WP Optimize Tutorial 2021 - How To Setup WP Optimize - WP Optimize Best Settings 2021 - WP Optimize

hey everyone this is scott from certmedia.com and in this video we're going to be covering wp optimize we haven't covered this plug-in in a little bit of a while by now so i figure it's about time we can go through talk about what's changed and what's new in the plug-in so that way we can discuss whether or not you should be using it on your website wp optimize way back when used to be a database optimization plug-in for wordpress however now it's kind of ever since its acquisition by updraft morphed into being a sort of all-in-one performance oriented plug-in it now has caching features and compression features that were not originally found let's go ahead though we will be using the free version in this video so that way if you're using it you can just follow along we'll be doing a premium version in a later video so just make sure to subscribe for them so the first thing you do is you install the plugin then you go to the optimize section there are two sections in this plugin there's the optimize section and there's the general settings i'm going to walk you through all of them so the optimize section begins by taking you to the database optimization section which was the original bread and butter i'm just going to run down what these general settings are you can run all database optimizations at the exact same time just by checking them here and we're going to look through all the checked options optimized database tables will remove overhead on the tables very common feature done by the optimize query in mysql very common very safe clean all post revisions will automatically delete all post revisions found on your website again very common standard practice every time you save a post as an update it will save a copy of that post in its current state in the database for very large websites with a lot of posts or at least ones where you revise and iterate a lot you will have very large database tables just because the sheer number of posts it's not uncommon for me to run across websites where a single post may have 80 post revisions because they've never cleaned them out and this plugin can just easily do that in one click clean auto draft post is very similar to the provision section what it will do is it will allow you to clean up all auto drafted posts which are which is an auto save like feature in wordpress to automatically draft post in a current state so that way if you don't remember to save it as draft it still has something to go off of clean all trashed post is again very simple cleanup instead of waiting for wordpress to clean it out once every 30 days it'll just clean out all trash posts for you with one click of a button very safe to use remove spam and trash comments is just like the first option it will clean out all trash and spam comments in the database with one click removing unapproved comments is now a bit of a trickier one if you have a website where you have thousands of leftover unapproved comments because the vast majority of them are spam this could be a good way to just easily skip back to ground zero however if you have a lot of comments and a lot of them could be legitimate at the same time then you run into the situation where you have to now go ahead and moderate and approve the ones that are good but you if you delete them with this option and they'll be gone forever so just keep that in mind you can remove expired transients a transit is a way in wordpress to store data temporarily in the database table so it'll go in the wordpress options table and it can hold useful information like let's say you connected your account to for paypal it may hold the token information in there or it may hold a temp sort of data in their transients tend to be temporary data where they're refreshed frequently so it's not something that you ever have to worry about necessarily deleting it's it's just a good way of storing data in wordpress that you have to have at least in the in terms that we don't have to make constant database queries whenever you're working with something a good example would be let's say you're pulling in a feed from another website in your sidebar that feed will be cached in the database so that way every time the page is generated it doesn't need to go back out to the website get the first five or so posts like you need and then come back because that would cause a lot of overhead pingbacks and trackpacks are both ways in the wordpress comment system to go ahead and basically let another website know that you've linked to them nobody uses this feature to my knowledge outside of it being used for spam it just is no longer used and it just causes problems because you're going to be met with tons of spam from this feature so you typically don't need to clean them out but if you haven't cleaned them out just go ahead and do it they're worthless they provide no seo value and they just clutter your comments section when you do have them enabled clean post meta will not clean your postman it will clean any orphaned data so orphan data would be a post meta object in the database that does not have a matching id on a post it's a safe operation because if the post id doesn't exist in the database when it does a check against the wordpress post database it's safe to say that that data was just remnants of when that post or content was deleted and it was never properly cleaned up clean comment matter works off the exact same principle it checks the id and it matches it against the wordpress comments and if the id doesn't match it will go ahead and delete any of the metadata that was associated with it finally orphaned relationship data is the final piece of the puzzle any relations between terms that were abandoned will be deleted if those terms no longer exist which is again a totally safe operation because if the term no longer exists you don't need to maintain that orphaned data now we'll just quickly hop over there's a table section this is purely meant for aesthetics to show you okay roughly which tables are generated from which plugins so the wp woocommerce shipping zones is coming from the woocommerce plugin so it's useful for figuring that out it doesn't know all of them wp wpr reuse css is from wordpress rocket and it does not identify that but it will also list out if you have any database tables with overhead so that way you know if you need to run the optimize query since it looks like we have a bit of overhead i'll go ahead and just run the optimization query and we should see that overhead that was previously here now go away as you can see we got four megabytes here we're gonna go ahead and refresh that data real quick and it should totally be gone once the query is done it's still running but the concept is exactly the same we'll just wait and come back here in a minute under the settings tab you can choose to handle a couple of automatic optimizations so when you schedule an automatic database cleanup you can choose to keep x amounts of post revisions let's say five and to keep data such as comments and trash posts that are older than like a week so that way you keep the well let's do two weeks only so if anything old uh older than two weeks will be deleted anything younger than two weeks will be maintained this is just a good way of keeping you from accidentally deleting something on schedule that you may actually have needed um typically what i just recommend doing is always taking a backup off-site backups to your database and your core files is a very important part of owning a website it has saved many people then i know a great deal of headache whenever they've done something either by accident or they had somebody else working on the website and they in themselves caused an issue schedule cleanup i recommend setting this quite frankly to do daily if you can if you're doing the post revisions and keeping old data then just keep it at a schedule that makes sense so if you if you're keeping two weeks of data you don't need to run the optimization every day run it every week and then just check the options that make sense always optimize your database tables cleaning all post revisions and trashed is a good item and removing expired transits is also a good thing i wouldn't remove unapproved comments on a schedule solely because if there are things in there you want to make sure you can check them before you delete them and if you come back and you view your comments and you have a spam comment mark it as spam or move it to trash and then it will automatically be cleaned out by the plug-in on the next clean cycle if you have a very large website where you're getting tons of traffic though and you have tons of comments and you need the data cleaned up more frequently even in the event of you retaining data for two weeks it's still beneficial in that case to just go ahead and lower the increase the frequency increased frequency will mean when it does have to run that database optimization it doesn't need to take so long because it's doing it more frequently so there's less data but if you had a very large popular website and you were only optimizing on a schedule once every week then you have a week's worth of data that needs to be cleaned up so just keep that in mind when you're optimizing for the images section now we have a image compression feature so image compression very simply it will automatically find images and it will compress them we'll do this through a couple of methods notably by removing orphaned data such as the exif image data and you can choose to define how how much compression you're looking for if you want maximum compression you can slide it all the way to the left and that means the images will have a very noticeable reduction in image quality however if you're trying to maintain image quality and slowly clean out metadata the best image quality setting will be for you i recommend just kind of keeping it a notch a below best image quality to maintain image quality while removing all the useless data to get decent compression ratios and then you can choose your compression service which by default is re smush it and it allows you to keep the exif data by default we will not be preserving it because it's kind of useless you can choose to back up the original images so that way you have something to go back to in the event of you compressing the original images which can be beneficial if you compress an image and the image quality goes very wrong and all the thumbnails look very grainy since we're using very light compression i'm not going to recommend using this because it will take up quite a bit of space in your file system instead what i recommend doing is just having a routine backup that you already have in place and you'll be totally fine you can also choose to automatically delete image backups after an x amount of time so let's say you wanted to back up your images but you want to keep them as a just in case anybody notices type of situation you can go ahead and set this to 14 days or so and then it will automatically delete those original backups after two weeks that way you can just get a fairly decent backup in case something is wrong you can go and fix it because if it is noticeably bad you should see it within a couple of days of the image compression being run now we have two premium section features that i'm just going to briefly talk about but i'm going to go ahead and show you how this works real quick i've set my features here i'm going to back up this original image and i'm going to click compress the selected image it's going to connect to the smush api it's going to send that image over to their server they're going to download it they're going to do the work on their server and then it's going to be sent back this way so it says one image can be compressed it probably was something on these on this particular staging environment so i wouldn't be overly concerned let's see invite an invalid file type okay so we'll just go ahead and try it with this image and see what it is what's probably happening is the image just simply is malformed this is a staging environment there's a good chance that they may have been messed with already so we'll just quickly test this again it looks like it's having an issue when i tested this on a live website of mine it didn't have any issues so i do think that this is an issue either with my staging environment connecting to the re smush it service or something else is going awry briefly these two features unused images and sizes will help you clean up unused images on your web server by checking against the database and your post to see hey is this image being used as a featured image and if it is it will typically make say this image is fine you should keep it it will also check registered image sizes so the thumbnails and we'll try to check to see if those appear on the website it's less reliable than you think typically if your theme or plug-in require those thumbnails to be used you should indeed use them what i would recommend though is if you've recently changed themes or frameworks running a force regenerate thumbnails plugin and having it delete unused or unregistered thumbnails can be very beneficial to cleaning up your database and your website while also saving you space the lazy load feature will do just that it will lazy load iframes and images so i wouldn't worry too much about this feature because it is a premium feature there are plenty of free plugins that can do that let's go ahead now and jump into the cache settings real quick cache settings is for handling your page caching very simple setup you you turn it on and then you have a couple of options you can choose to enable it for login users you should never use this option and generating separate files for mobile users which can be very beneficial if you have a mobile site or you're trying to optimize for mobile specifically by disabling assets using something like wordpress is mobile so if you have any feature that checks for user agents on mobile devices check this feature if you're unsure this is typically the safe option to check but just make sure you test it thoroughly when enabling it it can be finicky with certain hosting configurations as well and with certain themes and frameworks for the cache lifespan this just tells you how long a page can remain in cache a page can be automatically purged if it was updated so let's say you updated a post it will automatically clear that post from pen the cache this is just how long a new cash version will be forced regenerated seven days is a very good lifespan if you have a nonce or some kind of checkout or form where you're having issues submitting with that with it being that long go ahead and set the cash lifespan down to 10 hours and nonsense wordpress by default lasts for 12 hours so this should eliminate that issue for you under the preload section you can now set enable a cache preloader what i recommend doing is select the schedule type this won't choose how frequently the cache is preloaded i would just recommend doing it the same as the cache life span because you do want when your pages are automatically purged to automatically be recached and it will automatically check your sitemap if if it's available and if you click run now it'll just do just that it'll look for your sitemap it'll check the urls and begin the precaching process the advanced section i'm not going to spend too much time on but you can go ahead and exclude urls in here you can by doing the recommendations here you typically don't need to use this i wouldn't worry gzip compression this section honestly doesn't need to be in the plugin and is solely there for the aesthetics gzip is pretty much always enabled and this is just to check to say is your host using gzip yes or no and if they are it will show you how to set them up with some instructions browser caching headers is exactly the same thing it'll make sure that you support mod expires give you the heads up and then it will give you instructions to how to enable it if it is not done already for the minification section this is where you will be getting the option to combine minify and just compress your css in javascript but keep in mind this is an advanced feature and it does give you the notice here so for any you would enable this section first what this will do is it will go ahead and turn on the features set in its entirety this plug-in does have issues with certain environments so i would just keep that in mind my typical recommendations for minification is combining your css can be useful because it will reduce the total transfer size combining your javascript can be very useful for the exact same reason but it can also lead to breakages what i recommend here is enabling all three of the default options especially the javascript and css options go into your settings and then you have a couple of sub options you can enable the minification in the merging of javascript files and then you can choose contain each included file in its own block so enable this if you try to isolate a javascript error basically if you have an error and you're not sure where the error is coming from or which file this will try to help solve that by giving you more diagnostics you can choose to exclude a javascript file from being processed entirely i do recommend doing the default here jquery.js or jquery.min.js and then you finally have an option for enabling defer go ahead and try to defer all javascript files but then make sure if you do the deferred jquery option is unchecked deferring for jquery is not a safe method because many times inline scripts are more dependent on jquery than really anything else in your stack so if you are going to do this go ahead and enable this option and we will just go ahead and see if it's working i might need to test it in the incognito mode but that's fine we're going to go ahead and hop to the css section while that waits css section we have a couple of interesting features in here as well the plugin has actually come a very far a very long way as you can see it did work with the defer and the minify and the combine options enabled so no problems there for the css option we have a couple of defaults enabling see minification of css and the merging of css uh inlining css should never be never be used and then you can go ahead if you're not worried about how your website is printed disabling the print style sheets but you should never in line all of your css if you do while it will clear the remove unused css warning typically in page speed insights you have a couple of issues you've increased your html and your document transfer size by a lot and then you've also prevented them from being cached which will further reduce the load speed for returning visitors so i do recommend checking these three options and then exactly as the documentation suggests if you have any css files you want to exclude provide the file name here and if you want to load any file in an asynchronous fashion you could do that here but i do wish that they improved this option expecting the users to know which files to load asynchronously when the plugin is doing most of the work anyways is not a very good strategy for the fonts section you can choose to disable google fonts but i don't recommend that what i recommend is adding font display swap and then asynchronously loading the fonts here as and do not use the javascript method the javascript method will reduce your fcp and your lcp well it'll increase them rather by adding a lot more overhead for the javascript to be executed simply for the files to be downloaded and then i also recommend doing it real quick for the font awesome files because font awesome css again is not critical to the website and loading it in an asynchronous fashion should be the way to go but this also goes back to the whole there's not a good way to load the main style sheets in an asynchronous fashion and it kind of expects you to know i do wish that they would improve that but we can go ahead now and just reload again and as you can see right now this google font right here is now loaded with a preload and then it says unload this then it will load the style sheet so it does have a clear setup method for loading the file font files in in an asynchronous fashion for the advanced settings there is one option you may need to uncheck and that is the merge extra inline css and javascript option if this option is enabled you may notice that your http in your ftp a large amount of css and javascript files being spun up if that is the case and you're consuming most of your hosting's storage go ahead and disable this option i also recommend disabling it for min for login users the reason i recommend doing that is because for login users you're typically not caching anyways and the overhead tends to be more work than it's really worth um and then the wordpress d antenna mce icons should be disabled that is dash icons that it's disabling you can also there's a premium feature for preloading css in additional assets but we're not going to jump into that in this video but it is something that is included in the pro version finally underneath the advanced section we do have a handful of useful data for diagnostics there's a default exclusion list by default wordpress optimize excludes a list of files that are known to cause problems enable this option and then you'll be able to edit the default exclusions this is useful for preventing files that may or may not be bugged anymore because sometimes developers do not update these lists frequently enough so as you can see these are the following items that it has found to be problematic under the feature set for either css or javascript notification or combination if you want to go ahead and try to test whether it's okay to leave these features either minified or compressed you'll just simply uncheck them so let's just say i had divi and i want to disable and i want divi files to be combined and minified i would check this option and now w divi's react dom production js will now be combined and the only other option you have is the cache lifespan to prevent pro in order to prevent broken pages when using third-party caching wordpress optimize will keep a stale cache of your css for 30 days what this means is if you're using something like cache enabler for page caching but wp optimized for your css and javascript you can either increase or decrease the cache lifetime of the css and javascript files if you have a very very very static website setting this to zero would mean that the css and javascript files never get updated which is not a good thing to do if you keep your website updated on a routine basis instead what i just recommend doing is setting it to the span of seven days so that way you're not worried about your server getting flooded with large old expired files that are otherwise stale so i would enable this and make sure you keep debug mode off in production we'll go ahead and save real quick and go to the final section for the settings section there really isn't too much here it's just a bunch of quick helpful single options you can enable the admin bar feature to enable the wp optimize in your admin bar i don't recommend it it's just clutter so i would leave it undisabled you there is a caching menu option for purging cache from the admin bar or the minified cache this one is useful and i do recommend enabling it for trackbacks and pingbacks there's one click options for disabling them with which is this first option and if you want to disable wordpress comments altogether it has this option here and what this does is it goes through the database that it automatically updates all existing posts to disable it as opposed to just disabling it with a php filter this is the more correct way to disable them and then you can easily enable them if you wish finally there is a logging settings you can just set an area where you want your logs to be sent typically emailing is very useful um if you're trying to diagnose something or you can just enable it to the php error log your very last option this plug-in is a wipe settings option if you're no longer going to use this plug-in you can go ahead and wipe the settings for it entirely that way it removes all traces of itself from the database when you do this though keep it buying if you ever reinstall the plugin you will need to go ahead and redo all of the options again additionally it will probably prompt you to recompress all existing images that it may have already compressed now the real question is is wp optimize a good plugin and is it worth your time and that's kind of an interesting question if we look at the premium versus comparison list they do have some interesting features native multi-site support can be useful because a lot of caching plugins for instance swift and wordpress rocket aren't particularly good on multi-site however wp optimize is very good on multi-site supports and multi-site websites and you'll see that in a premium follow-up video for this plugin and then you have the option to optimize individual tables which not a useful feature quite frankly the only reason you would do this is just to save a little bit of time if you're working on a very large database but it's not useful removing unwanted images can be very useful because it can save you space on both your on your host or on your attached storage and it can just help clean up your website to make it easier to maintain uh but is this something that you would need to purchase that's up to you for sophisticated scheduling this is just an advanced scheduler for their for your optimizations that we did earlier with the more basic settings this just allows you to set up more flexible options for control of wordpress cli most people do not use cli so this is more of a dev friendly tool i wouldn't buy it for this feature lazy loading can be useful but the problem is that it looked very sparse compared to some of the features that are like in wordpress rocket's free lazy lid plugin the optimization preview is a very useful option to see what kind of data will be deleted and that can be very useful however none of the optimizations you're running are particularly risky so i wouldn't buy it just for the preview logging and diagnosing can be very useful for particularly for the slack integration to get notices but that's more of a dev friendly tool the real things that you're interested are going to be more of the following geolocation and tax country for woocommerce if you're running geo-location or tax information for woocommerce on multi-national websites this would be something that you're going to need multilingual and multi-currency are also things that you're going to need most caching plugins support this already but this has come this is a free caching plugin with a premium option additional captioning options is very useful and they will allow you to edit options in the post edit screen so let's say you want to disable minification of css and javascript you'll be able to do it directly by editing that post and just saying i don't want to minify my css on this page and it will allow you to disable it pre-loading key request very useful feature it does just as the name implies it will allow you to pre-load your web fonts your css your javascript etc to help improve the load time keep in mind it's a manual feature so you will have to set it up yourself and then finally we have the power tweaks which is just an advanced section for more dev oriented individuals it will allow you to improve performance by targeting weak points either wordpress core popular plugins it's just more flexibility to optimize your website further the biggest thing is it's not particularly expensive which is going to be your point if you're going to look at this for 49 a year it's about on par with swift and wordpress rocking and pricing i would just look at depending on your business and what you're trying to do if you have multiple websites let's say you have multiple stores this is a good deal if you have five or more sites or five at least five sites for 99 a year i think that's a bit better than you get with like wordpress rocket but the real question is is this better than wordpress rocket and swift and at the moment i would probably have to say no the only things that it does intrinsically better would be the database optimization feature the other things are not on par they don't have remove unused css they don't have optimized css delivery they don't have any delaying of third-party javascript features they don't have things that the other caching plugins have now so it's a bit behind but their dev team is very active so i do think that they will add these options in the future but for right now i would say it's probably best to just use the free version if you're not looking to pay for any plugins and maybe they will release these features and we can update it in another video like always guys if you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments below otherwise make sure to like subscribe and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: SERT Media - Wordpress Tutorials

Views: 1,700

Keywords: wp optimize plugin, wp optimize wordpress plugin, how to optimize wordpress, optimize wordpress, wp optimize tutorial, wp optimize best settings, wp optimize settings, wp optimize plugin setup, wp optimize images, wp optimize plugin for wordpress, wp optimize cache, wp optimize plugin 2020, wp optimize 2021, wp optimize review, wp optimize plugin tutorial, wp optimize setup, optimize wordpress website, wp optimize image compression, wp optimize 2020, speed up wordpress

Id: BwRMW2wv_Z4

Length: 28min 13sec (1693 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021