WordPress can be easily adopted for different tasks and that’s his main advantage. You can extend it tremendously by only adding a few lines of code or installing some useful plug-ins.
There are in fact millions of helpful add-ons and source-code tips that can make your blog even more powerful but you should use them carefully. In this post we’ll examine some shortcode snippets and plug-ins that will bite and optimize your WordPress theme so that you can launch any site into space!
5 Plugins That Optimize Your WordPress-Theme
1. WP Smush is one of the most comfortable tiny plugins for image compression that makes .jpg, .gif and .png pictures more compact. It will help you save up to 30 MB for each image and thus speeds the WP-theme and the whole website up. This elaborate plugin converts weighty .gifs into more lightweight .png, strips meta-data from .jpg-files and rigs off un-used colors.
Every step by WP Smush is automated so each image is being compressed when uploaded. The main beauty of this plugin is that it doesn’t worsen the quality of images and even more – it is fully compatible with NextGEN Gallery and WP Retina 2x. These plugins will display high-resolution images with the tiniest possible file-size.
WP Smush is recommended by GTmetrix.com – the most authoritative web performance tool service.
2. EWWW Image Optimizer performs lossless images optimization while uploading them to the site. Additional tool allows you optimize images that were uploaded before installing this add-on. This WP-plugin can convert images to the smallest size by using the most suitable file format (mainly .png).
3. Imsanity is a forceful free plugin with a freaky headline image in the WordPress Repository that actually lessens pictures to a more “sane” size. You can manually set basic features of the images – the quality, maximum height and width. Obsolete .bmp images can be scaled into smaller .jpg by one click.
4. PB Responsive Images plugin for WordPress reformats every picture automatically according to w3.org recommendations and standards. It uses the best suitable format proposed by the Responsive Images team of the World Wide Web Consortium
5. And the last but not least SEO Friendly Images plugin supplies your pictures with fitting ALT + TITLE tags that help enhancing your search engine optimization. You can program this plugin for automatic adding attributes for unsigned images.
These plugins are fully compatible with following EvaThemes templates:
Fortunado
Aurora
Elevator
Unico
Mac Photographer
+ 5 Shortcode Snippets To Boost Your WordPress-Theme Optimization
1) Display content only through RSS
Offering gifts that are available only through RSS is the best way to encourage visitors to subscribe for your feed. Use several lines of code to wrap content hiding it from non-subscribers.
add_shortcode( 'feedonly', 'ilc_feedonly' );
function ilc_feedonly( $atts, $content = null ) {
if( is_feed() ) return '<p>' . $content . '</p>';
else return;
}2) Featured images in Feed
If you want to stimulate your RSS-subscribers to visit your website (instead of reading short cuttings) you can use excerpt so that they follow the “Read-more link”. But in this case RSS feed doesn’t show the featured image of the post. You will need to use the code below to display it:
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'rss_post_thumbnail');
function rss_post_thumbnail($content) {
global $post;
if( has_post_thumbnail($post->ID) )
$content = '<p>' . get_the_post_thumbnail($post->ID, 'thumbnail') . '</p>' . $content;
return $content;
}3) Display posts only to logged-in visitors
Similarly to the tip #1 you can display content only to registered visitors that have logged in. Do this by using the following shortcode – it wraps your posts up, concealing it from regular non-logged users:
add_shortcode( 'loggedin', 'ilc_loggedin' );
function ilc_loggedin( $atts, $content = null ) {
if( is_user_logged_in() ) return '<p>' . $content . '</p>';
else return;
}4) Limit the excerpt’s length
Modern web-surfers are rarely inclined in reading long rolls of content so you have to divide it carefully into parts encouraging them to read your posts portion-wise. You can limit the number of characters and words shown in the excerpt by using the code below. Notice that it is essential for blogs with hundreds of users or websites with plenty of media-content. As you see this shortcode sets the number of words shown in the excerpt to 15:
add_filter('excerpt_length', 'ilc_excerpt_length');
function ilc_excerpt_length( $length ){
return 15;
}
