ensure that the theme was as secure as possible.

The ETP Blog is a winner!

Recently the ETP Blog was recognized in the World Bloggers and Social Media Awards 2012. The blog was named the winner of the Best Public Agency of the Year category.

Congratulations to the ETP communications team! ClickWP is proud to work with you and we look forward to supporting your digital communications efforts.

My personal blog got hacked last month. Ouch. Visitors who clicked a search result link to my site were getting redirected to some Russian site. Luckily I realized it pretty quickly and fixed it within 24 hours, but the damage had been done — I lost almost a day’s worth of traffic and some new visitors.

I did however, learn an important lesson from the experience — website clutter can get you hacked.

What’s lying in the hidden corners of your website?

After fixing my site I immediately investigated the source of the hack to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I realized that the attack vector was an old inactive theme laying around on my web server.

Yes, not clearing out my old theme files got me hacked. I can just hear my mom’s voice telling me to pick up my room…

This outdated theme was vulnerable to the TimThumb exploit. Although it was inactive, the vulnerable script was still there on my web server. A bot probably just checked whether /wp-content/themes/themename/timthumb.php exists on my server and when it found the script there, it proceeded to exploit my site.

If you have the Thesis or Headway 2.x themes, or older WooThemes you should go into your WordPress dashboard and delete the old versions of those themes from your server immediately. These are a few themes that I’ve used and that I know may trip you up because of how the update mechanisms work.

Note: Headway 3.x does not have this problem any more so you should definitely upgrade if you’re still sticking with version 2.x

Outdated plugins and themes

I’ve stressed the importance of keeping WordPress updated before, but here’s another piece of advice that should be taken to heart: delete your inactive plugins and themes.

We all love installing plugins and themes. Unfortunately we’re not so good at clearing out old plugins and themes. As I learnt the hard way, having inactive themes and plugins just laying around on the server can pose a security risk.

You may think that keeping your themes and plugins up to date is enough to avoid this. Not quite. What if the theme or plugin author didn’t manage to fix the bugs and security vulnerabilities? Your theme would report no updates, but the vulnerability would still be there.

Clear out the clutter. If a theme or plugin is not in use, don’t just leave them laying inactive on your site. Delete them to make sure that they don’t come back to bite you in the ass.

Old backup files

Other pieces of clutter that are potential disasters waiting to happen are backup files left in your root directory. I’ve logged into many web servers and I see stuff like this:

public_html
- sitename.com_v1
- wp-admin
- wp-content_old
- wp-content
- ...

Do you see the problem? Outdated files in the the backup folders can contain outdated plugins and themes, and vulnerable files that can be used to exploit your site. If you need to store backup files on your web server, don’t let them clutter up the public_html directory. You should zip up your files and put them above the public_html directory.

Outdated files are dangerous, even if they’re not active

Your website clutter is just waiting to trip you up

WordPress is actually a very secure platform but we constantly overlook “the little stuff” which then compromises our sites. Remember that inactive themes and plugins can contain vulnerable code which can be executed by anyone with a web browser.

If a hacker finds it, you can be sure their next step is to exploit your site. The next thing you know, your site will be redirecting people to phishing sites, spreading malware or worse, be used in phishing scams.

So before that happens, have a quick look around your web server and clear out any clutter that may be waiting to trip you up. If you need help, give us a shout on Twitter by tweeting @clickwp or get in touch via our contact form.

Hassle-free WordPress Security, Updates and Backups

Let ClickWP take care of your website security. We implement measures to keep your site safe, update your plugins and themes regularly, and make daily backups of your site content and files.

Find out more about our ClickProtect service

The new and improved CumiDanCiki.com with customized theme

Cumi & Ciki Food and Travel Blog is a popular Malaysian blog by Mei (@agentcikay). The blog has gone through several incarnations and needed a makeover and loading time optimization. However like many bloggers, Mei didn’t have the budget for a full redesign, so she turned to ClickWP for advice.

We advised her to select a ready-made premium theme from StudioPress to save costs*. We then customized the theme to add on the top featured posts section. ClickWP also optimized her database and threw out a number of redundant plugins to reduce her server load and improve the blog’s loading time.

Her new site runs on the Genesis theme framework by StudioPress which provided a solid foundation to grow on and made it easy to add new features. StudioPress themes and Genesis also provide great SEO control, theme options galore and bulletproof security.

Mei, and most importantly her readers, love the new site. Here’s what Mei had to say about her experience:

David and ClickWP did a fantastic job customizing a WordPress theme for me. What impressed me most was how consistent they were with communication and how they understood what I was looking for, in a new theme. At one stage I received an email every day upgrading me on the status of my job, which was delivered very quickly.

My blog now loads faster and is more zippy. Readers have commented that it is easier to navigate. Not only that, ClickWP also provided documentation and tips to help me make my blog more efficient. I’ve used this service now for several blog related issues, and have nothing but good things to stay about it.

If you’d like to have your site or blog revamped or optimized, please contact us and we’ll be happy to provide a proposal.

* All customers of our ClickAssist support plans get free access to all StudioPress themes as part of our Premium WordPress Toolkit program.

I’m proud to have played a small part in securing a venue for the WordPress party at SXSW 2012. Jane Wells tells the story on the WordPress blog:

Once upon a time, David Wang had a business called Buzzmedia in Malaysia, with the twitter username @buzzmedia. When David changed gears and started ClickWP, a WordPress support business, he stopped going by the Buzzmedia name. In the U.S., a company also called Buzzmedia wished it had that Twitter username, and asked if they could have it since David wasn’t going to use it anymore.

David, feeling the WordPress community love, said he would give them the name, and suggested they do something in return for the WordPress Foundation. So, everyone talked to everyone else and it worked out that Buzzmedia was willing to donate a fantastic venue for this year’s party as well as covering the bar.

In the end, the Foundation got a great SXSW party, Buzzmedia got their twitter username, and David got the warm glow of having used his power for the good of the WordPress community, and they all lived happily ever after.

I’m glad that everyone lived happily ever after, though I do wish I could attend the party and SXSW in person. If you’re traveling to SXSW and hanging out at this awesome party, could you send me a tshirt? Have fun guys!

Over $1000 of premium WordPress themes and plugins available for free to ClickAssist support plan customers.

We’re very excited to announce our Premium WordPress Toolkit, and we think it’s something you’ll love as well.

ClickWP has many premium WordPress themes and plugins in our toolkit. Because we own developer licenses for them, we are able to use them on customers sites. That means you are able to make use of the themes and plugins in our toolkit, without having to purchase a license for them yourself.

Today we are introducing a formal program for you to access our toolkit for your own site. Let us know which theme or plugin you’d like to use on your site by creating a ticket in the Client Area. We will then install it for you.

We’re launching the Premium WordPress Toolkit with the following:

StudioPress themes — beautiful, functional premium themes including the highly acclaimed Genesis framework.

Gravity Forms — flexible and powerful form builder for contact forms, order forms, PayPal payments and more.

Obox Mobile — the best mobile-optimized theme, used by The Next Web, Macstories and right here on ClickWP.

And we’ll be adding more to the toolkit as time goes on.

Terms & Conditions

The Premium WordPress Toolkit program allows you access to the themes and plugins in our toolkit, but not the support resources of the theme or pluign vendor. If you require access to the support resources, you should purchase a license directly from the vendor.

The items in our toolkit can only be used on the site being managed under your ClickAssist support plan.

Only ClickAssist support plans customers qualify for the Premium WordPress Toolkit program.

We reserve the right to refuse your requests to plugins and themes in our toolkit.

ClickWP introduces professional WordPress support plans for bloggers, small businesses and web publishers, simplifying the chore of running and maintaining a WordPress website without paying high hourly fees.

Managing a website is hard work. It’s even harder when you’ve got to run a business, deal with customers and do the laundry all at the same time. And why does adding something new in WordPress always seem so hard?

Or maybe you have a blog. You love writing it, your audience is growing but gosh if you could only figure out how to add a newsletter opt-in, or tweak the header design it would be perfect.

You may also need help with lots of small details that doesn’t warrant hiring an expensive designer. So you try to figure it out through Google, support forums and tutorials… and end up wasting hours of time.

Sound familiar? These are the reasons why ClickWP is launching our new WordPress support plans.

Our goal is to provide first class support from people who truly understand WordPress at affordable rates for bloggers and small business owners. In other words, we want to make sure we’ve got your back whenever you need us.

Introducing ClickAssist and ClickProtect

Our plans provide assistance for anything WordPress related – help with WordPress features, themes, plugins and integrations with popular web services like Mailchimp, Google Analytics, Feedburner and more.

We have 3 ClickAssist plans that provide 1 to 5 hours of WordPress help per month for customers with different needs. Rounding out our support plans is ClickProtect, which is an on-demand support plan. Learn more about our plans.

Subscribers to our plans will have access to our newly built Client Area where they can submit and manage their support requests. All plans come with automatic nightly backups, WordPress, plugin and theme updates and a monthly WordPress security audit.

We’re really proud of our Client Area, which is our helpdesk built with WordPress. It allows you to track support requests, it’s got a growing knowledgebase and functions as a central location for your customer history. It’s also mobile-optimized so you can access it from your tablet or smartphone on the go!

Launch Promotion – Lifetime 20% discount!

To celebrate the launch of our support plans, we’re giving the first 20 members who sign up for any plan between now and Jan 31 a lifetime 20% discount.

There’s no coupon code or hoops to jump through. Just sign up at our Client Area and select a plan to enjoy lifetime savings. Places are limited to 20 so please hurry!

Sign up for our support plans, or read more details.

Case in point – our new ClickWP Client Area. I built it over the last 2–3 weeks and was pleasantly surprised at how little actual coding I had to do.

Client Area Features

Client Area Dashboard

Add a Ticket

Watch Tickets

Agent Dashboard

Agent Tickets

Organized communication

Knowledgebase

Here are the key features of the Client Area:

• Fully-featured ticket system
• Knowledgebase
• Private customer history
• Front-end editing of user profiles
• Mobile, responsive layout
• Email notifications with custom design
• Socially connected accounts
• Protected content for members
• PayPal shopping cart integration

The Client Area allows ClickWP to provide high quality help with WordPress for customers of our WordPress support plans. Let’s have a look at how it was put together.

Built from ready-made components

I built the Client Area with almost no custom development at all. The majority of the coding work was theme customization, which a competent designer is capable of. No need for developers.

The site was largely built from readily-available themes and plugins. The foundation of the site was built with SupportPress by WooThemes, a theme that turns WordPress into a support helpdesk. The theme took care of the ticket system, knowledgebase, custom user profiles and the responsive layout. I did a little theme customization to modify the overall styling, the guest homepage, login page and author archives page.

The next major component is the socially connected accounts. I decided that signing up and logging into the Client Area with Facebook / Twitter / etc was an important feature because I wanted to reduce the friction of creating another account. That was made possible by the Janrain Engage plugin. It took a little bit of setup, but it was pretty straightforward and now my members can login without having to remember yet another password.

The third major component of the Client Area was the membership system. SupportPress comes with a basic membership functionaility (you can make the site accessible to logged-in users only) but I needed multiple membership levels (support plans) and an integrated shopping cart.

After considering Digital Access Pass, Wishlist Member and s2Member, I decided to go with s2Member because its roles and custom capabilities approach to membership levels seemed flexible and because the price was right–the basic version of s2Member is free. It may not be the most user friendly membership plugin, but I’m glad that I went with s2Member.

Another plugin I used for the Client Area was Gravity Forms for the various forms on the site. I’m considering allowing unregistered members to post support tickets, provided they pay a deposit upfront and have got that feature working with the official Gravity Forms PayPal add-on and the GF Custom Post Types plugin by Brad Vincent.

Is it perfect? No. Does it get the job done? Absolutely.

SupportPress is a lightweight alternative but not a replacement to something like Zendesk or Tender. It’s missing some features from full-fledged helpdesk solutions. For example, it lacks an email piping feature (turning emails into support tickets) which I hope WooThemes will add sometime soon.

However I needed something more than a helpdesk. I needed something that would help manage our WordPress support business. There was nothing on the market (that I could find anyway) that did what I needed. But thanks to WordPress and some planning, plugins and hacking, I managed to create a unique customer portal for ClickWP.

The Client Area website is yet another example of the flexibility of WordPress. I take my hat off to Matt and the Automattic team for making a tool that is not only powerful, but is easy to use and more importantly, easy to create with.

Less Clutter, More Focus

The admin screens have been updated in WordPress 3.3, with a focus on streamlining the layout and reducing clutter. The first thing you’ll probably notice are the new Pointers, a new feature that is being introduced in this version.

Pointers function to highlight and explain new changes, like the redesigned Dashboard. Plugin authors can also take advantage of this feature to quickly walk you through important details and changes.

The next thing you’ll notice is the new Toolbar, which is a consolidation of the Admin bar and old header. Hovering over the toolbar items will reveal submenus, when available, for quick access.

Like the new Toolbar, the redesigned navigation also helps to reduce clutter by making use of flyout menus.

I took a day or two to adjust to having menus fly out whenever I moved my mouse over the left side of the screen, but now I love it because it hides all the additional submenus and reduces visual clutter in the admin screens.

Workflow Improvements

The following new features have also improved my workflow when publishing new content.

My favorite new feature by far is the drag and drop media uploader. Instead of browsing through my hard drive for images and files to upload, I can just drag and drop them into the Media Uploader window. Sweet!

I’m always logging into the admin screens from my mobile devices to tweak settings, fix typos, etc. Certain admin screens in WordPress 3.3 have been optimized for iPad and tablet devices. For example, the 3 column Edit Post screen changes into a single column layout with a collapsed navigation on the iPad.

For sites with many administrators, the improved collision alert will tell you more accurately when someone is editing the same Post or Page that you are on so that you don’t accidentally overwrite each other’s work.

Attention to Detail

Finally there are many little tweaks that I really appreciate in WordPress 3.3. For instance, the automatic post slugs are now smarter and will not include special characters in the post slugs.

In the example above, I had used the » character which was then automatically added to my post slug. I didn’t realize it and the published the post. Do you know how difficult it is type » ?? This feature will also save you from getting  “, ”, &, → and other hard-to-type characters in your post slugs which will cost you traffic because your post becomes more difficult to share.

Another nice touch that site owners will appreciate is how WordPress 3.3 remembers the positions of widgets when switching themes. In previous versions, testing a new theme and switching back to the old one would reset the widgets. Now you can test a new theme, switch back to the old one and the widgets will still be in place.

Get Ready To Update

With so many improvements and new features, WordPress 3.3 is a compelling upgrade. Just remember to update your plugins and themes before updating WordPress to prevent any compatibility issues. Staying updated is a simple process that literally takes seconds (watch a 17-second video of how to update WordPress). Staying updated also prevents WordPress from getting hacked, so be sure not to make the mistake of using outdated versions.

Backing up doesn’t hurt either. WordPress upgrades usually go smoothly, but in the event that you have a plugin that doesn’t work with WordPress 3.3 you can revert to the backup. ClickWP can help with updating WordPress to the latest version and also by implementing a solid WordPress backup strategy.

Want to know the minute WordPress 3.3 is available to the public? You can follow @ClickWP on Twitter, or sign up to our mailing list. We’ll send out an announcement once we get the news.

The W3 Total Cache plugin, or W3TC, is a powerful caching plugin used by top sites like Mashable, Smashing Magazine and MakeUseOf.com. W3TC can help your site pages load quicker, help withstand traffic spikes and provides loads more features. Best of all, W3TC is free.

To measure the performance increase when using W3TC, let’s start by performing a Page Speed Test at https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/. Here are the results of The ClickStarter before we activated W3TC.

Before Caching — 71/100

Let’s see if we can do better with W3TC.

W3 Total Cache Guide

1. Install the Plugin

The first step to using W3TC is installing the plugin. You can install W3TC directly from your WordPress admin area or by manually uploading the plugin to your wp-content/plugins directory.

Once installed, remember to Activate the plugin. Now go to the Performance » General Settings page in your WordPress admin.

The first time that you activate W3TC, you’ll see a note at the top of the page saying that Preview mode is active. You may also see a notice telling you to change your directory permissions back to 755 after installing the plugin.

We’ll deal with this later. Now, it’s time to tackle the settings.

2. Configure Settings

This is the most daunting step of setting up and using W3TC because of the many, many options and advanced settings. It’s not possible to cover all of W3TC’s settings in detail but this article will guide you through the general settings page and get you set up.

W3TC provides multiple ways to cache your WordPress site. The General Settings page allows you to turn the available caching methods on or off with the default configuration.

Here is our recommended settings for websites on shared hosting:

Page Cache – Enabled with Disk:Enhanced or Disk:Basic method

Minify — Disabled

Database Cache — Enabled with Disk method

Object Cache — Enabled with Disk method

Browser Cache — Enabled

CDN — Disabled, unless you use a CDN service

Varnish — Disabled, only applicable for really large sites

CloudFlare — Enabled if you have already setup your site to work with CloudFlare. Otherwise, leave it Disabled.

If your site is hosted on a virtual private server (VPS) or better, you’ll have the option of enabling the above caching methods with Opcode or Memcache. The exact configuration will depend on your setup, so consult your server administrator.

We recommend disabling Minify because it has a high possibility causing bugs with your themes and plugins. You should only enable Minify if you have a web developer helping you sort through the bugs.

3. Disable Preview Mode

Now that you’ve configured all the settings, it’s time to enable caching on your site. At the top of the W3TC General Settings page, locate the General box and click the blue Disable button to disable Preview mode. Congratulations, caching is now enabled on your site.

If W3TC gave you a notice about your wp-content directory being writable, you should change it’s permissions back to 755 now.

4. Empty the Cache as Needed

W3TC refreshes your website’s cached pages periodically, but ocassionally you’ll want to update the cache immediately e.g. after you update a post or install / deactivate plugins or themes. You can update the cache easily by clicking the Empty All Caches link from the Admin toolbar or from the W3TC settings pages.

Keep Optimizing

Let’s have a look at the results of our caching by running the Page Speed Test again.

After caching — 75/100

The ClickStarter managed to gain 4 speed points after implementing caching. It’s not a fantastic increase, but it’s a good result for 5 minutes work.

W3TC is a quick and easy way to get started with caching, but if you want better results you’ll have to work for it. To improve your page speed further, here are some other things to do on your site.

1. Reduce the number of images on your site, or combine them into a single image. See how YouTube and Facebook make use of this technique.

2. Reduce the number of active plugins. Many plugins load additional CSS and JavaScript files which add on to the page load time.

3. Install the Lazy Load plugin. This plugin delays images from loading on your website until visitors scroll down far enough to see them.

4. Use advanced embed code for social widgets. While more difficult to implement, the advanced embed code usually has cool features like deferred loading which reduces page load speed.

5. Upgrade to a more expensive server (approximately $50/mo) to enable better caching methods in W3TC. We recommend Site5 VPS if you are serious about upgrading.

WordPress optimization is a big and complex topic. We hope that you now have a better idea of what caching is and how to implement it. Do keep in mind that installing a caching plugin alone can only do so much. If you have further questions about caching, please leave a comment or get in touch.