What does Speed Optimization for WordPress Actually Means?
In general, “speed” refers to the amount of time it takes for all of your website’s pages to download. In reality, this means assisting Google is crawling your website more effectively, not displaying problems in the browser while loading a page, and avoiding them if feasible.
To accomplish all of this, you’ll need to take the following steps:
- Decreasing the total size of the HTML code by removing unnecessary information from it (CSS and JS files can be combined together, for example).
- Minimizing HTTP requests by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), optimizing images, combining CSS and JS files as well as minimizing DOM queries
- Avoiding browser rendering blocking by deferring scripts
- Using Gzip compression on your servers which allows better compatibility with old browsers
WordPress websites are thought to be slow since the CMS has so many functionalities. It’s not so much about the features as it is about how they’re applied in a website. When you can simply add it through your theme or utilize a ready-made WordPress plugin, you should avoid utilizing plugins solely to add “one more function.”
To speed up your WordPress website, go to the Plugins tab of an administrator page and deactivate any plugins you don’t need. If you only use Yoast SEO, for example, turn off all SEO plugins. Then, using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, run your entire website through it and adhere to its recommendations (e.g.: minifying HTML code). If you want something simpler and still effective, I recommend Next3 AWS Pro.
How To Optimize A WordPress Website Yourself
There are various plugins available to help you optimize your website, but you can also do it manually, which is a little more difficult at beginning.
Let’s start with HTML code optimization:
- Using Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom Tools, check whether there are any errors in your HTML code.
- Look up all references to external image files on your website and remove them
- Remove comments from your HTML code — they are not only useless but also increase the overall size of your code.
- Minimize DOM queries by using unique CSS classes for styling similar elements. That way, you will reduce the overall amount of CSS rules that need to be downloaded by a browser.
You can further optimize scripts loaded in your WordPress website — if any of course:
- You should minify all JavaScript files used or simply use combined versions for even better results.
- If you have more than one external JS file, you can often merge them together with something like Google’s Closure compiler.
- Use deferred scripts whenever possible. This means loading your scripts after the page is already loaded.
- Use HTML5 instead of Flash or Silverlight on your website.
We recommend employing a CDN for even faster load times if you truly want to take things to the next level. Next3 AWS Pro can also optimize and compress images on the fly, so it’s definitely worth a shot, especially considering it’s free!
