Launching a professional website these days is far less stressful than it once used to be, with the help of content platforms such as WordPress; anyone is able to launch their first website in less than a few hours.

After you've finalized the basic setup of your WordPress blog, it's time to look into using Themes and managing Plugins -- two important aspects that can turn your WordPress blog from a simple and traditional website, into a fully developed professional business website that's ready to serve clients, and acquire customers. The fun thing is, getting from one point to the other is really easy with WordPress.

Once you have your plugins and themes activated, installed, and modified -- it's time to look into your performance results, as both plugins and themes tend to slow down your website significantly. For one, users prefer to visit websites that load fast, and on the other side you have search engines like Google who prioritize fast loading websites over websites that load slowly. There are great benefits for having a website that loads fast.

Working your way up for an optimal WordPress performance in all categories isn't so difficult. These days there are a number of great tools and plugins that help to keep your website loading fast, without sacrificing the quality of your website design.

Image compression

Web page sizes has grown from 700kb in 2010, to 2.4mb in 2016. That's an incredible increase of over 1.7mb! Internet connections aren't necessarily getting better either, but majority of this size growth has happened because of the huge increase in the number of visual data that is being used on websites; photographs, digital art, infographics, etc,.

It's not even about doing something because someone else is telling you, to compress the visual data that we upload to the web should come naturally to everyone. Everyone needs to look out for each other, because otherwise we will keep ignoring essential aspects of what slow down websites all over the globe.

If you're running a WordPress website, then image compression won't be that difficult at all. There are some great solutions out there that make image compression a true breeze, and most of the time you can just leave it as a background task that will automatically compress any image that you upload to your blog through the media file manager.

TinyPNG for WordPress

I have been using TinyPNG services for the past 3 years, and it hasn't failed me once. The wonderful aspect of the WordPress plugin is that you can just install the plugin, and it will do everything else automatically. So whenever you upload a new photo to your WordPress blog, it will be compressed automatically. You can also compress all your existing images through the settings panel for the plugin.

Keep in mind that the free version is limited to 500 unique compressions each month, look into the paid alternative if you have a large number of images to work with. It's absolutely worth it, and you'll end up shrinking your average web page size by 40%.

Here are some other notable tips for compressing image size:

• Image dimensions-- sometimes all it takes is changing the size dimensions of your image to reduce its size by a significant margin. Understand the viewlength of your content areas, and resize images accordingly.

• Thumbnails-- don't use the same 800x600 image on every single page, for the homepage where you're displaying featured images with thumbnails, make sure you're using a thumbnail for that element to avoid having readers load full-size images in pages where it's unnecessary.

Millions of WordPress bloggers are using the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin, a simple solution for resizing the images on your blog so that they fit accordingly to the kind of design that your theme is employing.

Alternative image file types

JPG's and PNG's aren't the only image file types out there. You have the choice between Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) which can scale infinitely and in turn save you plenty of bandwidth and disk space for images like logos, headers, banners, visual elements, and then you have WebP which is being developed by Google.

WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.

The wonderful thing about WebP is that Google provides you with a simple converter that you can use to convert existing PNG and JPG files into the WebP format. It's a huge step in the right direction for all developers and designers who care about performance.

File bundling, minification, and caching

Caching is one of the best ways to improve performance, with the help of a caching plugin a user can load a website's page, have the server create a cached copy of it, and the next user who is going to visit the same page will receive the cached version, thus saving unnecessary requests to your server.

Website owners with only a handful of visitors each month shouldn't worry about caching too much, but if you're serving 1,000-3,000 daily visitors -- it might be wise to get acquainted with the many caching solutions out there.

Here are my recommendations for caching, and also minification.

W3 Total Cache

With several million users -- Mashable, CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine, etc,. -- W3 Cache stands out as one of the most prominent, but also sophisticated caching solutions for WordPress websites. There's very little that W3 Cache can't do, but the things it can do it's really good at.

Users of W3 Cache have reported an increase in website speed by up to ten times. Through the minify feature you can save as much as 80% of bandwidth that would have otherwise gone to unnecessary requests for loading files. The documentation to get started is absolute-beginner friendly, and you'll have the plugin up and running in just a few short minutes.Each configuration step is thoroughly explained within the dashboard panel of W3 Cache once you finish activating the plugin.

Dependency Minification

The Dependency Minification plugin will concatenate and minify automatically any scripts that have been run using thewp_enqueue_script andwp_enqueue_style functions.

The plugin can automatically sort through all used scripts and group them together. Footer scripts get allocated together, and individual media styles also get put together. This is particularly useful as it helps to load necessary content all at the same time, without having to wait for each individual request to complete manually.

Content delivery networks

The last technique for boosting the performance of your WordPress website is more sophisticated than others, but regardless is very easy to setup. In fact, if you're using W3 Cache plugin, you can configure it to support CDN services such as MaxCDN and Cloudflare.

A Content Delivery Network is a service that takes your existing content, and delivers it to your readers from locations closer to their home. This way, the speed at which a website loads is significantly improved. But there are more ways that a CDN can help your website performance:

• Content improvements-- have all your external content load lightning fast for both desktop and mobile devices as CDN networks give you state of the art optimization tools.

• Website security-- CDN's are great at protecting websites from botnet (DDoS) attacks, and also from well-known spammers.

• SSL-- majority of modern CDN services now give their users the ability to switch their websites from using HTTP to using HTTPS, which adds another layer of data security. HTTPS is also now a ranking factor for those who want to rank well on Google.

Just by implementing these techniques alone, you can expect the performance of your web pages to improve drastically, at the same time you'll be saving resources that your hosting server will need to use in order to provide a smooth website browsing experience.

I would love to hear some of your own personal experiences with improving WordPress performance, so if you feel inclined, please share with me and everyone else.