After reading super long articles online, and as a beginner, I decided to take my own approaches.
Must have：
- SG Optimize ( Plugin) to your wordpress site. Moreover, you will be lucky if you are a “siteground” host memeber. Because it will automatically update your php version to 7.0+.
- Smush (plugin) It is to optimize your images. Please see this blog regarding image optimizations in wordpress.
- WP Super Cache (Plugin) This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. — I have no idea what is this paragraph was talking about, but still copy to here for you to see the functions.
Must not have:
*You don’t need so much SEO optimization tools, when you don’t even know how to use google analytics. 🙂
*You don’t need so many plugins or drag and drop the theme. Just put a theme there and start. 🙂
*Honestly, if your product is in a good niche, you don’t need too much optimization your competitors will catch up. I think most importantly, you need to always find new ways to extend your customer basis, and SEO is just one of the way not the only way. 🙂
Those are what I did after installed the wordpress for 3 months. I can certainly feel my site loads faster, however, I still think it is super slow. As far as I knew, I should go for the CDN, but I have no idea what was that about and will test it out next month.
As far as I knew, most people recommend, Cloudfare.