Whenever some changes and setting are being made by site owner then the effective way is to put your site content on maintenance mode.

Like most people as WordPress admin, I got tired of slow loading web pages in spite of all the efforts to optimize the page speed.

Redirecting a domain name to another domain is simply pointing your old domain name to the new one. It’s more like an email forwarding to another person.

Literally, its a way of creating a procedure that all the visitors of one domain should be redirected to another domain name. It can be a new domain name or it can be an old domain name as well. All it required to two domains to redirect from one another.

Why Redirect Domain Name?

There are a couple of reasons to conduct a domain name redirection and your reason should be one among this list. Just try to find out all the possible reasons that may cause redirecting a domain to another.

Reasons For Domain Name Redirection

• You may want to create a better version of your brand.
• You may go under some kind of brand name violation (unknowingly) and later want to change it.
• Your previous domain name is too long and just wanna short it out.
• You have recently found an SEO optimized name which is more related to your niche and ability to create a huge impact on traffic.
• Or you might be doing some practice with your website how to migrate from one site to another with minimal SEO impact.

While any one of these can be a reason, the solution is going to be the same for WordPress sites. There are multiple solutions as well and each of them can be fit to solve the problem. Externally, there may be some advance reasons for what you need to take advance steps during redirection.

Few Things To Note

Again for different platforms, redirection procedures can be different. In this post, I will only write about some of the safe processes to apply domain redirection on the WordPress website. But before looking for the procedure you need to make sure that you are going to use all the same resources as posts, page, and images in the new domain.

If you don’t want to use previous resources on the new website then only 301 (permanent) redirect domain name will solve your issue. But, in case you would like to hold all the resources inside the new domain name, migrating the whole website will solve the issue.

# Remember that to migrate website or changing domain name it’s recommended to have both the address on live (available to visitors)

To migrate your WordPress website safely without missing any internal links use “all in one wp migration” plugin.

You can watch this video to follow the steps as well.

Steps To Redirect Domain Name To Another Domain Name

As I have said there are various way to do it, let’s have a look at the safest ways I have ever did it without facing any problem.

1. Migrate Your Website To The New Domain Name

The first part of domain name redirection starts with website migration. The best tool for a safe migration process is all-in-one wp migration. Install the plugin in both domains and activate it. (To use this plugin both domain should have WordPress installed)

Now from the old WordPress site dashboard go to “all in one wp migration” and click on export and select file.

After exporting the website now go to the new domain (WordPress and all in one plugin must install there). Click on Import and select the downloaded file from your local drive and upload. (It may take some time depending on your server speed and file size)

#Use a better hosting for WordPress.

Sometimes, you may get an upload data limitation error but installing this limit extender plugin will solve the issue.

Once the uploading is done you need to login to your WordPress dashboard in the new domain using the old password and user name. After login, change the permalink structure like the previous domain.

This migration will do almost 90% of the work of domain redirection. After migration, all your internal links will be assigned with the new domain name and hence you don’t need to update them manually. It’s a big time saver.

2. Redirect Domain Name With The Help Of [.htaccess] File

Now you need to redirect the domain name of the previous website to the new domain so that whenever someone comes to your old website he will be redirected to the same page on the new website.

It’s really essential because neither you want to show a 404 error to anyone nor take them to a different page with unrelated content. If your old website had lot’s of pages ranked on Google then applying 301 redirections to the same new page is very beneficial. It will save your rankings and produces almost equal traffic to the new domain.

Don’t you think it will bring quick growth to the new website? In my case, it happened. The new website grew even quicker than I thought.

So to apply the redirection using .htaccess file go to your default file manager from hosting or use any FTP clients. Find the .htaccess file. If hidden go to settings and click on SHOW HIDDEN FILES.

Now edit .htaccess and add the following code. (change your site URL in the code)

Redirect 301 / https://newsite.com/ 

Alternative code:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] 

Both the code should work. If one is not working well try another one.

3. Let Google Know That You Have Migrated To a New Domain

Now, this is a very important step if you want your new website to grow quickly and have very less SEO impact on site due to the migration + redirection. You need to tell Google that “Hey, I just changed my domain name to a new one. So please, prefer to index and rank my contents from the new website instead of the previous domain.”

When you do that Google will get informed and they will start there process to indexing + ranking the new domain for previously published articles or blog posts.

To let Google know, you must have verified both the domain name in your search console. If you don’t know how to verify your domain name check this article.

The change or domain or URL tool is not available in the new version of webmaster tool. You need to access the old version of Google webmaster. It’s easy to access, all you have to select the “old version” on the left bottom of the webmaster dashboard.

In the old version click on the gear icon on the top right corner and select “change of address“

Now provide the information Google is asking from you and click on submit. Once done they will start the procedure to change your domain records in their database.

For 3-4 days your old domain ranking may disappear from search engine but don’t worry all your ranking will be regained with your new fresh domain name.

Applying these steps to redirect a domain name to a new one is really essential in case of WordPress site and can save a lot of time, energy and effort.

If you have any query regarding this post please don’t hesitate to ask. As I have experienced bad situations of migration and redirection so I can help you more with this. Hope this article help you.

We all prefer to use images inside our article. Images are beneficial to describe what the author is trying to manifest inside an article. Displaying some images keep your readers more involved in the topic.

During content creation, when it comes to image optimization people usually suggest using proper alt text. However, optimizing an image is much more than just naming it and using suitable alt text.

Here in this article, you will read about five different techniques to optimize WordPress images which will help you to fix GTmetrix/Pingdom warnings as well as potentially rank images high up in the search engine.

While optimizing an image for SEO is necessary, optimizing that for page loading speed is the significant part. As a result of optimization, you will achieve better page speed and SEO result.

Pre-publishing Image Optimization:

It’s always better to optimize WordPress images before uploading them to the media gallery. You can take advantage of powerful tools like Photoshop or your favorite image editor.

Prepare the image nicely by cutting, resizing, compressing, and saving in a proper format (PNG/JPEG/GIF) before uploading. Don’t forget to give a descriptive filename to it.

Hint: If your website needs high-quality images (Example: Stock Photo Website, Photography Website, Travel Blog, etc) then optimization of images will not help you because it will reduce the quality as well.

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#1. Find Unoptimized Images

After assigning the images into the published post, the post-publishing image optimization part will start. First of all, we have to scan and identify the problems with the uploaded images. There are tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom which can help you detect the problem with an image. GTmetrix shows the problem in details so I would recommend you test a particular page with GTmetrix.

Run your website through GTmetrix. As soon as the analysis is complete GTmetrix will display all the results regarding that page into two different tabs “Page Speed” and “Yslow”.

There are 7 types of image related problem can occur on a page. We will first try to solve the most important ones before heading towards the least cause problems.

• 1. Serve Scaled Image: Resize a large image into a correct dimension that your themes HTML & CSS specify.

• 2. Optimize Images: Compress the images losslessly.

• 3. Specify Image Dimension: Define the width and height of images in HTML or CSS

• 4. Make Favicon Small and Scalable: The preferred size of a favicon is 16x 16x.

• 5. Use a content delivery network (CDN): Serve images from a CDN url.

• 6. Leverage browser caching: Cache image files using a caching plugin.

• 7. Minimize Redirect: Serve images with proper HTTPS.

• 8. Combine Images Using CSS Sprite: Combine images into as few files as possible using CSS sprites.

GTmetrix will show image related test results like this:

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#2. Serve Scaled Images

If you get a warning to serve scaled images by GTmetrix, this means that the page includes some oversized images. GTmetrix recommends you to resize them into the correct dimension (will be provided by GTmetrix) which matches with your theme design.

As soon as you resize the images into the recommended dimension the warning of serving scaled images will disappear. It will help you decrease the page size as well.

Resize The Images Manually:

In this case, you should be resizing the images manually. Using a plugin will not be helpful because every image is recommended to set in a different dimension.

You can use an online image editor to resize the images which are required. Open the editor iloveimg and upload the image file from your computer or you can download the original image from the GTmetrix link shown in the warning.

Caution: Do not change the image title.

Set the recommended dimensions inside the editor and resize the image and download the resized version.

Check the original file location in GTmetrix and now upload the resized image to that location using hosting file manager or any FTP client. You should see the overwrite confirmation popup while uploading the image and select confirm.

Resize and upload back all the images which required proper scaling. As soon as you finish the process recheck the page with GTmetrix and the warnings will disappear.

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#2. Optimize Images

This warning usually appears when a page contains losslessly uncompressed images. Losslessly compressing an image will help to reduce the size of the image, resize image files themselves instead of via CSS, and most importantly decrease page loading time.

To fix this issue open the optimized image in a new tab which is recommended by GTmetrix and download it. Copy the original file name from GTmetrix (Image URL) and rename the downloaded file by pasting the copied name.

Now open your website file manager or use any FTP plugin and upload back the optimized images into the correct location (wp-content/uploads/date/….).

Hint: While uploading the optimized image to your file manager to replace the old image file you should get a “replace” confirmation.

Repeat the same procedure for all the unoptimized images. When finished re-test the page with GTmetrix and optimize images warning will be solved. Previously I have published a complete tutorial on image optimization. You can follow the procedure from there.

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#3. Specify Image Dimension:

Specifying the width and height for the images (In HTML and CSS) enables faster rendering by rejecting the need for unnecessary repaints.

This warning appears when GTmetrix detects any image in your website doesn’t have width/height mentioned inside the HTML or CSS code. Some themes automatically attach the image dimension while some others don’t.

Visual editors and live page builders like Divi, Elementor allows you to specify image dimension so they can assist you to fix this problem.

If you don’t use visual editors then adding width/height in HTML code will end this warning. A great example of using dimensions in the WordPress widget area is:

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#4. Make Favicon Small and Scalable:

Favicon is an icon connected with a web page. This little image remains in the “favicon.ico” file in the server’s root. During page load since the browser requests this .ico file, hence it needs to be present there.

Every time a browser requests this favicon file, the cookies for the server’s root are sent. So making the favicon small will help to reduce the cookie size for the server and improves performance the website as well.

Every time a browser requests this favicon file, the cookies for the server’s root are sent. So making the favicon small will help to reduce the cookie size for the server and improves performance the website as well.

You need to make sure that favicon size is 16x16px, and the file is in favicon.ico format, and is cached using cache plugin.

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#5. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

CDN is a set of web servers distributed over multiple locations around the globe to deliver your contents more efficiently to the users. The advantage of having a CDN, it can provide an equally fast website performance to your users across the globe.

While using a CDN you need to serve the images from a different URL, which is your CDN URL.

For example:

Image URL without CDN: https://yourdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/an-image.png

Image URL with CDN: https://static-ea7a.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/an-image.png

There are various CDN provider available, but I use KeyCDN and Cloudflare. Cloudflare serves the contents with 150+ data centers while KeyCDN has 34 data centers. Cloudflare is easy to combine with other CDN provider increasing the data centers for more faster content delivery.

Since Cloudflare doesn’t set CDN URL for the images, hence you can serve images from KeyCDN. It’s very easy to set up. Just create an account on KeyCDN, verify your email address and you will be ready to launch.

Create a custom new zone URL where you want to pull content from.

Go to “zone” from KeyCDN dashboard and fill up the form.

Saving this Zone will lead to a new window where you can see the newly created Zone’s status, and access the CDN URL as well.

Install CDN enabler plugin (light weight) by developed KeyCDN and use the CDN URL that you have created few moments ago.

Clear your website cache and Cloudflare cache (if you use Cloudflare) and re-check your website address in GTmetrix. The “Serve Images From CDN” warning should disappear upon using this technique.

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#6. Leverage browser caching

We can set a default expiry time for our website resources like CSS, images, java scripts, etc under which if a person visits your website again using the same browser, the browser doesn’t have to download that resource from the server. This lead to a quick page load.

See this image below.

On WordPress, the easiest way to leverage browser caching is editing your .htaccess file and add the following code into it.

Caution: Only add this code. Don’t make any other changes inside the .htaccess file.

#Customize expires cache start - adjust the period according to your needs
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
  FileETag MTime Size
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/css application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/javascript application/x-javascript
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresByType text/html "access 600 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access 600 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType text/javascript "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
  ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"  
  ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
  ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
  ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
  ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
</IfModule>
#Expires cache end

Inside this code, we have mentioned jpg, jpeg, png, and gif and set their expiry time to 1 year. This makes certain that the media files which needs the most time to download are stored on the visitors’ computer, and won’t be needed to download again until the next year.

Hint: Sometimes, changes in WordPress for browser caching doesn’t get detected immediately after changing the .htaccess file. But it does work well.

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#7. Minimize Image URL Redirect

URL redirection increases waiting time to load a resource. Redirecting a website to [https] URL from it’s original [http] URL takes extra time to load a page and can show a minimize redirection warning.

GTmetrix recommends using [https] URL to prevent content redirection.

Redirection in WordPress website can be minimized or completely stop by updating the website URLs to [https] version with the help of Better Search Replace plugin.

Alternatively, you can change the site URL inside WordPress general settings. (In case you do not serve images from CDN or other hosts)

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#8. Combine Images Using CSS Sprite

Website theme uses small icons to represent a beautiful design. Even we use icons in our pages, mostly on the homepage. In my website, there are 4 icons on the home page. But they are actually 1 image. You can do that using CSS sprite. Combining 4 images into 1 image decrease the total number of browser request and speed up page loading time as well.

Creating CSS sprite is a little bit technical or you can use a CSS sprite generator.

Hint: Don’t use CSS sprite for your important images such as featured image, images that describe your posts. Because combining these images will lead to lost of alt tags for each of them. Alt tags are a powerful SEO factor.

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#9. Bonus Tips To Optimize WordPress Images

Above mentioned techniques will help you to optimize WordPress images. However, these are not everything about image optimization. There are more other tricks which you can use to optimize website images as well. I will mention a few ways you can apply with the image.

#9.1 Apply Lazy Load

Halt the image loading process while the other part such as layouts, fonts, CSS are loading. It will not affect the visitor’s experience because as soon as the image comes inside the display it will load separately.

I use Autoptimize caching plugin and there is an option to unable image lazy load. If you use another plugin, the lazy load should be available there as well. Else, use the lazy load plugin.

#9.2 Remove EXIF data

EXIF data contains the information such as image shutter speed, image ISO, focal length, model of the camera, image date, and much more. These information doesn’t need while using that image on your website. So consider removing them.

Popular WordPress image optimization plugins like Imagify, Smush, ShortPixel have an option to keep EXIF data. Make sure you uncheck that.

#9.3 Use Correct Image Format

I prefer to use PNG, JPEG and WebP format for my website. PNG is uncompressed version so you should use PNG with small images with less color effect. JPEG is compressed and can be used for colorful images. JPEG is lower in size and hence lose its quality. See this Illustration below by Labnol or this article comparing RAW vs JPEG.

WebP is a new image format employing both lossless and lossy compression developed by Google and useful for the website as it provides image quality with less image size.

#9.4 Use Proper Image Name And Alt Tag

Search engine checks both name and alt tag of an image. So naming your image file before uploading and setting alt tag after uploading are an important task.

Avoid keyword stuffing in image name & alt tag. Just describe the image naturally.

<img src="https://www.rankwp.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/how-to-install-wordpress" alt="how-to-install-wordpress" width="577" height="247" />

To find images with missing alt tags you can use Image Alt Tag Checker and locate the image to add a proper alt tag.

#9.5 Enable Hotlink Protection

Hotlink protection prevents other people from copying and pasting your image on their own websites. Using your images on their website can consume your hosting bandwidth resources.

Caution: Hotlink protection can prevent featured image from appearing on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter.

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Final Words: As long as the image remains one of the most important parts of an article optimization is necessary. I have added some key ways to optimize WordPress images in this article. However, there are more roads which you can follow to speed up the page performance.

Make sure to optimize your website performance since this is a key factor of SEO these days. Have any thoughts regarding this article! Mention it below in the comment section.

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