Banko Stoyanov
The speed of the website has always been important not only for the SEO, but also for the user experience. You have already faced it – most of the WordPress websites are really slow and this reflexes on their SERP (Search engine results page), so it is a MUST our WordPress website to load faster that usual. If you use themes from Themeforest or Templatemonster, there is a possibility yours to have visual composer, which is based on shortcodes, making your website really slow. So, now is the time to make your first step in optimizating your WordPress and that is:
Cache plugin
When choosing a cache plugin, you should consider what hosting you run your website on. We strongly recommend W3 Total Cache in order to use the Memcache option from your hosting cpanel. But if you use an apache hosting, take a look at WP Super Cache, using the mod_rewrite. In both case the final result will be generated static HTML pages, but the only different is that all is memorized in the memory of the server with the Memcache, while mod_rewrite helps to generate and save the pages on the hard drive. After installing the cache plugin is time to go ahead with:
Image optimization
A WordPress plugin is not necessary. All images you upload on your website could be compressed before that. The WordPress community has developed really nice plugins here, so we will give you some options here, no matter that every new plugin integrated in your website will increase the loading time. We strongly recommend the image compression. Anyway, if you plan to use a plugin the best ones are brought to you by Smush.it and Kraken.io. Those innovative online services for image compressing have their own WordPress plugins, so you can check them out. Image optimization is really important part of the whole website optimization, especially when it comes to mobile.
After the image optimization we would like to focus your attention on another important thing that really slows down you website. This is the JavaScript.
JavaScript optimization
Fortunately with the “new” HTML 5 come the following attributes – “async” and “defer” of the tag < script > < /script >. As you already know the async attribute loads the script asynchronously. In many case this might cause problems, especially if you use a jQuery library. Here we suggest you to use the defer attribute, which allows the script to load after the hole pages is loaded. This is really important when it comes to optimize you website for mobile devices, no matter that the script is compressed it still takes some processing resources and time to load completely. You need to know that there is no matter where you will place the javascript – on top or on the bottom of the page code. After this our javascript is optimized and the loading time is reduce dramatically, now is time to optimize the static HTML code.
Minimizing the HTML
There is a great WordPress plugin here and its name is WP Html compression. Remember, if you already use W3 Super Cache you do not need to install a new plugin, because the cache plugin also provides compression of the final source code of your page. If your WordPress website uses too many javascripts you can install the new plugin just to support the caching one.
If you have red and followed our tips above, your website should be in the green aria (over 85 points) of Google Page Speed Insights. Thanks to all of these plugins your website is now faster that usual and you have better chances to rank it in search engines results.
Browser caching
Last, but not least is the browser caching. Image that you have a user, who is on your website and opening more than 10 page while browsing, he needs to download a picture over and over again. Of course, every browser has an option to do it for you, but in case you want to make sure that the job is done on 100%, you can write few lines in the .htaccess file:
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 7 days”
ExpiresByType image/ico “access plus 7 days”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 7 days”
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 7 days”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 7 days”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 7 days”
ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 7 days”
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access plus 7 days”
ExpiresByType application/javascript “access plus 7 days”
