What are the best practices for identifying and addressing CMS performance issues?

A content management system (CMS) is a software platform that allows you to create, edit, and publish digital content on your website. However, a CMS can also affect your site's performance, speed, and user experience. If your CMS is slow, buggy, or outdated, you may lose visitors, conversions, and revenue. Therefore, it is crucial to identify and address any CMS performance issues as soon as possible. In this article, you will learn some of the best practices for evaluating and improving your CMS performance.

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1 Check your CMS requirements

Before you install or update your CMS, make sure you meet its minimum requirements for hosting, server, database, and PHP versions. If your CMS is incompatible with your hosting environment, you may encounter errors, security vulnerabilities, or poor performance. You can check your CMS requirements on its official website or documentation. For example, WordPress recommends using PHP 7.4 or higher, MySQL 5.6 or higher, and HTTPS support.

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Bèr Kessels

Building a sales platform for founders
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While an important prerequisite to get a baseline, for performance it most probably isn't important. For performance, this falls in the category of finetuning. For overall improvement it still is crucial to create a solid baseline.

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Rahul Priyadarsi

Full Stack Node Js | 10+ Years | AI | MERN | Typescript, React, Svelte, Web 3 | AWS Expert
(edited)
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Most of the time you would be using a cpanel provided by various hosting providers like godaddy or hostgator to host Php based apps including cms-es. I would highly recommend that if you are just starting out and don’t have some technical knowledge of how websites and cms-es work use out of the box solutions to begin with. Otherwise certainly start with checking compatibility of the hosting environment with your cms version.

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2 Monitor your CMS performance

To identify and address any CMS performance issues, you need to monitor your site's speed, load time, and resource usage regularly. You can use various tools to measure and analyze your CMS performance, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom, or New Relic. These tools can help you identify any bottlenecks, errors, or inefficiencies in your CMS that affect your site's performance. For example, you may find out that your CMS is loading too many scripts, images, or plugins that slow down your site.

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Bèr Kessels

Building a sales platform for founders
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It is best to use a tool that allows ignoring some outliers. Often the 95petcentile rule. Where 95 percent of all requests must be handled within a certain time. Even more important here is to agree upon what "slow" or "bad performance" really is. Must all responses come in 100ms, or is a page loading in four seconds still OK?

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3 Optimize your CMS configuration

One of the easiest ways to improve your CMS performance is to optimize its configuration settings. Depending on your CMS, you may have different options to tweak its performance, such as caching, compression, minification, or CDN integration. Caching is a process that stores a copy of your site's content in the browser or server memory, reducing the number of requests and database queries. Compression is a process that reduces the size of your site's files, such as HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. Minification is a process that removes unnecessary characters or whitespace from your code, making it more compact and efficient. CDN is a network of servers that delivers your site's content from the closest location to your visitors, improving your site's speed and reliability.

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Tim H.

IT Consultant | SharePoint and Power Platform | Certified Knowledge Manager (CKM) | Knowledge Management | Training & Development
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To optimize CMS the use of metadata, data tagging, & the use of taxonomy to increase the effectiveness. I’ve found through trial & error the instances where the implementation of the latter increased collaboration across the board.

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4 Update your CMS regularly

Another important practice for maintaining your CMS performance is to update it regularly. Updating your CMS can provide you with new features, bug fixes, security patches, and performance improvements. However, updating your CMS can also introduce new issues or conflicts with your existing themes, plugins, or extensions. Therefore, you should always backup your site before updating your CMS and test it on a staging or development environment first. You should also review the release notes and changelogs of your CMS updates to see what changes they bring and how they affect your site.

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Rahul Priyadarsi

Full Stack Node Js | 10+ Years | AI | MERN | Typescript, React, Svelte, Web 3 | AWS Expert
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You have to be very careful with this step because due to cms updates, many plugins become dysfunctional. And that’s been my annoyance with updating. While some updates are critically required, some might not be. So I personally prefer updating cms only when necessary.

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5 Audit your CMS content

Your CMS performance can also depend on the quality and quantity of your site's content. If your site has too much content, especially outdated, duplicate, or irrelevant content, it can affect your site's speed, SEO, and user experience. Therefore, you should audit your CMS content regularly and delete, update, or consolidate any content that is no longer useful or valuable. You should also optimize your site's content for performance, such as resizing and compressing your images, using web fonts, and breaking up long pages into smaller sections.

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Zanaba Poland

Fusing creative & strategic marketing to drive growth in B2B
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You can use an external WordPress plugin to compress and optimize images, reducing site load. Incorporating vector images with PNGs and JPGs for efficient rendering will also helo. Always save images in appropriate dimensions, considering WordPress's responsive image support. Always opt for .ico format for favicons.

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6 Troubleshoot your CMS issues

Sometimes, despite following the best practices, you may still encounter some CMS performance issues that require more investigation and troubleshooting. In that case, you should use the available tools and resources to diagnose and resolve your CMS issues, such as error logs, debug mode, support forums, or documentation. You should also seek professional help if you are unable to fix your CMS issues on your own or if they are too complex or critical. You can contact your hosting provider, CMS developer, or a web development agency for assistance.

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Bèr Kessels

Building a sales platform for founders
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As with updates, it is crucial to also track error logs. And deal with those. Any errors must be fixed. They indicate actual problems. But more importantly, if you leave one error, (e.g. because you decided it's not harming you) it obscures the next error. A zero-error policy is therefore important to keep the system running smooth. Something similar for Warnings. These too indicate problems, albeit only potential problems. But ones that may become real problems in future, or already harm performance or stability significant. A zero-warning policy improves the system immensely. When considering third party tools, also look at their warnings and errors they cause. It is a red flag.

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7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Rahul Priyadarsi

Full Stack Node Js | 10+ Years | AI | MERN | Typescript, React, Svelte, Web 3 | AWS Expert
(edited)
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Using lots of plugins might be tempting with cms-es. However it’s important to understand that they could significantly affect performance. While any cms goes thru rounds of rigorous testing and evolution, same can’t be said about plugins which could be created by anybody. That’s why it’s important to use plugins from trusted and verified vendors. Also check it’s reviews, stability etc.. I strongly favor going with as few plugins as possible because usually with each feature, there is a performance overhead that’s added.

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What are the best practices for identifying and addressing CMS performance issues?

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1 Check your CMS requirements

2 Monitor your CMS performance

3 Optimize your CMS configuration

4 Update your CMS regularly

5 Audit your CMS content

6 Troubleshoot your CMS issues

7 Here’s what else to consider

Content Management

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What are the best practices for identifying and addressing CMS performance issues?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1 Check your CMS requirements

2 Monitor your CMS performance

3 Optimize your CMS configuration

4 Update your CMS regularly

5 Audit your CMS content

6 Troubleshoot your CMS issues

7 Here’s what else to consider

Content Management

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