what is WordPress

WordPress-It is an open-source CMS (Content Management System).which is based on PHP and MySQL. It was mainly designed as a blogging tool but now it has evolved into a versatile CMS.

                                WordPress posts vs pages

Posts-Posts are the site content which are published on a site with an exact  date and time. They can be categorized in a systematic way on the basis of category and tags. If you are a blogger, then you'll write posts to update your new blog. They are listed in a reverse chronological order on a site. As
posts are published timely.

Pages-Pages are static and not changed frequently such as contact us, about us, privacy policy, etc. They don't have date and time published, however, database stores the published date or time of the page.

WordPress Categories vs Tags

Categories- It is broad-ranging. It helps your users to identify what your blog is about. For a post, there may be sub-categories which make a hierarchy of category. It is possible for a post to have more than one category but it is best for a post to have a single category. A post must have at least one category.

Tags- It is like categories but they are used to describe a post more specifically. In some posts you may not need to use a tag. Tags are not needed in every post.

Free vs Paid WordPress Theme

As you already know there are two types of WordPress themes, one is paid (premium) and other one is free. Both are from WordPress community but they possess some differences in their functionality.

                                        WordPress Plugin

WordPress plugins are programs written in PHP scripting language that extends the functionality or add some new features to our WordPress site. They provide additional functions to an application. Users can add some more functions in their site without any coding skills by adding plugins. There are thousands of freely and commercially plugins available. For each and every function there is a plugin available in the WordPress.

                                How to choose a plugin

•  Make a list of your requirements :-First of all, you need to know what you want in your site. Make a list of all the features you want to implement in your site.
•  Search plugins:-It is recommended to search plugins through Google search rather than WordPress directory. Enter a search, for example we entered ninja forms as our search. It displays all ninja forms plugins from the directory.

• Compare them:-Choose 4 or 5 plugins and compare them by reading their description. Description contains information about that plugin, why it is used, what are its functions, supported versions, etc.

Difference between WordPress Themes and Plugins

Themes also add some features and functionality to a site but plugin can't change a websites design, look and feel but a theme can do everything.

Optimize WordPress performance

There are a lot of tricks through which a user can optimize the WordPress

site performance- 

• Choose a Good Web Host-Your site's performance greatly depends upon your chosen web host. So choosing web host is a very important decision. If your web hosting service is not quite good, then other tricks to increase your site's performance may not work.
• Use simple Theme/Framework-Don't choose a theme with lots of features which you don't need, it will negatively affect your site. Large themes use lot of CSS, JavaScript, PHP and Iframes which takes a lot of time to load. If you want to use complicated themes, minimize its coding or hire a developer to bring out best from the theme.
• Optimize images for Speed-Images are one of the heavier elements and take longest time to load in your site. Most websites have a lot of images on each page. Before using images, make sure that they are properly optimized for the web.
• Split long posts into smaller pages-For a long post article with a lot of images, it is better to split them into multiple pages. WordPress has a built in functionality for this.
• Split Comments into Pages-Some articles may have a lot of comments received. Loading all the comments in a single page will take a lot of time for loading. It is advisable to split the comments into multiple pages to reduce the load time.
• Use a responsive design-Responsive designs are used to load less resource for small screen devices and high resolution images for larger screens. This way small screen users won't get a heavy image and large screen users won't get a smaller highly compressed image.